Slashdot Mirror
Laptops Searched and Confiscated at U.S. Border
An anonymous reader writes, "According to an article in the New York Times, the Association of Corporate Travel Executives is asking the U.S. government for more detailed guidelines on when and why a laptop gets confiscated at the U.S. border, which, anecdotally, is happening more often. The story includes a report from a business traveler who had her laptop confiscated over a year ago and has yet to have it returned." According to the article, a knowledgeable lawyer said: "[Border guards] don't need probable cause to perform... searches under the current law. They can do it without suspicion or without really revealing their motivations." And an ACTE exective is quoted, "Potentially, this is going to have a real effect on how international business is conducted."
"Sir, please place your laptop computer on the table for inspection."
"OK"
"Please turn it on, Sir."
"Um.. er.. ah.."
"Turn on the laptop, Sir!" (Suddenly it grows quiet as everyone stares, particularly some armed security personnel)
"Er ah, OK." Click. zwinnngg zwikka zwikka bweet.
"Pornographic wallpaper, no problem. Thousands of mp3's, no problem."
"Um-er-ah.
sniff sniff sniff Arf! whine Whine Arf! Arf!
"What's this then!?!"
"Huh?"
"Sir, we're going to have to confiscate this laptop computer, our highly trained canine has detected the presence of a banned and extremely dangerous substance!"
Read about it here and here
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What are they (legally at least) able to do if I refuse?
In the US? Probably confiscate your laptop, bang you on the head with it and send you off to Guantanamo for sleep deprivation and beatings. But anything else would be considered abusive and thus forbidden by law.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Customs!!!!
They don't need a search warrant. Never have.
Didn't need one during FDR. Didn't need one during Lincoln. Didn't need one during Monroe. Didn't need one during Washington. And while we are at it, didn't need one during Queen Elizabeth I.
The 4th Amend doesn't apply when crossing the border.
For many people outside of the USA having an encrypted HD is a matter of good business sense or national security, depending on where you work. For those who work outisde the USA in the defence area, and work colaboratively with people in the USA, this is now a major hassle. When crossing the border the software needed for decent security is now effectively banned from leaving the country and your laptop will be confiscated. The fact the software came from another country in the first place and the person is actually working for a friendly government and helping the USA government is seemingly irrelevant. The solution to this problem which many are taking is quite simple, limit helping the USA with any classified or confidential work. And before people reply "the USA doesn't need anyone else", please think about why you have huge national debt ...
I thought that after 911 the government departments were meant to be 'beating to the same drum' for national security and yet here we are, 5 years later, with a case of the geniuses that run border security stuffing up other government departments.
Funny that this article should come up right around the time the first federal judge addresses the question, and find that they do need to have reasonable suspicion.
law.com article
opinion
Of course, this is not the end of the matter, but highly relevant.
-puk
They arent exempt from search. Just doesn't happen as often, due to the volume.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm a u.s. citizen and had my laptop confiscated at the canadian border when re-entering the u.s. about three years ago. They also held me in a cell for a few hours until a person from ICE (immigration and customs enforcement) could arrive to interrogate me and my friends. After a few hours they let me through, turned around my canadian friends, and kept my laptop. They returned the laptop to me about four months later (with a burned copy of an EnCase client cd left in the cd rom drive).
I had nothing to hide and there was nothing I could imagine useful to them on that laptop. If I thought I had something to hide or a reason the government would think I was up to something that would warrant their taking my laptop (something more than my political activism), I would not have carried it across the border. In any event, this taught me me a few things: 1) always encrypt entire partitions, including one's root partition, not individual files as I had been doing, 2) don't carry one's private encryption key when crossing borders [or in any obvious way the rest of the time], 3) always keep plenty of encrypted backups in different physical locations so that you can be back up to speed as soon as possible if your laptop is taken, 4) avoid carrying electronics across the border at all if one can't afford to replace the hardware soon afterward.
Personally, it made me happy to know the government spent time and resources copying and possibly picking through my innocuous files while there were other people out there busy with bringing an end to a government that found such activity useful.
Funny side note: my canadian friends, after being turned around and having to cross back to the canadian side a few hours later, were asked by the canadian border person, "why were you there at u.s. customs so long?"
My friends told them, "they said our friend was a suspected terrorist."
The canadian border person *laughed*, said "those americans are crazy", and let them on their way without any further hassle.
Border agents need probable cause for highly invasive searches that "implicate dignity and privacy interests" (US v Flores-Montano). As you imply, this gives border agents much more leeway than most US law enforcement officers, but even within the country's borders, police officers can perform warrantless searches based on probable cause or when it is incident to arrest. So the Fourth Amendment does apply when crossing the border, but its protections are lower there due to a different balance of interests than applies inside the country.
The article at least mentions the two recent apposite federal cases, if not by name (Romm and Arnold). If the judge's ruling in US v Arnold is upheld on appeal, the circuit split between 9th and 5th circuits will probably lead the Supreme Court to address the question. I hope -- against hope, given the presence of usually big-government and usually pro-security justices -- that they would agree with the California judge in saying that laptop searches do implicate dignity and privacy interests.
The Constitution applies inside the United States. You have not entered the United States until you pass the border. The 4th amendment doesn't apply until you enter the country.
The purpose of language is communication, If the idea is clear the grammar ain't important
"This is why you should encrypt your hard drive."
.jpg or .avi's.
The trick to hiding something is to make it look innocent.
Encrypting your whole hard drive just screams "kiddie porn" or
"terrorist's handbook here" to any agent that looks. And the first
thing he will do is ask for the password. You'd better hand
it over or get ready for a quick trip to Gitmo.
Instead, have a normal drive with a normal OS install. When
they scan the 200,000 files on an average drive they'll find
nothing unusual. Certainly no
But on that drive have a file named "corrupted.doc" or
something like that. It is really a Truecrypt file/drive.
You mount it manually when you log in and all your important
stuff is in there.
If they log in and search and manage to find "corrupted.doc"
(which they wont be looking for), they will ask what it is.
You can say it was an important doc file but it got corrupted
and you were hoping to find someone to fix it. It sure will
look corrupt thanks to Truecrypt not putting any sort of signature
at the start of the file.
My father is an immigration attorney (MFIAIA) near the Canadian border and we were chatting about this several weeks ago as it occasionally happens to his clients. Apparently, border agents largely trawl through people's email inboxes searching for evidence of work outside the scope of their current visa. People entering the US on valid visas have few options but to submit their laptop or face denial of entry and possible revocation of their visa and denial of pending applications.
Even if people utilized file or disk level encryption, I wonder if they would force people to surrender encryption keys and passwords. I suggested that he advise clients to look into that sort of solution, but it may not do any good. It would also be interesting to know how and where the information is stored and for how long.
You don't get out much - we've just had a wave of "no carry on luggage" as a sideshow to The War On Moisture.
Interestingly Singapore Airlines now has little notes in the dinner sets appologising for the plastic knives 'where required by local administrations'
>>> "I'm pretty sure my boss would rather not have a copy of the product's source floating around god knows where, even if it is encrypted"
I was expecting to see plenty of debate around this when I saw the article but no, most people were focused on hiding their mp3's and pr0n....
I travel the border occasionally and have carried commercially sensitive information that my employer would not like released - i.e tender documents / competing bid information / commercial contracts. I'm 100% sure the customs guy isn't willing to sign the NDE before he searches my laptop either!!
If someone is serious about smuggling illegal pr0n or ITAR restricted data, they're not going to have it on their laptop. And the Customs guy better be looking for a 'Blue pill' or making sure he's not in a Virtual Machine setup just for him.
If I was a customs agent I'd be looking for people partitioning half a 60GB iPod and encrypting the other half with the data on it: "hey its a 30GB iPod". Then you better be looking for the the USB stick key-chain, ear rings, cufflinks, wristband, watch etc. Also the customs guy would have to rely on others (NSA) to catch e-mailing that encrypted file to yourself....
Someone above discussed exporting encryption technology... well if a 'bad man' has their hands on it - its already too late. I'm sure most of you have heard of Truecrypt - its free, open source and available world wide. Truecrypt also offers reasonable plausible deniability. Its also pretty hard to break. Just use that, then hide the data on a CD-R in your CD music album inside some files labelled "me_singing_creative_commons_songs.mp3"
Sure, they might catch some careless fools, - which goes toward justifying the laws and the processes. But its all just part of the 'security theatre' that Bruce Schneier talks about. It makes everyone feel safe because the TSA are doing something. Its the wrong thing, but its mighty comforting...... (to those that aren't under the magnifying glass.)
Most of the Constitution applies all over the world in regards to the US governments. The term "citizen" is VERY rarely used, but the generic term "man" is used over and over to signify ALL men. The Founding Fathers were very specific about wanting the document to be accepted by countries all over the world, unfortunately, it isn't even accepted by most U.S. citizens anymore.
The U.S. government has very specific and limited authorizations under the Constitution. Not just within the borders, but everywhere.
Bush, Clinton, Gore, Obama (Barack), Kerry, Kennedy, all of them have to abide by the Constitution no matter where they're at. When will the courts start charging them with the treasonous act of violating the Constitution and give them the ultimate penalty?
In the United States, I presume?
Well, the current law that Bush and his rubber stamps passed allow them to arrest you, hold you indefinately without a trial, rape you (injuries during torture up to but not including death are perfectly OK -- Rape is perfectly acceptabe under the word of the law and has already went on at Abu Ghraib), and prohibit you any contact with any outside sources.
Forever.
According to current law, they could make you disappear, and you'd spend the next 50 years in solitary confinement, only being let out long enough to torture for your password. Of course, having given said password, they would just throw you back in and forget about you. You have no rights to a lawyer, no rights to contest your confinement (this is what Haebus Corpus is all about. It was one of the cornerstones of our society, and the founding fathers assumed that no one would be stupid enough to ever try to overturn it -- nor none of their decendants stupid enough to accept it).
Essentually, no rights at all, since they can simply lock you up and you CANNOT FIGHT IT if they do not want to let you. Want to use your 1st Amendment rights to free speech? Sorry, you can't because you're behind bars in some secret European prison. All other rights are trumped by the loss of the right to contest your imprisonment.
(BTW, think it only applies to "brown people" like Jose Padilla or random "Terrorists"? Think again -- the law SPECIFICALLY STATES that it applies to US Citizens.)
If your family protested, they'd either be arrested too, or simply ignored, or the government, when needing a political football, would make something up about you -- like what they did with Mr. Padilla, who they originally accused of having plans of blowing up a dirty bomb in the US. 4 years later, they've never bothered to charge him with that, only even bothering to charge him with anything when he got thiiiis close to getting the US ruled out of line for it. (He's currently being held, still without trial, for "conspiracy to murder, kidnap, and maim people overseas.")
Pardon me for waxing political, but... I felt this was important, since there's not NEARLY enough outrage going on about this.
BZZZZZT Wrong. Commercial Encryption was transferred from the Munitions list to the Commerce List in 1996.
o mmerce.regs
" Following upon the Administration's October 1 announcement, on November 15, 1996, the President issued the Memorandum directing that all encryption items controlled on the U.S. Munitions List, except those specifically designed, developed, configured, adapted, or modified for military applications, be transferred to the Commerce Control List. " http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto_export/961230_c
If you got your hands on Military encryption technology for scrambling your pr0n, then there is prolly a leak at NRL.
This is untrue, and this whole story is dated--as of October 2.
See United States v. Arnold, 2006 U.S. Dist.
The central holding of this ruling is that the so called border-search exception to the 4th amendment (argued as implicit in the ability of the gov't to levy and enforce tariffs) cannot apply to personal effects such as notebook computer as the information it contains retains 4th amendment protection.
Consequently, searchs of your computer at the airport are illegal without a warrant.
Searches which do not access the information content--e.g., x-ray examination--are still allowed.
This case even had the "save the children" gateway to degrading the rights of the people--the defendent was found to have child pornography on his computer.
There is no "international commerce" exception to the Bill of Rights mentioned in the Constitution.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I work at the Border at a International Airport. We don't "just" take a laptop. Its a massive amount of paperwork, custody logs and signing every single time some one has control of the laptop. If it was taken, its been my experience that it is related to 1. Evidence of a crime, be it technology transfers, money laundering or not manifesting goods that are being imported. 2. Kiddie porn. You would be floored to see how many times I nail some pervert coming back on a "business trip" with this, this dreck on his machine. So before you start with the tin foil hats or accusing us of taking these machines home, you find out who and what the person is making the claim
Thank you. If I had mod points I'd give you one, but instead here's a link to the case you mentioned.
--MarkusQ
Customs has been known to accidentally destroy small aircraft on arrival if they are suspected of carrying drugs. No liability for them when nothing is found.
The authority for the searches is 19 USC 1467.
The authority for lack of liability for the damage caused is "sovereign immunity", as reference in this case: Mid-South Holding Co. v. United States, which involved property damage sustained by a vessel during a search by the United States Customs Service and the United States Coast Guard ("Customs Service"). The Customs Service was called in to search the fishing vessel ABNER'S CHOICE on a tip that she was involved in narcotics trafficking. While the agents discovered no contraband, they were alleged to have unplugged the vessel's bilge pump during the search, which caused her to sink the following day. The vessel owners brought suit against the United States under the Suits in Admiralty Act ("SAA") to recover the value of the lost vessel. The United States gained summary judgment on the grounds that the district court lacked subject matter jurisdiction because the court concluded the United States enjoyed sovereign immunity in this case.
To quote from TrueCrypt's website: TrueCrypt can run in so-called 'traveller' mode, which means that it does not have to be installed on the operating system under which it is run.
This means you do not have a program list entry if you do not install it; all you have to do is keep the TrueCrypt.exe somewhere on the drive or on a separate thumbdrive (you should probably rename it to something like spellcheck.exe). But even if you do install it, you still get plausible deniability with TrueCrypt's two-container-model: you can create a secondary encrypted container within an encrypted container, so that you basically get two different contents depending on what password you use to open it. If you want to hide your PR0N stash, just put tax stuff, bills and personal data into the other container and if someone asks you to uncrypt this file, just show them the "sensitive data" you're protecting. It is impossible to prove the existence of a second data set.
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
TSA: please turn the laptop on, sir.
Me: [click]
TSA: What's this "No Hard disk" message? Why isn't it booting?
Me: [checks watch] The hard disk should be arriving in London is 30 minutes. I mailed it yesterday
TSA: Duh? What?