More on ACTA and laptop searches

Michael Geist responds to my last post by quoting from an EU submission to the ACTA talks: "Where a traveller's personal baggage contains goods of a non-commercial nature within the limits of the duty-free allowance and there are no material indications to suggest the goods are part of commercial traffic, each Party may consider to leave such goods, or part of such goods outside the scope of this section."

I read this as allowing parties to decide not to apply the terms of ACTA to personal baggage. Such an exemption seems fine from a national security point of view, since the Parties remain free to conduct electronic searches in accordance with their existing policy. They are also free to change that policy if they wish.

That's what ACTA should do. In fact, if the US negotiators are smart, they'll adopt something like the EU proposal just to make sure that people can't campaign against ACTA by suggesting it will mean a dragnet for downloaded music at the border.

And full props to Michael, who is not only well informed, he's got the texts to prove it. So why is EFF filing a FOIA claim with the US government to get ACTA docs? They can just ask Michael for them.