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What's happened to post-9/11 America, anyway? Have we lost our collective common sense?

Hardly a day goes by without another legal travesty descending from the fools on the hill. This time the government is sidestepping the US Constitution, making search-and-seizure legitimate. The unconscionable thrust targets personal computers, and their private collections of notes, thoughts and ideas. Due to a decision by the 9th Circuit Court Of Appeals in California, border police can now legally search your laptop, regardless of search-and-seizure protections granted under the Fourth Amendment.

Prior to this, some level of reasonable suspicion would have been needed, and it would have been a non-routine search. No reasonable suspicion is now required if a border agent wants to check your PC. After all, they can already inspect your briefcase, your luggage, your backpack, or your car. Agents can go as far as they wish with their searches. If you've ever seen a vehicle systematically dissembled at a border crossing, you know what I mean.

A recent high-visibility personal intrusion case involves Michael Timothy Arnold, a man with no prior criminal record. Notwithstanding, he was indicted on child pornography charges after customs officials searched his PC.

The government maintains Arnold's search was routine and therefore not subject to Fourth Amendment protection. This indictment came down after the 9th Circuit Court reversed a lower court's ruling, where it was decreed that while not physically intrusive (like a body search), the search of vast catalogs of personal information stored in a PC most certainly is an intrusion into the owner's privacy.

The latest ruling lets the government man copy the contents of your PC's hard disk, too. What's more, if your files are protected by encryption, you can be ordered to turn over your encryption keys.

Subsequent to a search, this policy makes it easy to leisurely pore over e-mail, communications and files. Government bogeymen can reassemble and peruse deleted files and, while they're at it, make copies of your address books and databases. There's nothing stopping inspectors from duplicating private information, and turning it over to political entities, police departments, the FBI, the CIA, and the like. All without probable cause or a warrant. If you cross the border with a notebook PC this could happen to you.

This ruling opens unholy floodgates. Searches are already routine at courthouses, airports, and federal buildings. Are searches at supermarkets, Internet cafes, train stations, and taxicab lines next? How about your office or living room?

Privileged materials, business plans, trade secrets, financial transaction records, and the like are expressly protected against government intrusion. Why exclude checkbook details, diaries, image files, e-mails, personal passwords, medical records, and Web site histories?

Fortunately, there are some watchdogs. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is one. Another is the National Security Archive. The EFF and the Archive recently urged a federal appeals court to strike down the National Security Letter (NSL) provision of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The federal surveillance law, expanded by the Patriot Act, permits the FBI to use NSLs to get private records about people's communications – without any court approval. It can do this as long as it claims the information might be relevant to a terrorism or espionage investigation.

In a friend-of-the-court brief, EFF and the National Security Archive argued that excessive secrecy surrounding the use of NSLs undermines government accountability and misuses authority. "This kind of secrecy doesn't make us safer," notes Archive lawyer Kristin Adair. "It simply allows the government to cover up abuses."

Thanks in part to the EFF and the National Security Archive, a federal judge ruled the NSL statute unconstitutional. As you might have guessed, the regime In Washington has appealed the ruling. Fortunately, there are additional voices of judicial reason. "Electronic storage devices are an extension of our memory," wrote one judge. "PCs store our thoughts, ranging from the most whimsical to the most profound. As such, government intrusion into the mind – specifically those forays that would cause fear or apprehension in a reasonable person – are no less deserving of Fourth Amendment scrutiny than intrusions that are physical in nature."

Border agents and customs officials have always had the license to probe. But copying the contents of someone's PC, and shipping that data to who-knows-where, is wrong. Moreover, just how do government agents know beforehand what’s on that PC’s hard disk, anyway?

Our US Constitution says the right of the people to be secure in their papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated. What part of "shall not be violated" does the 9th Circuit Court Of Appeals in California not understand?