Why did you post this as a response to my comment? It has nothing to do with any point I was making (namely, correction of factual errors in rl3's comment).
I took rl3's comment as basically saying that since it is so easy to send data across the border using the internet, only someone so extremely stupid that such people are unlikely to even exist would actually try to cross the border with a laptop or phone that contains evidence of a crime. The implication is then that it is fruitless to look at phones and laptops at the border to try to find criminals.
My response was trying to say that he's way off in his understanding of what people of average intelligence do when they do criminal things. There are plenty of arguments one can use to make a plausible case against widespread border searches. The argument that basically no one is dumb enough to carry a phone or laptop with incriminating data across the border is not one of them.
Should we randomly go into people's homes and demand people to open up their houses and kick them out pending investigation? Clearly, we can do that now if they are 100 miles from the border if we can confiscate laptops and hold it then we can confiscate homes and cars and hold them for investigation as well.
Not exactly. You aren't considering that there's a threshold to overcome. All customs searches would be unreasonable if there were a trivial way to send items without going through customs.
Invading everyone's privacy to catch a few dumb criminals (because all non-dumb criminals would have just sent their data through the internet) is a really really bad tradeoff, because the cost:benefit ratio is too high.
