On 25 June the Judiciary Committee, on which you serve, conducted a hearing on
"Laptop Searches and Other Violations of Privacy Faced by Americans Returning
From Overseas Travel."  I often travel into the United States with a laptop
computer, as do many of your constituents from Boston's technology industries
and universities.  As your colleague Russ Feingold observed at the outset of
the hearing, the Bush government's suspicionless searches and seizures of
laptop computer and other mobile electronic devices differ fundamentally from
searches of paper notebooks and other records, since electronic devices hold so
much data, including very private and personal data in which the government has
no business snooping in the absence of any cause for suspicion -- even in the
context of border protection.  Tales of arbitrary seizure of laptop computers
abound, with consequent disruption to work and loss of use and value.  I hope
that you will work with Senator Feingold to introduce legisalation that will
forcibly and explicitly curb the government's suspicionless searches and
unwarranted seizures of mobile electronic devices at borders.