The risks of taking your electronic devices abroad

You are a hard-working lawyer. You have just finished a long trial, deal or other matter and decide to take a vacation. You jet off to a tropical locale for some R&R. Of course, through compulsion or desire, you have to stay plugged into things going on at the firm and with your clients, so you bring along your work laptop, your BlackBerry or iPhone, and your iPad or e-reader to cover all your bases electronically. Through this planning, you can enjoy yourself while keeping things under control work-wise and manage to talk (or email, as the case may be) a client down from a precarious ledge with your helpful and timely counsel. Thanks to modern technology, you can handle these crises from anywhere. On the plane ride back home from your sunny getaway, you scroll through your virtual inbox, confident that no nasty surprises await you back at the office.

Then, a funny thing happens on your way to baggage check — whether due to your dress-down appearance, your demeanor while standing on line, a random check or the fact that you simply meet “the profile”– and you get stopped at customs. The Customs and Border Protection officer asks to see your bags and decides to confiscate your laptop and iPad for further inspection. End result: You don’t get your devices back for almost two months and you have no idea how many government agencies saw, inspected and/or analyzed their contents. This is not so hypothetical. The Boston Globe just reported this precise scenario happening to a former MIT researcher coming back from Mexico and noted that some attorneys fear that something similar could happen to them, upon their return home from a vacation or a business trip. The MIT researcher sued the Department of Homeland Security over the “suspicionless” seizure of his laptop. See House v. Napolitano, 11-cv-10852-DJC (D. Mass). In a separate suit, the ACLU, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and others are challenging the DHS’s “suspicionless search” policy as an unconstitutional, confidentiality-invading phenomenon. See Abidor v. Napolitano, 10-cv-04059-ERK (E.D.N.Y.). Indeed, in Abidor the complaint detailed how several years ago the NACDL’s current president, Lisa Monet Wayne, got the precise treatment we’re talking about on a return business trip from Oaxaca, Mexico, and was forced to yield her computer to governmental intrusion.