The Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights watchdog has concluded that “intuition and hunch” are among the primary reasons why it is “inadvisable” to establish constitutional safeguards protecting travelers’ electronics from being searched for any reason along the U.S. border.

The DHS, which secures the nation’s border, on Wednesday released a redacted report of its “Civil Rights/Civil liberties Impact Assessment” (.pdf) pertaining to border searches of electronic devices, including laptops and mobile phones. In February, the DHS disclosed an executive summary of the 21-page report, concluding then that “imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits.”

The full report sheds more light on the rationale, and comes as electronic devices have become virtual extensions of ourselves, housing everything from e-mail to instant-message chats to photos and our papers and effects:

First, commonplace decisions to search electronic devices might be opened to litigation challenging the reasons for the search. In addition to interfering with a carefully constructed border security system, the litigation could directly undermine national security by requiring the government to produce sensitive investigative and national security information to justify some of the most critical searches. Even a policy change entirely unenforceable by courts might be problematic; we have been presented with some noteworthy CBP (Customs and Border Protection) and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) success stories based on hard-to-articulate intuitions or hunches based on officer experience and judgment. Under a reasonable suspicion requirement, officers might hesitate to search an individual’s device without the presence of articulable factors capable of being formally defended, despite having an intuition or hunch based on experience that justified a search.

more @ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/border-gadget-searches/?ub=true&ubid=51d1b5f80a5635e51100007e&ubtoken=GpEFP7V5pmHgSGq