Slashdot Mirror
Laptops Can Be Searched At the Border
Nothing to Declare notes that a California appeals court has unanimously upheld a ruling that border security officers at international airports can search personal computers without requiring any specific evidence of criminal activity. The appeal was made by US resident Michael Timothy Arnold, charged with child pornography offenses after an airport search of his notebook PC in 2005. Might want to think hard about what's on your laptop if you're going to be passing through a US international airport.
It makes you wonder that if there hadn't been something like Child Porn on there if this would have been overruled.
If it'd been a violation of rights search where they searched and you sued just for that with no criminal conviction.
The sad part, is this sets a president if it is allowed to stand, and whittles away at everything else.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Might want to think hard about what's on your laptop if you're going to be passing through a US international airport.
Might want to think hard about making a trip to the states even if you don't have anything untoward on your laptop.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. " I can see them checking your person before getting on a plane to make sure you're not carrying weapons... but what on your laptop could possibly endanger an airplane?
This should cause a nice bump for encrypted drive/volume software.
It's a real shame this revolved around a kiddie porn case that hinged on the admissibility of the evidence. Nobody wants to let the kiddie porn guy go, so the chances of getting a good precedent here were probably that much lower.
And that's the thing. Like the last /. discussion on this, if your hard drive is encrypted can they compel you to provide access as a condition for allowed travel?
What about employees of organizations/in professions that are legally required to protect information?
What about software, videos, MP3? What if they want proof of license? They could also decide to download your email inbox and address book. Why? Because They Can.
I know what's going on my laptop next time I cross the border. TrueCrypt. That's what.
The next logical question is, if you password-protect and encrypt your hard drive to thwart precisely this kind of unwarranted and unjustifiable privacy invasion, can Customs force you to divulge your passwords?
Schwab
The answer to this is to use deniable encryption. For example throw all your sensitive data on a separate partition that is at the end of the hard drive and encrypt it. Not the data, the partition. Keep the decryption tools on a separate pen drive or just make them look like something innocent. Now it looks just as if part of the hard drive is simply unused. If they don't know the encryption is there, they can't do anything. If a window jumps up at boot that says "Enter the passphrase that will decrypt the harddrive where all the information that customs shouldn't see is" you can be sure you'll be searched and probed in minutes.Guess FedEx / DHL will run out of Laptop sized boxes soon. All those business travellers opting to send their laptop home, instead of carrying it on the plane..
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
I imagine that if you encrypt your data and then refuse to give them the password it would be treated something along the lines of refusing to give a breathalyzer sample. In their eyes, the only reason you'd refuse is because you're trying to hide something illegal. The solution is to have nothing on your notebook, keep all your work or pr0n on your machine at home and access it via some remote desktop service or home server.
Heck, Gonzales once issued a statement once saying that people who haven't cleared customs technically are neither in nor out of the US, and therefore have no actual rights (can't dredge up a reference now). He's certainly said that habeus corpus isn't actually a right.
Basically, for a while at least, the legal opinion was that you could be arbitrarily and indefinitely detained without recourse. You're so far removed from the 5th Amendment at that point, it's not funny!!
Unless things change, you have shockingly few rights at the border -- at least until a court clarifies things.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
So as a parent, if I take a picture of my 6-month old baby girl in a bathtub, have the picture on my computer, and go traveling, I could be detained and locked up for child pornography? I'm sorry but I have little faith that our minimum wage earning security sloths will be able to tell the difference between proud parent images and kiddie porn.
I seem to remember a similar situation at a department store photo department. The teenager running the picture printer saw pictures of a 7 or 8-year old bare-chested child with long hair (it turned out later to be a boy), thought it was kiddie porn and called the cops.
I barely feel like they know how to do the job they have. Now were going to have them searching peoples laptops?
This is just plain stupid.
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
it makes perfect sense that people traveling with their laptop only bring "unimportant" information with them. What should a road-warrior expect, access to their data while they travel? Hogwash! There is no reason for them to ahve information that important on their laptop. It should be secured on the servers and accessed when needed.
Customs Agent: OK, you won't enter the password, I'm just going to confiscate your laptop and let those guys in the lab have a look. You can write a letter to request it back... blah blah blah Hey, Bubba, gimme that pirated Windows XP disk we confiscated from that kid that came through here an hour ago. Just found my kid a birthday present.
Unfortunately, Government also gives PEOPLE power. PEOPLE are, unfortunately, corrupted by power. Especially low-paid customs inspectors. The best-of-worst-case scenario you can expect from them searching a device with encrypted data on it that is capable of decrypting said data is to lose both the device and the data. Especially if the device is new and shiny.
PERL:
All of the power of Voodoo with most of the understandibility!
The U.S. is becoming a police state, apparently.
Stealing the laptop won't help if they don't have the password.
Truecrypt has the ability to make hidden encrypted partitions.
There is actually a pretty easy way around this. (Albeit, there are some variables that effect practicality). If I were to travel across borders and knew I had material I did not want seen (private photos? personal docs), I would simply sftp them some place safe and delete them from my hard drive. Once on the other side, I sftp my files back down. The border guards can search until the cows come home for all I care. Screw all that encrypted file system crap. :)
PLUS, if my laptop gets broken or stolen, I don't lose all my important docs.
Can all fish swim?
No, movies where people murder people are not illegal to own AFAIK. If so, I and many websites including youtube will be in trouble : One or two examples (if you haven't worked this out, these videos are videos of murders. Don't watch if you don't want to). Possessing video of a crime is definately not necessarily a crime in itself, apart from when it concerns sex.
The situation is this now : It is legal to own actual video of murders. It is illegal for a 17 year old to create a CGI of themselves (or obviously film themselves) and send it to their partner.
People are not defending child pornography here, people are questioning the law. Also, there is such a thing a due process - if you start ignoring it for "really nasty" crimes, eventually you'll start ignoring it for more and more crimes, and your liberties are dwindling at an alarming rate. Just because people question the process doesn't mean they are defending the actions uncovered by the process.
If I ever want to move sekret data over the US border, that absolute last thing I'd think to use was a laptop.
There is this invention called The Internet which lets you move gigs and gigs of data into and out of the USA with excellent public key encryption. You can even store the data encrypted in the US and access it from from your secret pirate island with complete safely no problem.
If only moving drugs around was so easy.
Other then slowing down the border that much more, I can't imagine catching anybody with a clue.