John Cole writes about our rights being ameliorated. Not.
He notes some of the incidents that have happened lately, like the fact that at border crossings, the Department of Homeland Security can take anything from you that it deems important to retain, e.g., laptops, cellphones, documents, etc. and hold it for as long as they like. The DHS can do this without a court order. They can share whatever information they glean from these sources with which ever government agency they wish. He also notes a young man who fell from an overpass and broke his back and was then stunned by police 19 times because he would not get up. John raises other issues, but they all come back to two things:
1) there is a lack of national standards for the recruitment, training and exercise of all facets of the criminal justice system.
Local municipalities get to make decisions for themselves on how they wish to operate their police, courts and prisons, and they are not always the best qualified to make those decisions. Also, local governments often use the police and the courts as a way to generate revenue. Rather than rely on taxes, which are politically unpopular, municipalities rely on the courts to make the extra revenue that is needed to keep them in business. This is a system that is ripe for corruption and rife with abuse.
2) there is little transparency in the way the system is run.
Rather than trust the citizens, the government tries to hide facts in what should be a matter of public debate. As a practical matter, if someone has a laptop with critical information and makes a habit of crossing borders with it, the information in that laptop will be compromised sooner rather than later. The DHS can already search cars and persons that are crossing the border. It is a trivial task to image (make a copy of the data) a system, so anyone that is trying to secrete information would be a fool to put it on a laptop. Flash memory drives are very small and easily imaged.  If one needed to move electronic data over a border, the better place to put it is in a flash drive, and then secrete that someplace where it will not be found. In either case, the DHS doesn’t need to retain these devices. This is the flexing of bureaucratic muscle for the purpose of flexing, not for keeping the citizens safer.