As I reported in a recent trip report, I received the "random" (aka I was silly enough to be the first person out of baggage claim and they had nothing better to do) search by Customs at SFO a few days ago.

One officer powered up my laptop, turned it towards himself and proceeded to browse through the directories. I leaned forward so that I could see what he was doing. He said "you could lean back a bit", to which I replied "yes, I could, but I want to see what you're doing to my machine". This was not a well-received response. After some minutes of browsing, he'd finished. He never looked at anything in the Linux partitions, of course. I was wishing I'd made Linux the default boot OS, as I'm sure that would have confused the hell out of him. I really wanted to tell him where to find both the MP3 and the video of American Idiot (yes, they are on my laptop) but decided against it.

Once he was finished, I asked what he was looking for, and he replied there were many possibilities, including "illegal company records, pornography". Now, given the search he was doing, there's no way he'd have known any company records, or even been able to tell if I had any. As for pornography, I wasn't aware of that being illegal in the USA. It seems to be available everywhere, including on public access TV in Seattle and on most computers.

I strongly suspect that those were totally bull.... answers, but I don't know. Two things I am left wondering:

1) Does he have any right to search though my belongings (including searching my laptop) without my being able to see what he's doing? He could have caused serious damage or data loss and I'd rather not allow that. (I was carrying a complete CD-based backup of the whole machine in one of my other bags though.)

2) What are they really looking for? Are they really looking for anything, or just being terrorists? As far as I could tell, he was just browsing at random to try to annoy me and waste my time.