My computer, locked up

I know this is a serious subject, but my sense of the absurd kicked in when I got the Washington Post article Travelers' Laptops May Be Detained At Border in an email. I had immediate visions of renditions, or trips to Gitmo.

Seriously then. We all know, or should, that privacy in the United States pretty much ends at our front door. As long as we stay in the Homeland (A grand Newspeak concept), we're still protected by conceits like probable cause.

All bets are off when we travel internationally. Your laptop, your cellphone, even your ipod with Ludacris rapping Politics as usual may be 'detained' for 'a reasonable period of time' by the Department of Homeland Security.

That's "any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form" in addition to "all papers and other written documentation." Oh, and that can all be shared with other agencies and private entities. More from the Post:

"The policies . . . are truly alarming," said Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), who is probing the government's border search practices. He said he intends to introduce legislation soon that would require reasonable suspicion for border searches, as well as prohibit profiling on race, religion or national origin.

"In April, the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld the government's power to conduct searches of an international traveler's laptop without suspicion of wrongdoing", the Post adds. If the Ninth Circuit signs off on it, no other court is going to oppose.

The policies are dated July 16, according to the Post, though they've been around for a lot longer.

For more information,see if you can get http://www.cbp.gov/linkhandler/cgov/travel/admissability/
search_authority.ctt/search_authority.pdf to work. It's giving me problems when I try to load it.

This is Cuil

There's a new search engine in town. A bunch of former Google people have formed Cuil. (That's supposedly an old Irish word for knowledge, pronounced like 'cool')

I've just started playing with it, but it's pretty cuilable. Competing with Google? Hmm, hasn't that been tried before?

Update already: when it hits it's a new way of looking for info. I like it, I think. It misses a lot. It doesn't look like I could get back to this site by just typing 'sosaipan'.