How safe are your files from government inspection?

I don’t use this newsletter for expressing any sort of political viewpoint, since a) that isn’t the purpose of this newsletter; and b) I don’t want to offend people who might have a different perspective on things. That said, I believe the usurpation of our Constitutional rights – no matter who is doing the usurping – is a serious matter and will have important ramifications on unified communications and other messaging technologies.

The U.S. government believes it can freely search the contents of your laptop or other mobile device upon entering the United States, since it views this practice as conceptually identical to searching your luggage at the airport, which it can do without any sort of probable cause. A federal appeals court agrees with the government’s position and few judges seem to disagree with the practice. The good that comes from this practice is that child pornographers can be thwarted, but the quite serious downside is that the Fourth Amendment is effectively ignored.

What ramifications will this have for business travelers and their employers? I believe one of the important impacts it will have will be to generate increased interest in hosted services, from e-mail to application hosting. By using such a service, you can access just about everything you need through a Web browser, requiring no local content on your mobile device. While this has its downside – namely, potentially slower access speeds and the inability to work offline, it offers the enormous advantage of not exposing confidential business records to government investigators. If the data is hosted outside of the U.S. in a country that will not share its customer data with U.S. officials, there is little chance that business records will be subject to such warrantless inspection, particularly if the data is encrypted between hosted provider and customer.

Is it worth it to use a hosted service if only to protect your data from inspection by government officials? For those who carry sensitive records on their mobile devices, such as lawyers who carry with them work product or consultants who might be in the middle of an acquisition, the answer is probably yes. A hosted service will provide an additional layer of protection for data that might not be afforded if data is stored on a mobile device. For most of us whose data might not be extraordinarily sensitive, perhaps taking these steps might not be warranted.

I’m not proposing doing away with inspecting luggage prior to boarding an aircraft – I enjoy flying on airplanes whose passengers aren’t carrying dangerous stuff. However, inspecting files on a laptop is a different issue. Regardless of the efficacy of finding bad guys by inspecting these files, it does represent a significant departure from the traditional protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment.