No need to waste their expensive devices AND their time.
Retrieving confiscated devices can ruin time as well.
A device you can safely discard, in lieu of bureacratic form signing, waiting-in-line retrieval queues, is also time saved. Now they've confiscated what amounts to used toilet paper.
Did you read TFA?
It's sort of like "teaching the cops a lesson" by loitering around the local school in an ice cream truck implying something might happen.
Like, wow man. It really makes you think.
It makes me think about illegal search and seizure, and how I guess that only matters for special people. It makes me think that, hey, maybe some inalienable rights are actually kind of alienable, depending on who you decide to alienate, right?
They get paid money to do their jobs. Well wowee! That means they're correct in fucking people up arbitrarily right?
Special person on a blacklist? Fuck 'em up! Don't like the looks of those guys? Fuck 'em up! Hate your job and need to take it out on somebody? Fuck 'em up!
Sure, I get that. But where does the black list come from? Can I vote on who gets listed?
You know, I got some people I'd like to fuck up, myself. Would that be okay?
What if I decide to hire someone to fuck someone else up for me? I got some money to pay them. At that point, they'd be doing their job.
Hmmm. Maybe I should pick a career that let's me fuck people up, just so's I can help write those lists. It'd be my job, after all.
Okay, fine. He was the right bad guy to knock down a peg, so send a message. Sent him a message and he got it. Mission accomplished.
The point still remains: hobbling technical carry-ons like the laptop he has, and cloning handhelds to scrape for metadata intel is still a pathetic strategy which would only slow down a half-retarded script kiddie. It's a weak tactic that isn't going to offer real protection at any border, because that's not how smart people with technical skills approach a border.
If that's anyone's idea for how to interdict hacker operations and learn the details of their network, guess what. Consumer grade computers are likely a mere distraction in this scenario, and it's unlikely that a border agent is going to notice a device or technical object intended to survive a border search.
It's not likely that grabbing these sorts of devices stops the people that care about getting certain devices and data across.
Maybe raising the bar and taking ordinary laptops and handhelds off the table to advertise that it's not childsplay to bring general technology across a border might be another message to send non-professional trouble makers and problem children, such as in this case. Either way, to be honest, I think border patrol is out of their element and beyond their depth in this sphere.
Being a hammer, and approaching all border stops as nails, is a strategy for a century ago, when a pipe with a handle was surely a musket.
You see, even if I'm forced to write down a password, if that password decrypts a 3TB file filled with shit data that LOOKS like it's still encrypted somehow, and then throws errors on further attempts to decrypt, the goal is achieved.
I have old laptops I'm ready to throw in the garbage. I have old, dying hard drives I can partition with nonsense. If that's all I'm carrying, then border patrol can merrily spin their wheels on it, and it will never contain anything valuable, despite appearances, because it is junk and contains junk by design.
For phones? Well, if all I'm carrying is a 1990's candybar phone with a 4 digit pin, and I "unlock" it for someone, and it shows "NO SERVICE" because I never paid money to activate service on that phone, even though it's the only phone I'm carrying, the goal is achieved.
If I'm carrying a trashy 2008 edition smartphone, and I unlock the bootloader, and reflash with a custom ROM that contains 500 garbage contacts with (555) 555-5555 numbers and John Doe as the name, and then encrypt an SD card with a FAT partition that contains a single 4BG encrypted file that's really just random data, or maybe 9000 files with misleading file names, but all contain junk when decrypted, the goal is achieved.
If I jail break an old iPhone C that I bought refurbished, second-hand for $50 and then I activate it's password protection as the number 1234, but never place a SIM card in the slot, and load it with thounsands of random images from the internet, and tons of fake notes that look like Base64 data, and that's the only phone I'm carrying, the goal is achieved.
Your tangent about drugs is an unrelated digression.
Staging junk devices with garbage data, for the purpose of sacrifice to security theater, is fun, easy, and anyone can do it if they've got the next week or two to pack their bags.