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Homeland Security Changes Laptop Search Policy
IronicToo writes "The US Government has updated its policy on the search and seizure of laptops at border crossing. 'The long-criticized practice of searching travelers' electronic devices will continue, but a supervisor now would need to approve holding a device for more than five days. Any copies of information taken from travelers' machines would be destroyed within days if there were no legal reason to hold the information.'"
If any of the "information" was over 18 at the time of photography, they have a "legal reason" to keep it, am I right?
I, for one, definitely trust the letter and the spirit of the law to be upheld on this one. We've never had trouble with illegal intelligence gathering here, especially not when the agency involved is opaque and largely unaccountable. It should be fine.
The DHS has always held the belief (with the Supreme Court's backing) that people and their belongings at customs checkpoints at the airport (or at a border crossing) aren't within the country (yet), consequently, the constitution doesn't apply to "inspections" within those checkpoints. That gives the DHS and their goons all the leeway they want in "confiscating" or "inspecting" all the stuff they want for as long as they want.
Does this press release change anything? Not really. It just lays some groundwork for more "routine" searches. Anything beyond that they have to give some bullshit reason ("national security") to keep it longer.
What's to stop this bullshit agency from making a mockery of their press releases? I can guarantee you that the goons they have on the "front lines" haven't been told about this "press release".
So what about from the viewpoint of someone travelling into the United States from out of the country? Can we expect the right to privacy or would we be beholden to the same ritual? As a Canadian, who often travels into the U.S, can I expect that my laptop could, essentially, be seized because the powers that be just want to take it? Can I demand a warrant for the seizure of my laptop? I wonder if they would lock me up for demanding a warrant then lose the key sort of thing.
The U.S is fast becoming a police state -- kind of scary the lack of freedom within the Constitution and its amendments.
"i lost my dignity on a slippery wiener"
'The long-criticized practice of searching travelers' electronic devices will continue, but a supervisor now would need to approve holding a device for more than five days. Any copies of information taken from travelers' machines would be destroyed within days if there were no legal reason to hold the information.'"
That will really help. Terrorism is always a legal reason; and nowadays even thought-crime is being used as a reason to imprison people (yes! see gitmo). They have no business with my private information. No matter if those are love letters or plans for a bomb of some type. I will crypt the data. You copy the data, but I get to keep the hardware, right? Why can't they publicise it that way? Why the delay of five days? It is an ineffective policy and an ineffective change. They still pester people for no reason.
That is why my laptop contains nothing of interest whatsoever. Any interesting data is kept on encrypted partitions on an 1Tb USB based disk, normally placed safely in the checked luggage.
They can take and keep my laptop all they want, I'll just hook up the real data disk to a new laptop and install Truecrypt and I'm good to go.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
By that argument, if a gang of thugs flew into the United States, never left the international arrivals area, and committed heinous crimes while there---plotting assassinations, designing nuclear weapons, calling for hits on their enemies, execution-style murders, gang rape, etc.---they would not be in the U.S. and thus could not be prosecuted under U.S. law. For that matter, any sort of crime---mugging, graffiti, public urination, public drunkenness, public nudity, arson, etc.---would be completely legal as long as you don't leave the international arrivals area. Does arson only become a crime when the fire spreads outside the international arrivals area? This also means that terrorists could legally set up training camps in the international arrivals area of a major airport. Why does the DHS want to harbor terrorists within our borders?
Another scary thought: it may not happen today or tomorrow, but statistically speaking, before the heat death of the universe, some psychopath will likely murder a child in the international arrivals area, get off because he wasn't on U.S. soil, then kill again. Then we'll have another law on the books named after some dead child, all because the government feels such a desperate need to violate its own citizens' right to privacy. The very thought of such a thing happening should give every DHS agent chills. It gives a particularly ironic twist to using the words "think of the children" while executing illegal searches for child porn....
Alternatively, if Cuba or North Korea flew a firing squad into some U.S. airport, lined up its soldiers along the walls, and shot everyone who came through, that, too, would win an award for irony, watching as a not-free country helped a "free" country to be more free.
Or the U.S. .government might simply seal off all the borders. clamp their hands over their ears, and shout LALALALALALALALA! Sounds more like our government to me. After all, nothing could be more important than the government's right to catch stupid criminals who aren't smart enough to ship their pirated DVDs concealed in children's toys, upload their homemade videos of sex with underage girls in Thailand to a server in the U.S. instead of carrying the unencrypted files on their desktop, or download their Al Qaeda propaganda through somebody else's open Wi-Fi access point after they get home. I mean, do they seriously catch any significant number of criminals this way? And if they do, aren't they at least as likely to be able to catch such morons in a million other ways without burning our Constitution in the process?
Just my $0.0137 (adjusted for inflation).
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Our employees have no problems going in or out of the U.S. with laptops even though we require all laptops with data on them to be fully encrypted. When an employee is, say, going to France (worst case; it's illegal to enter France with an encrypted device) we copy all their data to the network, take it off the network, wipe it clean, and install a base image. When the user gets to France, they are met by one of our techs who installs full disk encryption, joins the machine to our network, sets up a VPN, and copies their data from our U.S. servers to the laptop in France.
When it's time to return home, the tech in France copies all data to our servers, takes the laptop off the network, wipes it clean, and installs a base image. When the user gets back into the U.S., a local tech fully encypts the machine, puts it on the network, and copies the user data from our servers to the laptop.
Now, this seems like lot of trouble to me. But it prevents our employees from having any problems with customs in either France or the U.S.
This isn't just done in the US. In fact, laptop seizures for corporate espionage doesn't happen here as often as people might think.
However, look at the UK and China. The UK can toss someone in gaol for a number of years if they don't reveal just their laptop password, but the password to their VPN, all Administrator/root passwords they know to log onto those remote machines, and so on.
China is more simple. Give them the business info or else your next of kin gets a bill for the lethal injection chemicals before they get your body back.
I worked for one company where when IT people leave the US to certain areas which tend to use their police services for espionage for their domestic companies, all admin access is pulled that the person has until they are physically back in the States. Their Active Directory system has a duress code feature where you type in a slight variation of your password, it would alert central IT to contain any possible damage silently, as well as see about what can be done via legal or diplomatic channels. It is assumed that once an individual is in a foreign nation, that nation's intel service can do anything they want to the person including overt torture. Even the CEO of the company gets limited access if traveling abroad just in case.
As for laptop protection, BitLocker is the easiest to push out on an enterprise basis, but at the same place as described above, they recommended using TrueCrypt. Random chaff and pr0n would go in the outer volume, the real business confidential stuff would go in the hiden one. So far, nobody has ever had any border agents demand to look at the TC volume, much less ask for a password. Most agents tend to care that the laptop boots (so each laptop has a guest user account with no privs just to pass by screening), and that is it.
Your first paragraph nails the legal aspects behind Guantanamo Bay pretty well.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I'd love to see it tested in court, merely because AFAIK financial liability for unreasonable detention is largely an untested area of law. The cases I'm aware of that (fail to) set the bar for reasonable border searches are all cases in which there was at least some degree of probable cause for conducting such a search (e.g. something illegal in plain sight) and in which the searches turned up something illegal as expected. Basically, they were all the sorts of cases in which it would have been surprising for the courts to not find in favor of the government.
It would be very interesting to see a case in which the government was on the defensive instead of the offensive, having detained someone without reasonable cause for an unreasonable amount of time, resulting in financial harm. Those sorts of cases, if they ever made it to court, are the sorts of cases that would stand a chance of setting actual standards of reasonableness.
Some cases are clearly doomed to fall one way or the other. The cases in the middle are the ones that set precedents.
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