swiped from johnbook's blog:

• If you are a producer and/or DJ who travels, and are someone who works with digital files, best you upload your files to a file sharing website or your own FTP before going international. I read about this first on another board (aloha Strutters!), but apparently it is now legal for the U.S. border agency to seize and inspect your laptops and any digital device that has any amount of storage, without a guarantee that you will get your laptop with anything on it (or the laptop at all). This includes any portable music device, cell phones, and external hard drives.

• What's the problem? If you are a music producer that prefers to meet face to face with an artist, you have the means to travel. If you have your track sessions on a portable hard drive, you take that with you. Not so fast, says the U.S. border agency, what you have is something that can legally be searched, even if you are not a suspect of anything. It seems to suggest that anyone with any digital device that can carry any type of data is an immediate suspect. This doesn't just concern the professional side of things. If you have an iPod, with a healthy amount of music, and let's create an example and say that out of all of the songs on your player, 98 percent is legal. You needed a certain soundtrack and you had to deal with a p2p or Rapidshare. Or let's say your particular player has nothing but "legal" MP3's for your particular trip. Doesn't matter, they will take your digital player, analyze it. and maybe (keyword: maybe) return it to you. It doesn't mean your digital player will have the same content.

• What are the U.S. border people looking for? The big stuff: any links to terrorism, child pornography, smuggling of any type (from weapons to animals), the big criminal stuff. But this policy states that even if you have nothing to do with any of this, and you carry any type of digital storage, you may not get it back. Obviously the border people are looking out for the public citizen, right?

• For the most part yes, but if you are a working artist, producer, or DJ who relies on digital files to make music, you risk losing not only your files but the items that hold your files. If you're someone like Timbaland it wouldn't be much of a big deal, since you can just buy new equipment. For the young producer who has to work two jobs and go through every Craigslist page to find the right bargains, the loss of any amount of equipment can be devastating, especially if the equipment is your bread and butter. You often hear about DJ's going digital, using Serato, or having their CD DJ decks, and in the last few years there have been stories about a number of DJ's and/or groups not being able to go into Canada for whatever reason. When it comes to music, we as fans like to collectively think "oh, they had weed." No, you can't go into Canada because your laptop is now a device of evil.

• Now you're asking "I'm not a producer, DJ, or even anyone who works in the music industry, I'm just a college student who wants to meet someone in Toronto" or Vancouver, BC. It doesn't matter, your laptop or cell phone may be confiscated, and even if you don't have any music, you may have a number of personal files, information about your family, including social security numbers, credit cards, or health information. If you are a writer who is in the middle of a screenplay or book, or a young director about to film your first documentary project, it's best you have a back-up plan because your weeks, months, or years of hard work may not come back to you.

• This policy was probably put together by someone who thinks that this will actually lower the chances of someone committing a terrorist act or bringing in illegal contraband. It may very well do that, but will it show a significant decline? Highly doubtful. There are hundreds, if not thousands of hacker communities out there, probably transmitting the kind of information that could do more damage than anything we could ever attempt to do in our lifetimes. That's also putting belief in the theory that all hackers are doing what they do for the sake of evil, and that's definitely not true. It's all about people who want to crack the code. To put it in a more simpler way, it's like buying a 1000 piece puzzle featuring a photo of outer space. It's black with nothing but stars. Now put it together. Or... take a look at a painting in an art gallery. The artist placed 12 camels within the artwork. Find them.

• I can blow this out of proportion, but it boils down to a few things. One, show your concern by getting in touch with a politician. Let them know how you feel, and create awareness for something that you are worried about, and why. Two, if you are going across the border for legitimate work, try to find spots in those cities where you can rent and/or borrow equipment. You or someone in the other country working for you can download the files and when you get to your destination, make sure everything that you need is there. Then there's three, and it's something that more producers, DJ's, and collaborators are trying out. In terms of collaborations, keep it online. In 2001 I was a part of an online collective called Tapegerm where members are able to place various sound files onto a private folder within a website, and the members can take any (or all) files and create their own music. What used to be bold and daring is now common practice, you regularly hear about producers and rappers sending files back and forth to complete not only songs, but EP's and full length albums through the internet. You're uploading 24-bit/96kHz WAV session files and ideally a full project can be mixed and mastered in a day. You don't have to deal with travel costs, border policies, nothing, and it's perfectly legal. There are some who believe that a quality recording project means having to meet everyone face to face so that one is able to create a momemtum in a song that makes it sound good. Let's be honest, producers have been overnighting master tapes for years, recording full projects digitally is just taking new technologies and making it work in the same ways it worked years ago.

• As for cell phones, I can't help you there. If you plan on going to another country, best you have an address book with phone numbers written down. Again, they're probably not going to take every piece of technology, but realize that you also face the risk of it being taken away. It may come off as technological paranoia, but the truth is that this policy is in effect, it's not A Clockwork Orange fantasy sequence.

• At a time when the economy in the U.S. is horrible and people are opening themselves up to different ways of consuming, traveling, eating, and living, this policy seems to remove more of the freedoms we didn't realize had been taken away.

• Maybe there's a better solution: learn an instrument. As far as I know, they can't take talent away.


for full story:
www.itworld.com/legal/54007/us-border-agency-says-it-can-seize-laptops


I am personally bothered by this to no end...it has my ass itching. grrrr