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
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Thank you. If I had mod points I'd give you one, but instead here's a link to the case you mentioned.
--MarkusQ