Alex Reid

Business travelers have long been complaining that their electronic devices were being searched and seized indefinitely upon coming into the United States, and a July 16 document from the US Department of Homeland Security confirms just that; they now have the right to seize laptops at the US border.

What’s more alarming is that the laptops (or any sort of hard drive such as an iPod, flash drive or technically a camera – especially the hard drive video cameras) can be copied, shared with other agencies (foreign even) and if there is no reason to keep the information afterward, the data must be destroyed.

For companies keen on keeping their (or their clients’) data confidential, they can simply access important documents via the Internet.

A Canadian law firm has instructed its lawyers to travel to the United States with “blank laptops” whose hard drives contain no data. “We just access our information through the Internet,” said Lou Brzezinski, a partner at Blaney McMurtry. That approach also holds risks, but “those are hacking risks as opposed to search risks,” he said.