The Department of Homeland Security just disclosed its official policy on laptop seizures. It says it can and will take laptops of foreigners and U.S. Citizens for as long as it wants, for whatever it wants.

How can they get away with this? Because an out-of-touch judiciary says so. Border agents can search laptops without any suspicion of wrongdoing, according to the 9th Circuit, the most recent court to rule on the issue. And so the DHS policy, which they have been following for years.

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I am a huge ThinkPad fan. The MacBook Pro may be sexier, but if you shot a ThinkPad and a MacBook Pro out of cannons at each other, the ThinkPad would destroy the MacBook Pro and still boot up the pre-installed SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (or Vista, I guess, if you swing that way) in a jiffy.

And just spotted on Lenovo’s website is the next-generation line of ThinkPad laptops.

The naming convention is new, the specs are beefy, and the form factor is pretty much the same black brick. Perfect.

My four-year-old T43 is still going strong, but I am awfully tempted by the ultra-portable X300.

We bought my wife a Macbook a couple of weeks ago after she finally agreed that her broken-screened, dead-USB, no-battery laptop was nearly unusable. (Most of those conditions were my fault, albeit by accident.) So we picked up a $1,099 white Macbook.

My wife is not a technophobe, but she is no geek, either. She was up and running, on her own, in minutes. The Macbook is ready to go right out of the box. She especially loves the size, long battery life, and the fast recovery from suspend when you open the case—seriously valuable features for wired litigators. And OSX Leopard is just beautiful. It makes Windows look clumsy, and Ubuntu dowdy, by comparison.

Of course, it works just fine with her Outlook Web Access and file access for her work, and she has no problem opening Word and Powerpoint documents in iWork, which, at $80, is a steal when compared with Microsoft Office.

As some know, the three other attorneys and one law clerk I share office space with also use Macs. I am the lone rebel in the office, using Windows until recently, and now Ubuntu, but always a PC. Playing with my wife’s computer, I am wavering. I am definitely going to get us a Mac Mini for a living room computer—once they include a Blu-Ray player, anyway—but I may just get myself a black Macbook when it comes time to upgrade my trusty ThinkPad T43.

Imagine any of the following scenarios:

• You returned to your office this morning to find it had burned to the ground overnight. You cannot salvage anything but a few crispy bits of your pencil sharpener.
• Someone swiped your laptop on the train this morning while you were on your way to work. Nobody seems to have seen the person who did it.
• While working on a brief, you are just putting on the finishing touches when your computer’s hard drive stutters a few times, then dies completely.
• Last night, someone broke into your office and, realizing your clients’ personal information would sell for far more than your computer hardware, rifled through your files, making off with your client information sheets.

Now, ask yourself a few questions.

• Will you ever be able to recover your physical data? Unless it was protected in a fire-proof safe, few attorneys keep spare client files.
• How long will it take to recover your electronic data, and what will you have lost? In other words, how solid is your backup system, and do you have off-site backup?
• How much will it cost to purchase credit-monitoring for all of your past and present clients? If your laptop is stolen and your data is not encrypted, or a thief makes off with part of your paper files it seems only fair.
• How will you (a) prevent, or (b) mitigate the effects of each of these scenarios?

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A story of my love for my old laptop, an IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad T43, and my disappointment with the “updated” version, the Lenovo T61

I bought my ThinkPad T43 in August 2005. I love this computer. It is thin, light, powerful, and tough as nails. It may not be as pretty as an iBook or MacBook, but in size and weight, it compares favorably. Until a few weeks ago, I only replaced a trackpad button (too many video games) and the optical drive. Both were replaced nearly instantaneously by Lenovo’s outstanding on-site support (I am not kidding, they are awesome, both then and now).

It came with Windows XP Pro, but I started using Ubuntu Linux with it about a year ago, as well, and it works nearly perfectly with both operating systems.

A few weeks ago, the motherboard on my T43 fizzled. I was certain my warranty had expired, so in a fit of impulsivity, I ordered a new ThinkPad T61 with all the bells and whistles. I was even thrilled to order it with SLED Linux pre-installed instead of Windows.

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