Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

Let us say that you are a business traveler. You are returning from outside the U.S. On the way through customs, you are asked to turn on your laptop, then to sign onto it, and then to let the customs or border police go through your file system. Then, you notice that they are copying files from you computer onto their devices. My question is this:

   At what point do you become indignant?

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals says that you have no right to become indignant at any stage of this process. The court says, in fact, that you don’t have any rights at all in this situation. So they can have your letters to your girlfriend. They can have your confidential business correspondence. They can have that file that you keep all of your online passwords in because you can’t remember them. They can have the data in your Quicken folder. They can have whatever they want.

All you can do, as a result of this ruling, is look around to see if any paintings of Stalin have gone up on the wall at the airport since you were last there. As we move farther and farther away from the freedoms that used to distinguish the United States from the rest of the military dictatorships, maybe we should get indignant before we get to the airport. Maybe we should get indignant while we’re in the polling booth, and in conversations with our friends. If we don’t do that, and more, maybe all we will have to do is wait for the mandatory portraits to appear at the airport and everyplace else.