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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
My laptop requires a password to wake from sleep or decrypt the contents of my home directory. Since this is seemingly not a search-warrant situation, am I in any way legally required to type / provide my password? What are they (legally at least) able to do if I refuse?
Yes but, can Captain Encryption get me my computer back?
Better yet, can Captain Encryption keep the G-men from stealing it in the first place?
Canadian Customs has "searched" my laptop twice. Once I sat at the border for about four hours while the tried to figure out how to use the finder. U.S. customs took my laptop (a MacBook Pro) out of the case and looked at it, but I think they decided they didn't want to spend the time with it.
I shudder at how long it would take the good customs folks to work their way through a Linux box, or a decently encrypted hard drive.
In both of the Canadian searches, I was asked questions specifically based on email messages cached in my mail client. That was awful disturbing.
In the "long search" case they apparently also spent most of their time browsing the iPhoto and Photoshop albums and asked me a lot of questions about other places I had been.
I crossed the border twice on Sunday. They didn't care about my laptop. There's your anecdotal evidence.
Years ago, on a ski trip to Searchmont (in Canada near the Soo*) a friend and I were returning to the US and had pulled into US Customs. "Are you bringing anything into the country?" "Um.. just these doughnuts"
Bad. Very bad. They nearly tore the car apart (apparently looking for more doughnuts.)
Still a sore point to this day when I visit my friend and his wife and go to Canada. "Do not mention doughnuts!"
*Sault Saint Marie
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Whether a laptop is seized or not depends on size and brightness of the screen, and if it might have DVD rom and good speakers.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
For all the love that the US government and big corporations seem to have for 'free trade' and 'globalization', they don't seem interested in open borders. I wonder why not? It's OK for corporations to ship jobs around the world to wherever labor conditions are the most favorable to them. But if workers try to migrate to where the hiring conditions are better, they are demonized as 'illegals'. It's OK for corporations to buy supplies from any country, getting the best deal in the process. But if consumers try to buy products from other parts of the world, that's a no-no (witness Lik-Sang). True globalization demands open borders. Fire the border guards. Tear down the fences.
Some will reply and tell me this is crazy. How it can never work. That somehow we just have to have walls. Why? And if walls are so good and necessary, would you support building them between the States? Why not?
> You need to search where?
> That doesn't even make sense!
It does, for a USB thumbdrive.
~wavy lines, a bombed-out shack in post-Civil-War-II America~
This USB keychain I got here was first purchased by your great-grandfather to hold pictures he took during the First Gulf War. It was bought in a Best Buy in Knoxville, Tennessee. Made by the first company to ever make USB thumbdrives. Up till then people just carried floppy disks that was read by magnets. It was bought by private Doughboy Ernie Coolidge on the day he set sail for Iraq. It was your great-grandfather's USB thumbdrive and he carried it everyday he was in that war.
When he had done his duty, he went home to your great-grandmother, took the thumbdrive out of his pocket, put it an empty dresser drawer, and in that can it stayed 'til your granddad Dane Coolidge was called upon by his country to go overseas and fight the Ay-rabs once again. This time they called it The First Global War On Terror. Your great-grandfather gave this watch to your granddad for good luck. Unfortunately, Dane's luck wasn't as good as his old man's. Dane was a Marine and he was killed -- along with the other Marines at the battle of Baghdad. Your granddad was facing death, he knew it. None of those boys had any illusions about ever leavin' the Green Zone alive. So three days before the Ay-rabs retook the Green Zone, your granddad asked a gunner on an Air Force transport name of Winocki, a man he had never met before in his life, to deliver to his infant son, who he'd never seen in the flesh, his USB thumbdrive. Three days later, your granddad was dead.
But Winocki kept his word. After the First Global War on Terror was over, he paid a visit to your grandmother, delivering to your infant father, his Dad's USB thumbdrive. This thumbdrive.
This thumbdrive was in Daddy's pocket during the Second Civil War when he was flyin' to Canada. He was captured at the airport, which was a place that was sorta like bein' in a Halliburton prison camp. He knew if the TSA ever saw the thumbdrive it'd be confiscated, taken away. The way your Dad looked at it, that thumbdrive was your birthright. He'd be damned if any bureaucrats were gonna put their greasy hands on his boy's birthright.
So he hid it in the one place he knew he could hide something. His ass. Five long hours, he wore this thumbdrive up his ass. Then he died of a perforated colon, but before he did he gave me the thumbdrive. I hid this uncomfortable hunk of plastic and silicon up my ass two more hours. Then, after a total of seven hours in secondary inspection, I was sent on home to my family. And now, little man, I give the watch to you.
- With apologies to Tarantino
Don't like it, get the law changed.
Otherwise, all they'll get is a policy change... which is the equivalent of a "I promise" but without any garauntee or accountability.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It's getting so that I don't want to travel to the States any more. They're getting waay too uptight.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
stealing. The US border guards are stealing computers. How about we make them stop stealing things?
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
So customs authorities have the power to inspect the data on your laptop, or presumably any other data-carrying device, without warrant or even cause.
But an obvious way around this search would be to transfer the data electronically, and perhaps rent a laptop in the US to retrieve it.
So my question is this. If searching files on a physical device is legal, would it not also be legal for customs to "inspect" all electronic data that crosses international borders? And in the same way that it is legal for the authorities to sieze a laptop for more intensive analysis, would it not also be legal for customs to "embargo" electronic transmissions until they can be analyzed? (Perhaps compelling the sender or receiver, whichever one is on their soil, to disclose the key?)
Think about the implications for a couple of minutes. This would put the Great Firewall of China to shame, and you have to know that somebody in the justice department is thinking about doing it.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
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
If the paperwork isn't filled out, it didn't happen!
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.
So, why wouldn't I just have two partitions, dual-boot, and on the plane make sure it's setup to boot the 'boring' partition?
Think the customs guys will notice that dmesg shows the drive has more space than df -k does?
They _are_ comfortable with emacs in a text window, right? That's what _I_ boot into
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Have you ever even traveled overseas before? It's like you just lifted this information from an Orwell novel or made it up off the top of your head just to be an anonymous contrarian. Your language is stilted and sounds like something you heard somebody smarter saying years ago: "Your person" indeed. I'm no Richard Stallman, but I've traveled extensively in the Middle East, Lower Asia, and in Eastern and Western Europe. For an American, I do alright.
Everywhere I've gone, airport and border security has been lax. You are searched, but not invasively so. They ask questions about where you're going and why, but it's not Jeopardy-level stuff. A valid passport does its job for you. Nobody throws you in quarantine for having a cold or pretending to, for godsake. Why don't you do us all a favor and stop bothering us with this unrealistic Checkpoint Charlie crap you saw in a late-night Spike TV Jean Claude Van Damme movie.
Interestingly, it's only when you re-enter the United States as an American citizen that you are subject to the most harassment, at least at O'Hare and Kennedy. They are not afraid to use dogs to sniff you while you're waiting on your luggage. They will whip out the rubber gloves when handling your property, and they will give you that knowing look like "Give us any trouble, and these can be used for you."
But thrown into quarantine? Laptop and briefcase-toting American businessmen? Please get a clue.
First of all, don't put it to sleep. Turn it off, so that the password they ask for will be a login password rather than some kind of state-restoration password.
Next, when they ask for a login password, give it to them. Give them a username too.
Now they log in. They see a very boring directory, which is very easy (and here's the important part: quick!) to search through. They yawn after a very brief investigation, give the machine back, and you go on your way.
Why did everything work out? Because you gave them a username and password that you don't use everyday, so all your personal stuff isn't sitting in there, needing to be sorted though looking for stuff related to kiddie porn, terrorism, drugdealing, and .. (oh damn, what's the 4th horseman? I forgot.)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
They _are_ comfortable with emacs in a text window, right? That's what _I_ boot into :-)
::Pop quiz::
If the customs officials have no clue what your computer is doing, their likely reaction would be to:
A) Pat you on the back, apologize for wasting your time, and send you on your way.
B) Put you in a holding cell while they spent hours attempting to figure out your notebook.
How does appearing like you have something to hide help you at all? Best to make it boot into an innocuous windows partition.
"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.
What happened to all the "conservatives"? Am I the only conservative who actually believes in limited government? That may be the most tangible benefit of a Democratic victory in an (any) election--the conservatives would be (ostensibly, if dishonestly) anti-government again. Right now we're stuck with the dichotomy that government-funded healthcare is creeping totalitarianism, but government torture is innocuous. Strange world we live in.
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. While most police forces are still subject to civilian control, Customs officials in the US and Canada increasingly do not operate transparently. In the absence of clear civilian control, they and all other police forces inevitably descend into corruption and abuse.
Western police are not immune to this. "Our cops don't do that!"... BS. I don't know why we (westerners) think that we're inherently better human beings than say, Soviet Russian police. Nothing about us makes our societies better, it is our political and economic freedom that has made us better. Define power roles and remove the controls... the "Stanford Prison Experiment" could easily have been a prototype for Abu Ghraib.
When you consider that Customs officials increasingly don't have to answer to anyone, and there is no longer any useful process of complaint or appeal, it is inevitable that they will abuse their power. After all, you could be a terrorist/communist/anarchist/whatever it was 150 years ago.
As for customs guards, the fact that you're a business traveller, earn 10x what they do, and that this is the only context in which they will ever have power over you will surely cause them to abuse their authority. This is human nature.
I use TrueCrypt for my laptop. I don't have a password, I use a key on the work network protected by VPN (if you're not on the local network.) I literally cannot be forced give access to someone without setting up the VPN connection. Anything sensitive is on the encrypted partition. If I have to travel overseas, I will ask that they disable my VPN access until a mutually trusted aquaintance at my destination requests it be restored. I might go so far as to ask that I not know who is the responsible party.
If my laptop is confiscated, it will be a pain, but not terrible since the encrypted partition is backed up when I'm on the work network. If they must decrypt it, then they have to go through my company's security officer and the company's lawyers. If they take the laptop, then its my company's problem and they can decide if it's worth the legal fight.
Why? I handle other people's sensitive personal data (and try to keep even that at a minimum on my laptop.) I do what I can to protect the privacy of anyone who has trusted us to keep it private. If I'm dealing with someone who is trying to legally obtain the contents of the drive, they are forced to go through a legal process that protects our clients and by extension myself. If I'm dealing with a personal criminal with a gun, hopefully I can just hand over the laptop and valiently try to run away.
No lying to officials is necessary. I don't think I'd volunteer to explain that there is an encrypted partition, but if asked directly I can tell the truth.
If you're worried about it, you could probably set up the same with friends instead of a company and have most of the benefits.
If the climate is really nasty, then I'll probably just ship the drive. Boot? Sure, that's knoppix by they way, let me know if you need help finding the games.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Thank you. If I had mod points I'd give you one, but instead here's a link to the case you mentioned.
--MarkusQ