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Tips For Taking Your Laptop Into and Out of the US?
casualsax3 writes "I'm going to be taking a week long round trip from NYC to Puerto Vallarta Mexico sometime next month, and I was planning on taking my laptop with me. I'll probably want to rip a few movies and albums to the drive in order to keep busy on the flight. More important though, is that I'm also going to be taking pictures while I'm there, and storing them on the laptop. With everything in the news, I'm concerned that I'll have to show someone around the internals of my laptop coming back into the US. The pictures are potentially what upsets me the most, as I feel it's an incredible violation of my privacy. Do I actually need to worry about this? If so, should I go about hiding everything? I've heard good things about Truecrypt. Is it worth looking into or am I being overly paranoid?"
Put your files on a few small USB-sticks, or on your home server (for encrypted retrieval once you're in the country). Bring a Live-CD to boot from and then "cat /dev/random > /dev/sda".
Make sure to grow a big beard, learn a few arabic phrases and quote Allah to the security guard in customs.
Then let them have a crack at decrypting your "encrypted" drive.
Just be sure to say "Just kidding" so they don't ship you off to Guantanamo.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
If you haven't noticed lately, the DHS can search your laptop, make copies of everything on your laptop and keep it. If you are a person who loves exercising arbitrary power over people, you probably work for the DHS or another government agency.
Its really funny that a person who doesn't care about basic civil liberties is posting as AC. However, the joke is probably on me and you are just a troll. :)
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
...is a good offense.
If you're offended by having your privacy invaded, just make it horribly offensive for the invader as well.
With the right accessorizing and appropriate leather:latex:chainmail ratio, you can ensure even the most intrepid airport screener will breeze you through in record time.
Oh...and, yes, Truecrypt is terrific, but not nearly as fun.
Memory sticks work fine, most security personnel don't even know what they are. Just remember, what ever you do, don't EVER bring a bottle of water with you!
It shouldn't matter what kind of pictures he takes. It is none of their business.
I think he was more concerned about our amusement than their business.
Or if you do then use the best deterrent of the Ages:
dirty underwear. Few tourists bother to do laundry before coming home and the luggage rifflers know this. So be sure to pack lots of filthy, stinking, absolutely disgusting pieces of apparel near the laptop. Save that neat donkey ride until the last day, go hiking when it is hot, have really wet sex just before leaving. Just smile a say that you had already packed your luggage and so had to carry it on.
Kooties: the ultimate fear.
Insist on showing them every picture!
Also, backup the gutenberg project.
Fill up the rest of your drive with dd if="/dev/random" of="secretstuff.iso" so that if they copy your drive they at least have something they can work on decrypting.
Don't forget to bring your extra harddrives, too! I'd pay you to take some of my crashed ones... I would love for somebody to get the data off of them.
Other than that, all I can think of is for you to laugh maniacally.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Them: Excuse me, sir. Why do your balls make my detector wand beep. Please come with me.
You: Uh oh.
Have you seen the people they are hiring at the airport security recently? You might be subject to an entirely different form of harassment, from someone who feels you are their perfect soul mate...
He can't name them! Don't you understand! They have systems in place to wipe all evidence!
Yeah, you're absolutely right. I suspect that he's either one of: not sufficiently paranoid, or way over paranoid. As usual it's what you need to defend and against whom.
Heck, I can't even find stuff on my own drive I'm looking for inside 5 minutes sometimes - there's no way any kid of quick search can be of any use, unless we're underestimating our enemies again. I'd suggest that putting the photos inside a dot-directory would be largely sufficient.
Still, I think it's better not to play along with surrendering your 'fourth amendment' inalienable rights at all.
I bet photoshopping a picture of yourself shaking hands with Dick Cheney and setting that as a desktop picture would be the fastest way through the line.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Now that you've escaped, why bother tunneling your way back into the Stalag^H^H^H^H^H^H Soviet^H^H^H^H^H^H U.S.?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This past year we took a laptop with us to Vietnam to pick up our daughter. (We blogged from our hotel a lot. We were awake most of the time anyway.)
Our jet-lagged child's first hour in the USA was interesting. Nothing cuts through the red tape and lines more effectively than a cranky baby screaming at 160 dB.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
Border agent: What is your reason for traveling today. ...
Geek: I'm talking to a company about fault-tolerant servers
...
and in this Powerpoint you'll notice that the two processors are running in
lock-step. Whereas, this comparator here looks at these two pairs of CPU's
....
Border agent: You may go.
Geek: Wait! This is the interesting part
Border agent: For the love of God, please go!
[Insert pithy quote here]
Didn't you ever watch Hogan's Heroes? You tunnel back in to help the others and play tricks on the commandant.
My answer to this problem is simple. Fill up your hdd with legal but really gross images. Old people doing sexy times would be a good way to go. Then, the snoopes are forced to get an eyefull of some saggy luvin! I guess you are too, to some degree. But punishing fascists is never painless!
Everybody knows that only terrorists use Linux. You are supposed to help the guy. Seriously. If TSA stopped people with a Macbook Air because it had no optical drive, then they will probably freak out and think you replaced your hard drive with an explosive or something like that if it doesn't show up.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
The way your dad looked at it, this Secure Digital Card was your birthright. He'd be damned if any slopes gonna put their greasy yellow hands on his boy's birthright, so he hid it, in the one place he knew he could hide something: his ass. Five long years, he wore this solid state media device up his ass. Then when he died of dysentery, he gave me the memory card. I hid this uncomfortable piece of plastic up my ass for two years. Then, after seven years, I was sent home to my family. And now, little man, I give this Sandisk Extreme 8GB SDHC card to you.
For bonus irony points, put your head on top of Saddam Hussein's body in that famous picture of him shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld. (Although, Rumsfeld is technically no longer a high-ranking government official.)
Italy during WWII was bizarre as well.
There is a bill being debated in the US Congress right now to limit impoundment of laptops to 24 hours.
And I'm sure that in order to back that up, they'll take a forwarding address from you and FedEx you the laptop immediately those 24 hours are up, lovingly packaged and at no further cost to the passenger, regardless of where you are in the world. And when FedEx loses a package (because no courier company in the whole of history has ever achieved a 0% loss rate), they'll chase FedEx up on your behalf, replacing the laptop for you if FedEx can't find it in a reasonable timespan.
Regarding the data on the lost laptop, they'll almost certainly image it before they let it go anyway, so I'm sure they'll be only too happy to copy the image to another disk and ship that to you.
And all of this will be done so quickly and efficiently you won't even miss it.
It was a bizarre tyme for photographers then.
But atleast it smelt nice.
Maybe a bit of social engineering?
... damn! It's done it again! Sh*t...
Someone should make a program that's easy to install and remove that makes Windows generate a BSOD (reliably) on startup. The BSOD might just be famous enough for the security guard to recognize it.
Inspector: Can you please start up the laptop sir?
Owner: Sure thing, but it's been crashing on me lately. I've got to get my IT guy to look at
I: Haha, my laptop was doin that when my kid messed wit it.
O: That might explain it! As I recall, I let my son do his homework on it just last week and it's been acting weird since. Thanks for the tip!
I: Hey, not a problem. Actually, I'm pertty good with the interweb too, cept once I went to one of them phishing site for some fishin tips, but even when I paid the stinkin $1 fee with my credit card, there weren't no tips or nothin! Just watch yourself sir, it's a crazy web out there. On your way!
Shouldn't that be "Agfa" instead?