Thinking of taking your laptop to the US?

Might be worth considering this from Good Morning Silicon Valley . If you’re looking to get outraged by a government’s intrusion into the electronic lives of its citizens, you don’t need to look all the way to China. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security recently revealed its current border policy on laptops, iPods and other gadgets carried into the country by returning travelers or foreign visitors, and it boils down to this : Without explanation, we can seize your laptop or any device capable of storing information (including cell phones, thumb drives, video tapes, and old-fashioned analog paper). We can keep it as long as we want . We can look through the contents, and we can share them with other agencies or private entities. And we can do all this whenever and to whomever we want — no reasonable cause needed, not even a vague suspicion of wrongdoing. And, of course, this is all OK because we are protecting our treasured American freedom.