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Securing Your Notebook Against US Customs
Nethemas the Great points out a piece from Bruce Schneier running in the UK's Guardian newspaper with some tips for international travelers on securing notebook computers for border crossings. A taste of the brief article:
"Last month a US court ruled that border agents can search your laptop, or any other electronic device, when you're entering the country. They can take your computer and download its entire contents, or keep it for several days. ... Encrypting your entire hard drive, something you should certainly do for security in case your computer is lost or stolen, won't work here. The border agent is likely to start this whole process with a 'please type in your password.' Of course you can refuse, but the agent can search you further, detain you longer, refuse you entry into the country and otherwise ruin your day."
I got it in my biweekly dose of Cryptogram and found it disheartening. The GOD of security says: all you can do is make sure they wont find anything that will mess you up.
The sad thing is that citizens think this idiotic idea of checking laptops at airports serve any kind of law enforcement objective other than generalized panic and further diminishment of democratic values such as the right to privacy.
This is your government fucking people up (and "people" can be foreigners or locals entering the country), attempting to find in informations traces of delincuent activity that, if youre a two bit moron you know you can save it anyhow, in a mostly anonymous fashion on google's, yahoo's or microsoft's servers for free, and any number of services that are available today.
True criminals simply have huge botnets and hidden servers behind the huge pr0n/spam nets and they DO NOT carry incriminating evidence with them and EVEN IF THEY DID, how in hell is a custom's agent going to find them?
I mean, i have a better solution than that of bruce: change your initab so initdefault is 3, make sure that that level does NOT turn on the wifi card or any networking at all, change your shell to ASH (hopefully temporarilly) and let them have the root password, who cares.... good luck, mister customs agent.
NO SIG
The downsides? You probably won't be able to work in the airplane, but is it worth it now that the Customs are being so much trouble?
If they want to clone your hard drive and disassemble it later, your secondary boot OS is going to stick out. Not that it is unusual for anyone to have more than one OS on a hard drive, but it won't be hidden. Remember, they essentially have physical control of the computer. "They" win. Unfortunately, it comes down to 1) security by obscurity or 2) nothing to hide.
Roll up your sleeves and bend over.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
if your under suspicion for who you are then you are pretty well fucked. But if your just worried about a random security search and wanting to keep certain data private you only need to get past that first step because they will not spend the money to dig deeper even if they do copy your hard drive.
if you are a known individual (person of interest) and you expect to be stopped at the border, don't carry sensitive material with you. Hell, just mail a flash drive.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
I have been denied access to countries for less than not providing a password. They can pretty much turn you away because they feel like it.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
If you're going to carry stuff over the border you don't wan't The Man to look at, put it on a thumb drive and attach it to your keys.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
>>>"The border agent is likely to start this whole process with a 'please type in your password.' Of course you can refuse, but the agent can search you further, detain you longer, refuse you entry into the country and otherwise ruin your day."
Sounds like a small price to pay in order to protect my right to liberty. Just because the government demands access does not mean I have to comply.
Other people have paid a far higher price for liberty ("the full measure of devotion" aka death).
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Have all your US and overseas clients meet each other in Toronto, Vancouver or anywhere in Canada for that matter.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
This amendment exists to protect citizens from a government that may object to the content they create or possess. Maybe someone can explain why the act of entering the country nullifies my constitutional rights.
This isn't the TSA.. its customs. A huge difference.. They can do this if you're crossing in a car, on a bus, on a horse, on foot, etc... They've had this "right" since the country was formed, and older countries have had it for much longer.
My own opinions on your blinkeredness shall remain unsaid. I'm sure you can guess them.
First, I'm not American. I have visited but these incidents literally remove the country from the list of viable or "safe" foreign countries I could travel to.
"I carry corporate source, designs and some customer data on my laptop. Yes, it would be a problem if it were made public. I encrypt it, but do not hide it. I see no reason that a border guard, a TSA guard or even the (whisper) NSA would choose to give it to a competitor if they had it."
-Several thousand dollars.
- Industrial espionage.
Even in the UK, some staff at airports have been caught selling on items stolen from baggage, there's nothing to stop a corrupt official doing so. By giving them to ability and "legitimate" reason to search ANY laptop for ANY reason, it's inviting problems.
- A letter from Microsoft offering a reward for non-licensed or pirate software.
- Anything that could accidentally tag you as a terrorist.
Customs officer browsing through my web history: You read wikileaks lately? We'll have that as evidence of, in your own words, being an anarchist.
- THIS POST. Say I took a laptop with a copy of my posting history to slashdot to the US... they could EASILY use this very post against me. Evidence of "wanting to avoid customs" or some such rubbish.
"What's the problem here? Is this a matter of principle or is there something to hide?"
Neither. It's my data. You have no right to go through it without reasonable suspicion FIRST. And then in a certified, supervised way to ensure you keep within your stated use of the data. No other civilised country in the world currently does this and the UK has been dealing with terrorism for FAR, FAR longer than the US has (a UK airport security expert was told that he was "being paranoid" before 9/11 when he visited a US airport and complained about their lax security - within days he was on BBC News recounting the tale because 9/11 happened).
My workplace cannot even throw a hard drive out with having it professionally destroyed, whether it's been exposed to confidential data or not. What makes you think I can let a customs officer copy it without MASSIVE assurances of everywhere the data could end up? The chances are I'd be in a questioning room while all the copying was going on.
"Consider how important your data is to a customs official. News flash: I'd bet a lot that they don't give a rat's ass what you've got, as long as it's not illegal. If it's illegal, then the problem is totally different and you have no right to complain about it."
Define illegal. I think you'll find it depends on jurisdiction, for a start, and includes such things as data protection laws. This is the problem.
As a business, I would be required to NOT TAKE SOME DATA into the US because of this - UK and EU data protection laws means that I *can't* let anyone see it, whether or not it's "secret". If your salesman is going to have to break British law to make a sale in the US, then he's not going to GO to the US. Or he'll have to take the steps mentioned in this article.
Say my office gave me a laptop with copy of Windows that was installed from a pirate key... that's "illegal". I could get detained *without reasonable suspicion* and possibly convicted because of that. Say I *don't know* the password to an "encrypted-looking" file on the laptop (like, I don't know, say a database contained within a business program accessed only by Word macros or company-created utilities - I have seen many such systems loaded on laptops for employee use). I'm detained until I release it.
It's not that I have anything illegal under US law - the US is not the world, though. Things that the US does are considered illegal in other countries. Let's not go too far down that avenue because it's just too easy to get into country-bashing.
It's that the US customs have no reason to demand inspections without reasonable suspicion. They certainly s
I would say that most sovereign nations have the power, not the right, to control who and what enters the country.
Being detained by customs does not give you a criminal record. If you're a non-citizen, it may indeed cause trouble in entering the country again. To get a criminal record, you must be tried and convicted of a crime.
Some would say we have arrived long ago, but this is certainly a telling mark.
We are discussing "hiding legal and unincriminating" stuff so that we don't get hassled by government police. We have gone far beyond the "if you don't have anything to hide, you have nothing to fear" argument where now, even when you don't you have plenty to fear... in this case, potential loss of ability to work!!
They have been going too far for a while, but this is a point at which even the most common person can appreciate and understand the problem with this.
If the EFF were buying "public awareness" ad time on TV, radio and print (I haven't seen any if they already are) I'd donate $100 each month from now until "we've won" whatever that means. I'm sick of this.
Whenever someone talks about standing up to whatever injustice in some way, someone always comes along to point out the people they're standing up to won't like that.
No shit, Sherlock. That's sort of the point.
If nobody ever stands up to this kind of bullshit, even in these kinds of small ways, it's only going to get worse and we're *all* going to spend a lot more time in tiny cold waiting rooms whenever we try to get anything done.
Does that mean I can shoot the border agent and not be prosecuted under American laws?
:-)
Try not to confuse 'legal fictions' with reality
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ipods. I mean, come on, they're nothing more than several dozen GB thumbdrives, you can easily put all your stuff on there and carry it with you without suspicion.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
This is exactly it.
America is just now doing this? I was returned from Canada and they searched my luggage, laptop, read private conversations, opened letters all cause i was going to be staying 2 months which was too long of a vacation/job for them apparently. The guy was just a prick and didn't want anyone taking jobs. Canada is terrible for this but on Slashdot everything is the big bad USA. I'm so sick of the slant on slashdot. All countries do this its their right to refuse what type of people in their country. Some agents turn away illegal Mexicans cause they're scared of them taking jobs, some customs agents dont like the idea of a foreigner getting paid more than them.
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
Standing up for something only works if you can inconvenience the other guy somehow. Border agents aren't paid by how many people they pass through the border, they're more than happy to let you rot out in the waiting room for hours if you try to make their job difficult. They're not even under any obligation to let you in the country unless you're a citizen returning from a trip. If you give them too much hassle they can (and will) just turn you away.
I read the internet for the articles.
[theory, of course]
What is this, people? Waving flags screaming "I'm hiding something!"
If I actually had something to hide, say, key NDA-restricted docs, and I HAD to carry them on me, I wouldn't put up red flags like obvious encryption or a partition with some weird-ass hippiecommie suspicious linux install. If you want to fly below radar, you need stealth.
First: a vanilla install of windows or macOS. Standard business apps, standard documents folder with typical usage, such as correspondence, presentations, expenses, etc.
Second: family photos. Friends on vacation, etc. Make them more than typical: lots of them, and innocuous. If you're too straightlaced to keep personal stuff on your computer, that's suspicious too.
Third: on a different computer, encrypt your files with decent encryption, AES or something, using strong password. Make sure the file name isn't interesting. Doesn't matter, if a professional gets the files, they'll be cracked; the point is to keep them unobserved, so this part's kind of optional.
Fourth: mask them inside innocuous files like the photos. Transfer them to your laptop. Now you're camouflaged. Smile, respect, make eye contact, be naturally a tiny bit nervous but with nothing to hide.
The secret to security? don't get caught.
[/theory]
Damn those pesky terrorists
Even as an atheist, my time here is important enough not to waste it with trampled rights.
But otherwise, yes, you're right.