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
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.
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
What are you trying to hide? Why do you hate freedom!?
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?
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?
If you are a US citizen I suppose the US criminal code and possibly anti terrorist legislation act apply. If you are not a US citizen they can pretty much do whatever they bloody well want with the worst case scenario being that you get dragged into a Learjet sporting a fake civil registration which flies you to some US allied country in the Middle East or one of those covert jails in E-Europe for 'harsh interrogation'.
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'
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.
Fly a plane into a building.
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.
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.
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.
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.