US border guards searched 60 percent more devices in 2017
In 2017, the US Customs and Border Protection searched 30,200 electronic devices. That's over 60 percent the number of searches its personnel conducted the year before to the dismay of privacy advocates. Some also view the rise in searches as a product of the administration's stance on immigration. "[I]t goes against the very thing the 4th Amendment was designed to protect against, which is arbitrary dragnet surveillance," University of Washington in Seattle law professor Ryan Calo told Los Angeles Times . The agency has revealed those numbers in an announcement, along with changes to its directives that could be both good and bad news for travelers. The good news is that customs agents will now need to have "reasonable suspicion" to perform a thorough search on your phones. Usually, an advanced search on electronic devices in airports means connecting them to an external gizmo that can analyze or copy their contents. Border guards can still manually sea...