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EFF To Fight Border Agent Laptop Searches
snydeq writes "The EFF and the Association of Corporate Travel Executives have filed an amicus brief with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals requesting that the full court rehear and reverse a three-judge ruling (PDF) that empowers border agents routinely to search files on laptops and mobile devices. The case in question involves US citizen Michael Arnold, who, returning from the Philippines in July 2005, had his laptop confiscated at LAX by custom officials after they opened files in folders marked 'Kodak Pictures' and 'Kodak Memories' and found photos of two naked women. Later, when Arnold was detained, officials uncovered photo files on Arnold's laptop that they believed to be child pornography. In addition to raising Fourth Amendment issues, the amicus brief (PDF) reiterates the previous District Court ruling on Arnold's case regarding the difference between computers and gas tanks, suitcases, and other closed containers, 'because laptops routinely contain vast amounts of the most personal information about people's lives — not to mention privileged legal communications, reporters' notes from confidential sources, trade secrets, and other privileged information.'"
While I agree with the privacy infringements, I really wish it wasn't someone suspected on child porn complaining about it. It certainly won't garner much support from the general public, informed or not.
In the past, the time before computers, you never traveled with all your personel papers, love letters, note books, and your corporate trade secrets in your luguage because the border gaurds would be searching your stuff and possible reading it. So why is storing it on a computer so different. If you do not want it looked at don't put it there.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
The EFF and the Association of Corporate Travel Executives have quite the fight on their hands.
Really all the government has to do is use the branding of we are looking for child pornography terriosts that have weapons of mass destruction and guess what, poof there goes any right to privacy. Right now, they pretty much have a free ticket to do just about what ever they please.
Every time I hear stories similar to this I think back to an episode of the Simpsons, where Helen Lovejoy keeps saying, "Won't somebody think of the childern?" It was satire that they would do just about anything, if it was for the childern.
Historians will look back on two things this decade, how hurricane katrina changed how oil companies charge people for gas (they can also do just about anything they want) and how 9/11 affected personal freedoms and privacy.
I wonder how long it will be before we hear about how the customs agents have a shared collection of porn from all the hard drives they search.
Customs doesn't search for bombs. They search for anything that is illegal to bring into the country (drugs, weapons, large amounts of cash without proper paperwork, certain kinds of foodstuffs, etc).
Clearly these people are stupid enough to think that my mouthwash and nail clippers are lethal weapons.
I doubt they have the faintest idea what to do when confronted with a command line.
"How do you start windows?"
Strong encryption is an answer, not the answer. In this particular case, there should have been no need for any encryption: computer data should not be searchable without a warrant or probable cause. And no, "I need to see if you're carrying pictures of naked kids" is not probable cause without substantive evidence of wrongdoing.
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
Anyone know the last time this tactic was used? Oh yeah, Nazi Germany.
(first Godwin!)
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This is about border agents, so it has nothing to do with bombs. It is about illegal or undeclared goods being smuggled into the country.
So the argument will go that as long as certain forms of information are illegal to bring into the country, in order to do their job (stopping smugglers) the customs agents need to be able to search for illegal information. I'm not saying I agree with that argument, but in order to convince anyone other than the choir you need to understand the real issues and not some straw man argument about bombs.
Any counter argument will have to indirectly argue that customs agents don't have to keep illegal data out of the country. For copyright, such an argument is easy to make (e.g. "customs agents have no way to tell if a work on a laptop is involved in criminal infringement they may have permission from the copyright holder or it may be fair use"). For child porn, the argument is harder. The court will likely end up weighing the cost of invading people's privacy against the benefit of stopping child porn at the border. Given that the technique has already proven effective (they caught the guy), guess which one the courts will side with.
Again I'm not saying I agree with the government's position, but you have to know your enemy and the battle ground in order to win.
Bruce Schneier's recommendation for this situation is that your company have a secure VPN in place so that once you're across the border you can connect to the office and download any sensitive material you need. Before you return, VPN in again and upload your work back to the office so that the laptop is clean as a whistle when it goes through customs.
This has nothing to do with the Patriot act.. they've always had this power at the border. Courts, for decades, if not over 100 years, have always ruled you have limited/almost no rights at the border. US citizen or not..
Customs has the right to look for anything that could be against US Law, as well as looking for imports to collect duty and taxes on. They always have. Its just now, people are carrying more with them and on their laptops than before.
Do the limits need to be updated? Maybe somewhat, but I'd still want customs to have the authority/ability to do their job.
For Arabs, and Muslims, it's a very big problem, since strangers are allowed to look at private pictures of family members.
This is both a cultural and a religious difference, which this law doesn't address nor respect.
It's against our customs and culture to post our women's pictures online for the public to see, let alone having the customs look at them and take a copy of them as well!!
And what is considered childpr0n, maybe as well be nude pictures of man's 16 year old wife. That's the legal age to get married in some of the countries in the Middle East.
Apart from pictures, business men carry sensitive information, that shouldn't be copied, and if encrypted, they're forced to provide the key/password to decrypt them.
When there's a leak of information, is the US customs going to be responsible for such cases?
Mod points are a dangerous tool. Abuse them wisely.
A right is a fundamental, inherent to the existence of a human being. You have the RIGHT to live, not to protect you from someone taking that right away form you, but because here you are.
Privacy PROTECTIONS exists because any and all people in a position of power have opportunity to abuse their authority for personal gain, thus violating your RIGHT to privacy.
You could as well say the Constitution grants you rights. This isn't true at all. There are no Constitutionally granted rights, only Constitutionally protected ones.
I know this sounds like quibbling over semantics, but I think there's an important fundamental distinction here.
Now I'll climb off my soapbox.
Privacy is not a right the limited to the technical elite. The proverbial 'grandma' should be able to expect crossing the border to "just work" without having to set up full disk encryption (which if discovered they would detain you for until you unlock it, so you need to know how to hide it and then make a second dummy installation for them to discover and this really all sounds like a bunch of bullshit to go through when you think about it). The solution is to demand our individual rights, not to hide behind technological barriers.
No, you won't be done with this problem at all. You're still complicit in the stomping of the privacy rights of U.S. citizens. It will get worse, I assure you.
I'm not saying encryption is a bad practice (hell, my workstation's partititions are *all* encrypted). I'm simply saying that finding a way around the system isn't a suitable replacement for long term efforts to fight it.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Outstanding points. Unfortunately, our children are routinely taught in grade school that rights are somthing *given* to us by goverment officials. Even the average teenager (at least many I've spoken to) seem to think it's well within the government's power to take away your rights whenever it's "justified." They also seem to run with the general opinion that bad things won't happen to them; things like illegal searches only happen to "real criminals." Scary stuff.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
What is their job again ? To check that goods entering are legit and that people entering are legit. Information that you have to CARRY are not trade goods but private data that you can't easily prevent carrying. They may revel some past criminal activity from their owner but determining this is the role of a court, not a custom authority. A custom only has to stop known criminals.
And if you want, I can elaborate on why separating judgment and enforcement of a judgment are activities that must be carried by different organizations.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Hiding and encrypting your data is a good idea in general, even when not crossing the border. Here's the problem, though... how long until the mere presence of any encryption software whatsoever is taken as open permission to confiscate your gear until you feel like giving them the passphases they want? Who says you'll ever get it back at all, or won't wind up on a watch list? Aggresive legal measures need to be taken now to stop this crap.
To me, the most idiotic part is the fact that anyone sufficiently sophisticated to harbor a lot of illegal information, or information deemed dangerous to national security, would most likely be smart enough to send it over the net to its intended destination via an encrypted link. Oh, wait... does that mean the government will start considering data streams entering our country as liable to unquestioned search? Think about it.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.