Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Make sure you have a backup of the pictures before you enter the US. Secure online storage is cheap. You can refuse to give them the password but they can take your laptop for "analysis."
But uh, mind if I ask: exactly what kind of pictures are you planning on taking on your vacation? ;-)
It shouldn't matter what kind of pictures he takes. It is none of their business.
Truecrypt would not help: If they really wanted to see your content they could ask you to show it to them or alternatively confiscate your laptop and decrypt it themselves.
Truecrypt provides plausible deniability - the capability to create a hidden encrypted volume within another encrypted volume, thereby allowing you to grant access to unimportant/dummy data when a password is asked for without the attacker knowing additional information even exists.
As for the US government just decrypting the colume themselves, as far as I know they simply don't have that capability. If your boss knows otherwise or has knowledge of ways to defeat Truecrypt's plausible deniability then (s)he should provide some kind of evidence to back that up, otherwise this just sounds like uninformed guesswork or pure tinfoil-hattery.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
An ounce of circumvention is worth a pound of countermeasures. Don't store them on the laptop at all. Store the pictures you're taking online and you'll be able to access them from anywhere. Border patrol can't find something on your computer when it's not there. Even if that's not feasible 100% of the time, you could still make a temporary archive online while removing them from your computer. If even that has you feeling paranoid, you could always burn the files to DVD, wipe them from your computer, and stow the DVD.
Truecrypt provides plausible deniability - the capability to create a hidden encrypted volume within another encrypted volume, thereby allowing you to grant access to unimportant/dummy data when a password is asked for without the attacker knowing additional information even exists.
Well, there's that, and the fact that no file can be positively identified to be a Truecrypt volume. Until you you give a password it just appears to be random data. High entropy random data, but the guy at the border is looking for a 5 minutes spree tops - I seriously doubt he knows what entropy is let alone enough to check for it.
If you're that worried create a volume with nearly same size as your system RAM, keep it in a directory with some source code (even write a stupid program that will crash if you want) and just name it "core" or "core.dumped". If asked about it tell them when you were testing your program (that does whatever you want to maekup) it crashed and dumped memory to file. It's probably just corrupted nonsense . . .
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Only children think in terms of the worst things that could happen to them. Every day, when I leave my house, I could get run over by a bus. I could get ass raped in a jail after being unfairly imprisoned by a cop for a crime I didn't commit. My house could be robbed. My person could be robbed. My car could have a molotov cocktail thrown at it. I could catch some nasty disease from a toilet seat.
Note I spend about zero time thinking about these things because the chances of them happening to me are about nil. Ditto having my laptop searched. What are they going to find, my porn stash? WTF do I care, really. It's not worth a moment of my life to worry about.
I retort: Maybe you should grow up and worry about things that are important, like where your next meal is coming from. I hear that it's growing fashionable now.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I think it is much easier to bring 2 USB keys to Mexico, move the data on them and send them home via regular mail, separately.
this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
You'd think that, but there have been stories recently about that not being the case.
There are "stories" about kidnapping of children, but I still let my children play outside. There are "stories" of serial killers, but I still walk in the city. There are "stories" of school shootings, but I still let my kids go to public school.
What's your point?
I can find a "story" about anything. That doesn't mean that it's common or that special precautions need to be taken.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Extending off of this idea, My solution for travel to the US was to remove the hard drive, leave it at home, and run my laptop off of an ubuntu livecd. Any data I wanted to keep was stored on SD cards purchased in the US.
We flew into Munich, traveled by Train to Austria and returned to the US via Munich. We had no issues other than US Customs wanted to review the food items we were importing and declared. We knew that when we bought the Austrian chocolate and it took maybe an extra 5 minutes to go through the Agriculture lane for customs.
I did burn a DVD of my pictures as a backup, more in case the laptop was stollen than if US Customs wanted to retain the laptop.
Get over the paranoia and go see the world.
Regular people, just doing ordinary legal business now need to worry about this?
What the fuck is up?
Doesn't this read more like an item that one would have expected to read - historically - by someone concerned about a visit to the Soviet Union, East Germany or Argentina? Looks like the Soviets didn't lose the cold war. There are just 1st and second runners-up, with both losers in a 15 year period, no? I mean, you fuckers used to have LAWS. You used to have a Constitutional validation of basic individual rights! But, I guess there are more important things to a nation, than the consent of the governed.
In America, Soviet Union becomes YOU! You fucked up, America. And now you no longer exist in any meaningful context. The only single thing that defines you as a coherent entity within your borders is the way in which you are taxed - without representation.
I don't know if I am angry or sad. But it is sad.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."