What's in a laptop

What’s in a Laptop?

Hugh Gusterson

T he anthropologist Katherine Verderydid 39 months of field research in East-

ern Bloc Romania between 1973 and 1988.After the Communist Ceausescu regime fellin 1989, Verdery gained access to the fileRomania’s secret police, the Securitate, hadcompiled on her during the previousdecade and a half. It was 2,700 pages. Ver -dery, who has generously shared with metwo unpublished papers on this issue,1 isstruck by the plausibility of the Securitate’sperception that she was a spy who sharedmany of their methods. After all, she calledher participants “informants,” she made uppseudonyms for them, she used a privatecode in her notes, she had exactly the sametape recorder that the Securitate agentsused, and she took volu-minous notes that sheused for, in Ian Hack-ing’s memorable phrase,“making up people” bybuilding files on them.

The Securitate wentto enormous lengths tobuild their dossier on Verdery. Although shekept her fieldnotes locked up, they gainedaccess to them and photographed them.They put bugs, and sometimes even videocameras, in rooms where she stayed and inthe homes of some of those she visited. Theyfollowed her and interviewed the people

she spoke with. “My overall impressionfrom reading the file,” says Verdery,

is of an extraordinary expenditure of time,

money and effort. … Officers not only

copy my fieldnotes: they translate them

into Romanian in painstaking, error-filled

drafts, then have those typed. … Endless

hours are devoted to translating correspon-

dence and transcribing recorded conversa-

tions that sometimes lasted an entire eve -

ning. Officers charged with following me

spend 14-, 16-, 18-hour days, much of the

time waiting for me to leave one building

and go into another. … Officers meet with

informers, then have to write their reports.2

My initial reaction to reading Verdery’sarticles is one of horror—not only at the ab-solute violation of her privacy, but also atthe way that her endeavors as a conscien-tious anthropologist had been assimilatedinto the state intelligence apparatus’ ownproject, turning Verdery into a tool in theregime’s surveillance of its own people.

Verdery was not only anobject of the Securitate’sre gime of surveillance,she was an involuntaryinstrument for it too.

Verdery did her field-work in Romania in the“B.C.” era—before com-

puters, or at least before computers becamecommonplace tools of fieldwork. When Ibegan my own fieldwork with American nu-clear weapons scientists in 1987, laptopswere not yet commercially available. I didhave a desktop that, indeed, took up half mydesk top and seemed terrifyingly fragile to

26 anthropology NOW Volume 4 • Number 1 • April 2012

Verdery … is struck by the

plausibility of the Securitate’s

perception that she was a spy.

AnthroNow_4-1_AnthroNow 1/24/12 8:59 PM Page 26

me, but I kept many of my fieldnotes on pa-per. I taped interviews with a bulky taperecorder that generated piles of cassettesthat are now packed into shoeboxes. Towrite my thesis, I xeroxed my fieldnotes andtape transcriptions, cut them into pieceswith a pair of scissors, and sorted the piecesinto piles that turned into chapters.

But by the mid-1990s I was using a lap-top, a small, portable metal and silicon boxthat soon contained an enormous archive ofmaterial about nuclear weapons designers:transcriptions of interviews with them, digi-tal tape recordings of interviews with them,correspondence with them, newspaper arti-cles about them, and my reflections aboutmy conversations with them. Filing cabi-nets, notebooks, and shoeboxes of cassetteshad all been condensed into a single stor-age mechanism small enough to carry in abriefcase. It contained records—sometimesthe actual voices—of weapons scientistsspeaking candidly about government policyand about their managers in ways that, iftraced back to them, might harm their ca-reers. Occasionally employees inadver-tently told me things that were secret, as Idiscovered when the publication of my firstbook, Nuclear Rites3 caused a minor uproarin the Livermore Laboratory’s Z Division (itsintelligence division). Other anthropologistskeep on their laptops equally extensiveethnographic information about human-rights activists, environmental activists, andunion leaders.

Several governments might be interestedin my fieldnotes, including the United Statesgovernment. When I began my research inthe 1980s, anyone wanting to copy my ma-terials would have had to spend days xerox-

ing, copying cassette tapes, and backing myhard drive onto floppy discs. Now, theycould copy everything from my laptop intwo or three hours. My convenience as a re-searcher in the digital age has come at a cer-tain risk. As Wikileaks has demonstrated,the ease with which digital information canbe copied and dispersed poses a grave dan-ger to government regimes of secrecy. But italso offers governments a new and powerfultool in their ever-expanding surveillance oftheir own citizens, and that is what con-cerns me.

Like most anthropologists I try not to usemy participants’ real names in either mynotes or my publications, and my laptop ispassword-protected. But I also rely consid-erably on the Fourth Amendment, whichsays: “The right of the people to be secure intheir persons, houses, papers, and effects,against unreasonable searches and seizures,shall not be violated, and no Warrants shallissue, but upon probable cause, supportedby oath or affirmation, and particularly de-scribing the place to be searched, and thepersons or things to be seized.”

Anthropologists know that objects andpeople get recoded, and their words acquirenew meanings as they move from one socialcontext to another, especially when theycross borders. A piece of indigenous folk artmight become a museum piece when it ar-rives in the United States. A military uniforminvested with solemn meaning in its countryof origin might become kitschy when atourist takes it to another. A methampheta-mine pill bought legally over the counter inThailand becomes a source of legal prob-lems when Australian customs discovers it.Laptops are an interesting variation of this

Hugh Gusterson What’s in a Laptop? 27

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theme. In order to look at the contents ofmy laptop in my home, or in my office, orwhen I fly from Washington to Albu-querque, the U.S. government needs a war-rant. This is not the case if I take the samelaptop out of the country and then return tothe United States with it. Pascal Abidorfound this out the hard way. A PhD studentfrom Brooklyn, Abidor took a train fromMontreal to New York in 2010. At the U.S.-Canadian border a U.S. customs agentseized his laptop and kept it for eleven days,apparently copying its contents before re-turning it.4 Something similar happened toLisa Wayne, the president-elect of the Na-tional Association of Criminal Lawyers,whose laptop was, as she put it, “detained”without cause at the Houston airport in2008.5 More than 3,000 U.S. citizens hadtheir laptops or other electronic devicessearched without warrants at border cross-ings between 2008 and 2010, and the paceof these searches has accelerated underBarack Obama, the President whose motherwas an anthropologist and who campaignedas a defender of civil liberties.6

The ACLU, the New York Civil LibertiesUnion, and the National Association ofCriminal Defense Lawyers are suing theObama Administration on behalf of PascalAbidor. And, after a number of incidents inwhich lawyers traveling with confidentialclient information have had their laptopssearched, the American Bar Association isprotesting the policy.7 The American Anthro-pological Association has also spoken outagainst the policy. In 2008, then AAA Presi-dent Setha Low wrote to Secretary of Home-land Security, Michael Chertoff, saying “asanthropologists, we are especially con-cerned about this development, as confi-dential information, such as fieldnotes,could potentially be reviewed. ... Currentpractices have grave implications for an-thropologists, social scientists and their re-search participants, as informants allow re-searchers into their lives precisely becausethey believe they have the ability to protectthem and obscure their identities. The abil-ity of scholars to honor their commitmentsto these individuals and communities couldbe compromised if a search were to takeplace.”8

However, both the Ninth Circuit and theFifth Circuit Courts of Appeal have, in sepa-rate cases, upheld the constitutionality ofsearching laptops, and even copying theircontents, at U.S. borders. Judge O’Scann -lain, writing for the Ninth Circuit, said thatthose opposed to this practice “failed to dis-tinguish how the search of his laptop and itselectronic contents is logically any differentfrom the suspicionless border searches oftravelers’ luggage that the Supreme Courtand we have allowed.”9 Former U.S. Sena-tor Russ Feingold, seeking a law against lap-


In order to look at the contents

of my laptop in my home, or in

my office, or when I fly from

Washington to Albuquerque, the

U.S. government needs a warrant.

This is not the case if I take the

same laptop out of the country

and then return to the

United States with it.


top searches, said, “I guarantee you this:Neither the drafters of the Fourth Amend-ment, nor the Supreme Court when itcrafted the ‘border search exception,’ everdreamed that tens of thousands of Ameri-cans would cross the border every day, car-rying with them the equivalent of a full li-brary of their most personal information.”10

On the other hand, my George Mason col-league, law professor Nathan Sales, has tes-tified, “Officials can search mail, they cansearch address books, they can searchphoto albums at the border, with no suspi-cion at all. Why should the rule changewhen we keep our correspondence, con-tacts and pictures on a laptop?”11

As they weigh these contending con-structions of laptops, the courts must dowhat they always do when determining thelegal status of a new object: seek to fix thenew object in a grid of analogies with al-ready existing objects whose legal statusesare more settled. This is what the U.S.Supreme Court did in its landmark 1980 Di-amond versus Chakrabarty decision, whereit had to decide whether a novel entity, agenetically modified bacterium that “ate”oil, was a human invention that could bepatented or something in nature that couldnot. It allowed the patent by 5–4, creating anew industry in the process.

Genetically modified organisms and nowlaptops are examples of what Leigh Star andJames Griesemer call “boundary objects.”Star and Griesemer define a boundary ob-ject as “an object living in multiple socialworlds and which has different identities ineach.”12 Star and Griesemer characterizeboundary objects as “internally heteroge-neous,”13 and observe that “people from dif-

ferent social worlds frequently have the ex-perience of addressing an object that has adifferent meaning for each of them. Each so-cial world has partial jurisdiction over theobject’s resources, and mismatches causedby the overlap become problems for negoti-ation.”14 They add that “intersections placeparticular demands on representations andon the integrity of information arising frommore than one world.”15

Laptops are, in Star and Griesemer’sphrase, “internally heterogeneous.” Theykeep our personal correspondence andphotographs, financial records, addressesand phone numbers, confidential informa-tion about clients, students and human sub-jects, attachments other people sent that wenever opened, road-kill recipes, video clipsof dogs doing cute things in swimmingpools, the avalanche of announcements ofnew initiatives from assistant deans, angryletters to ex-lovers we did not send but didnot delete, all those messages fromMoveOn, unsolicited ads for Viagra and im-possibly cheap mortgages and, in my case,lots of stuff about nuclear weapons andabout counterinsurgency. As Lee Tien of theElectronic Frontier Foundation put it, “Peo-ple keep their lives on these devices.”16

The laptop’s status as a boundary objectis especially salient in the borderlands,those liminal spaces of official anxietywhere national boundaries meet. Hundredsof thousands of travelers take their laptopsacross these boundaries every day, not real-izing that the rights of privacy that seem sta-ble in the United States may be warped andfractured in the fields of securitization thathave arisen at our national borders since9/11.



In writing that computers are “good tothink,” Sherry Turkle famously argued thatpeople project on to computers their ownanxieties, fantasies, and desires, workingthrough key identity issues in the process.17

When you combine the internal hetero-geneity of laptops as boundary objects, withthe securitized state that prevails at borders,you invite a volatile clash of perceptionsThe invisibility of information stored withina laptop makes it easy for the owner to for-get the enormous amounts and potentiallydangerous data it contains, while the samequalities make laptops enormously interest-ing to border officials. Used to looking in-side anything they want to, even includingthe bodies of people they deem suspicious,one can understand why they might assumethe right to poke around inside our laptops,even if this does represent tremendous ex-pansion of intrusive power.

Unless Congress passes a law on this is-sue, or until a Supreme Court decision set-tles the matter, Homeland Security officialswill look at laptops as an address book, aphoto album, or a piece of luggage they’vealways been allowed to search, while manyof us will feel, if our laptop ever falls intotheir hands, as if they’ve barged into ourhome and opened every drawer. On a re-cent train trip to Montreal from New York, Inoticed that almost everyone else in the car-riage had a laptop. I asked a few people atrandom if they knew that the U.S. govern-ment reserved the right to copy their harddrives when they re-entered the country.None did. Many squinted suspiciously atme.

And where does this leave anthropolo-gists? Since we cannot rely on the courts to

protect our human subjects and us, we havethe obligation to take extra care ourselves.When I travel outside the country I now usea secondary laptop on which I keep no hu-man subjects information—no transcripts ofinterviews, no digitized voice recordings,no fieldnotes. In doing so I have, ironically,replicated the practices of my own inform-ants, who have “secure” and “open” com-puters, which they keep separate. My“open” laptop is my own special boundaryobject with its own unique “internal hetero-geneity.” I bought it on Craigslist for $180from a Bolivian immigrant who got it as sur-plus from the Pentagon and installed a harddrive he scavenged from Dell where, as faras I can tell, he works. He sells half a dozensuch computers a week from his garage thatis, literally, around the corner from the Pen-tagon. A former Pentagon computer nowused by one of the founders of the Networkof Concerned Anthropologists, my laptop isa recycled and demilitarized object, a digi-tal sword beaten into a plowshare. Beyondthat, in its material assemblage and its social biography it is beautifully heteroge-neous. And it protects my human subjects,military scientists who contribute theirweapons expertise to the national security


When I travel outside the country

I now use a secondary laptop on

which I keep no human subjects

information—no transcripts of

interviews, no digitized voice

recordings, no fieldnotes.


state while fearing that state’s surveillance.Unfortunately, these are the measures wehave to take in an era when the intersectionof new digital technologies and powerfulprocesses of securitization poses challengesto our ethical practices that we are only justbeginning to articulate.

Notes

1. Katherine Verdery, “Secrets and Truths”(n.d.); “Observers Observed: An Anthropologistunder Surveillance,” Paper presented at Ameri-can Anthropological Association Meeting, Mon-treal, November 19, 2011.

2. Verdery, “Secrets and Truths,” p.13.3. Hugh Gusterson, Nuclear Rites: A Weap -

ons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

4. AP, “Under Suspicion: Student ChallengesLaptop Seizure.” Boston Herald, March 21, 2011.http://www.bostonherald.com/news/national/northeast/view/20110321under_suspicion_student_challenges_laptop_seizure/srvc=home&position=recent.

5. Martha Neil, “Defense Lawyers and OthersSue Fed over Border Searches of Laptops, OtherElectronic Devices,” ABA Journal, September 7,2010.

6. Chad Bray, “ACLU Sues Homeland Securityover Search Policies,” Wall Street Journal, Sep-tember 7, 2010.

7. Neil.8. Letter from Setha Low to Michael Chertoff,

July 25, 2008, archived at www.aaanet.org.9. Quoted in Molly Neil, “9th Circuit Up-

holds Border Agent’s Laptop Search.” ABA Jour-nal April 22, 2008.

10. Jim Puzzanghera, “Welcome Back to theU.S. Now Let’s See What’s on Your Laptop.” LosAngeles Times, June 25, 2008.

11. Josh Gerstein, “Customs Agents CopyTravelers’ Laptop, Phone data.” New York SunJune 26, 2008.

12. Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer,“Institutonal Ecology, ‘Translations,’ and Bound-ary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals inBerkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39, reprinted in Mario Biagioli, The ScienceStudies Reader, quote p. 518.

13. P. 517.14. P. 519.15. P. 520.16. Quoted in Gerstein.17. Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Comput-

ers and the Human Spirit (Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 2005).

Hugh Gusterson is professor of anthropology

and sociology at George Mason University. He is

the author of Nuclear Rites (1996) and People of

the Bomb (2004) and co-editor with Catherine

Besteman of The Insecure American (2010). He

can be reached at ([email protected])



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