"David House, a former MIT researcher who cofounded an organization to raise money for Bradley Manning, accused the Department of Homeland Security of violating his civil rights when he passed through a Chicago airport in November 2010."<p>"Homeland Security agents did not have a warrant when they seized House’s laptop, camera, and a flash drive, then asked him questions about his relationship with Manning."<p>"The Department of Justice had tried to have the lawsuit thrown out, asserting that the government has the authority to conduct routine searches at a US border."<p><a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/05/30/supporter-leak-suspect-bradley-manning-settles-with-over-laptop-seizure/EOG2iCb3aSbwBQeEHq7tiO/story.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/05/30/supporter-leak-s...</a>
London (and other) police ofrces have been doing similar for a while.<p>(<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/may/17/met-software-mobile-phones" rel="nofollow">http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/may/17/met-softwar...</a>)<p>(<a href="http://www.publicservice.co.uk/news_story.asp?id=19807" rel="nofollow">http://www.publicservice.co.uk/news_story.asp?id=19807</a>)<p>(<a href="http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/met-police-acquires-mobile-phone-monitoring-kit-44303" rel="nofollow">http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/met-police-acquires-mob...</a>)<p>Police grab as much data as they can, and keep it for as long as they can. So it's a problem if they can cheaply and easily slurp cell-phone data because we know that they probably will.<p>See, for example, the length of time they keep DNA data.
Due to the UK's key disclosure laws (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_Kingdom" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_Kingd...</a>) encryption doesn't help. If you don't provide your key to the government they can put you in jail for up to two years.
What will they do when someday our phones are chips in our brains? "Please sir, I need to cut your head off for a bit". Eventually technology will make it almost impossible to do a real border search.
Probably best to mail it to yourself. If you carry something over the border, it's fair game to deny you entry to the country until you cough up whatever useless information they want. But if you mail it, then you're already in the country and have some rights if the government feels like searching what you've mailed.
This is pretty alarming but the article points out something often overlooked: <i>"nowhere in Britain do you have less rights than at the border."</i>