…seems to have arisen, involving, among others, our good friends the TSA.

Federal security workers are now free to snoop through more than just your undergarments and luggage at the airport. Thanks to a recent series of federal court decisions, the digital belongings of international fliers are now open for inspection. This includes reading the saved e-mails on your laptop, scanning the address book on your iPhone or BlackBerry and closely scrutinizing your digital vacation snapshots.

Unlike the more common confiscations of dangerous Evian bottles and fingernail clippers, these searches are not being done in the name of safety. The digital seizures instead are part of a disturbing trend of federal agencies using legal gimmicks to sidestep Fourth Amendment constitutional protections. This became clear in an April 8 court ruling that found admissible the evidence obtained by officials who had peeped at a passenger’s laptop files at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.

According to court documents, FBI agents had identified an individual suspected of downloading child pornography on an Internet chat room. The G-men, however, did not want to take their evidence before a judge to obtain a search warrant, as the Constitution requires. Instead, they flagged the suspect’s passport and asked officials at the Department of Homeland Security to seize and search his computer at the airport - without a warrant. Three incriminating images were found during the examination, but this case is not about whether a particular person is a scumbag. It’s about abusing a principle that applies to all Americans.

Well, with all the rhetoric that came out of B. Hussein Obama and the rest of the Democrats in their malevolent attacks criticisms of the Bush Administration in regard to what they termed callous invasions of the privacy of U.S. citizens (monitoring of certain suspect international telephone communications and accessing bank accounts believed to be part of terrorism financing networks), this one sure is a shocker, isn’t it?

I’ve heard the accusations that the “Bushies” were using the War on Terror as an excuse to allow Uncle Sam’s nose into our personal business, according to the political left, keeping an eye on how much our nine year olds have accumulated in their savings accounts and keeping track of whom we were taking out for dinner and a show on Friday night, but this one’s a taker of the proverbial cake!

The fun part is that Obama and his henchpersons do worse without even a grimace that they are doing exactly what they purported not long ago to be anathema to any semblance of decent humanity.

Can you say, “hypocrisy”?

Actually, coming from the leadership of the Obamanation, seeing how much more marxist-like and anti-Constitution they have proven themselves in the last 15 months, I would have to say that they are acting well within the parameters of their established character.

It’s interesting to note, however, that though 99.99999% of today’s terrorist threats come from Muslims of Southwest Asian and Middle Eastern decent, every increasingly oppressive anti-terrorism screening measure they take targets everyone but Muslims of aforementioned descents.

Obama philosophy: When the best odds on preventing a terrorist act can be found in the profiling of Muslims, we must make every effort to avoid profiling Muslims.

The Fourth Amendment guarantees the right of Americans to be “secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects” from unreasonable and unwarranted government intrusion. It is obvious that this right is meant to apply equally to papers that happen to be stored in digital form on a personal hard drive. Such protections do not disappear merely because one happens to be at a real - or imaginary - border.

Because the courts have been derelict in their duty to uphold this fundamental right, it is up to Congress to prohibit the thinly veiled attempts to create Constitution-free zones where Americans find their privacy invaded.