Police state in action — Fed style

This is unbelievable. Unless there’s a lot more to this story than the article suggests it seems if you are a US citizen consider your civil liberties threatened, if not nonexistent, until a sane group of individuals (either party will do just fine) can get into the halls of power next January.

If this activity is common and has become standard operating procedure, the terrorists truly have “won” the last six-plus years. I wonder how a group of dark age fools could wreak such ongoing havoc on the very fabric of the world’s largest, and really only, superpower.

The Bush 43 regime has been an abject failure on so many levels it’s truly astounding. In 2000 I honestly thought he would be an adequate president, and that might have come to pass had 9/11 not occurred. Of course it seems Cheney and a small group of the ex-Nixon administration neocons had some objectives going into their second tour of the White House that might have been executed with, or without, 9/11. We’ll never know, but man we’re dealing with an awful aftermath of failed policy, government overreach and the absolute gutting of the civil liberties on which our founding fathers placed the utmost importance. 

From the link:

Returning from a brief vacation to Germany in February, Bill Hogan was selected for additional screening by customs officials at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C. Agents searched Hogan’s luggage and then popped an unexpected question: Was he carrying any digital media cards or drives in his pockets? “Then they told me that they were impounding my laptop,” says Hogan, a freelance investigative reporter whose recent stories have ranged from the origins of the Iraq war to the impact of money in presidential politics.

Shaken by the encounter, Hogan says he left the airport and examined his bags, finding that the agents had also removed and inspected the memory card from his digital camera. “It was fortunate that I didn’t use that machine for work or I would have had to call up all my sources and tell them that the government had just seized their information,” he said. When customs offered to return the machine nearly two weeks later, Hogan told them to ship it to his lawyer.

 

The extent of the program to confiscate electronics at customs points is unclear. A hearing Wednesday before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on the Constitution hopes to learn more about the extent of the program and safeguards to traveler’s privacy. Lawsuits have also been filed, challenging how the program selects travelers for inspection. Citing those lawsuits, Customs and Border Protection, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, refuses to say exactly how common the practice is, how many computers, portable storage drives, and BlackBerries have been inspected and confiscated, or what happens to the devices once they are seized. Congressional investigators and plaintiffs involved in lawsuits believe that digital copies?so-called “mirror images” of drives?are sometimes made of materials after they are seized by customs.