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Device Security: How Border Searches Are Really Used
onehitwonder writes "Newly released documents reveal how the government uses border crossings to seize and examine travelers' electronic devices instead of obtaining a search warrant to take them, according to The New York Times' Susan Stellin. The documents reveal what had been a mostly secretive process that allows the government to create a travel alert for a person (regardless of whether they're a suspect in an investigation), then detain that individual at a border crossing and confiscate or copy any electronic devices that person is carrying. The documents come courtesy of David House, a fund-raiser for the legal defense of Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Pfc. Bradley Manning." A post at the ACLU blog (besides being free of NYT paywall headaches) gives more details, and provides handy links the documents themselves.
The documents reveal what had been a mostly secretive process that allows the government to create a travel alert for a person (regardless of whether they're a suspect in an investigation), then detain that individual at a border crossing and confiscate or copy any electronic devices that person is carrying.
Can some fella convince me that the government here, is any different as compared to those other governments?
Ohh wait, those governments are not democratic but ours is...
This isn't exactly shocking news.
To save them and you the inconvenience of physically handing it over, I guess?
I am not a crackpot.
This isn't exactly shocking news.
Oh, I disagree! The USG has established 100-mile 'non-Constitution' zones around the national borders. Due process and security of personal information is suspended.
How is that not shocking?
Only reasons I see to examine everyone's electronic devices are:
A) keep privatized prison populations growing
B) revenue from confiscated electronics
C) revenue from war on drugs
I guess that's believable
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Not if they abuse it to target and gain access to things they couldn't legally inside the country. It seems to be coming to a head here -- here are documents showing exactly this -- the illegal motivation.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It's not shocking, considering the current disregard for personal privacy currently administered by the government. It may be shocking if you take out the fact that many people are already aware of the fact that we have lost the war on privacy, and now are just going through the dance pretending that it's something we can win.
The US government has had a taste of knowing everything, and now thinks that it is our best interest to suspend/revoke/rewrite privacy laws because they just hinder investigations. Nevermind the fact that the rights of citizens should come first by our own principals.
Either way, shocking or not, this has been going on for over 10 years now, and will only get more invasive as new ways are revealed, and we become more complacent to the methods already used.
Even though there are those of us that disagree with this, and fight it as much as we can, it will not change the fact that the general population already has the mentality of "If you have nothing to hide...", and the government continues to keep it's mis-fires localized and on the "fringe", people will continue to give up their rights until we reach that ever lovable point of no return (which I honestly believe we have already passed).
I didn't know all email and FTP servers were located in the USA.
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This isn't exactly shocking news.
Oh, I disagree! The USG has established 100-mile 'non-Constitution' zones around the national borders. Due process and security of personal information is suspended.
How is that not shocking?
Yeah, but many of this have been fully aware of this for some time... Shocking news would be if the general public and mainstream media gave a fuck.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I keep looking for an exception for the government's imaginary 100-mile no-constitution zone, and it's just not in there. What the customs service is doing is a crime.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
So instead of giving it to the border patrol, you tell them to get there own copy from the NSA.
There, fixed that for you.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
*Her* name (and gender) is whatever the fuck *she* wants to call *herself* and be referred to as. That some "official" document says otherwise is irrelevant.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
The exception is an exceedingly narrow definition of what constitutes "unreasonable".
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
horrifying news about civil rights, but obama shouldn't sweat it because new iphones are being announced in an hour so everybody's attention will swing to that.
... So anybody who cares about their civil rights, regardless of political persuasion (liberal, conservative, republican), needs to support and donate to republican candidates...
The solution to the problem of an overreaching Democrat president is not, nor ever will be, to elect Republicans. The only peaceful solution is to never elect a Dem or Repub again.
Definitely shocking, and likely unconstitutional. According to the ACLU, about 197 million (or nearly 2/3rds) of the US population live within 100 miles of the US border. It is highly unlikely that the newly proclaimed 100 mile wide "constitution free zone" would hold up in court if it essentially permanently suspends constitutionally guaranteed rights to 2/3rds of the population. Not even the US Government can get away with that (at least, not yet).
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Access to offshore routers (eg. East side of the Pacific ones owned by Telstra) has been confirmed as well. All your traffic is 0wned by the US.
The "treason" charge didn't seem to happen and Manning was certainly never convicted of that. Oliver North didn't get charged for treason for selling weapons to a terrorist group that had killed over a hundred US Marines only a year prior, selling them via a declared enemy of the USA no less. Manning doesn't even show up on the scale.
Did someone remove the right to decide your own name too? They're falling so thick and fast now, I may have missed it.
You have the right to decide whatever name you want to be called by. I have the right to form an opinion of you based on that name. If I really hate your name, I may choose not to use it, but that won't stop it being your name. That's as far as our respective rights go.
Gender identification is a bit more involved. But declaring it a "silly whim" just shows you know nothing about it.
I guess you missed the part about it being encrypted?
I doubt it; did you miss the recent news regarding the NSA?
People are still trying to figure out if TrueCrypt is compromised.
Have you noticed the deafening silence from the Republicans (including even Tea Partiers) who were crowing about impeaching Obama over Obamacare? You should think about why they choose to clam up now that they have an actual legitimate reason to want him impeached.
The answer, of course, is that the Republicans are just as complicit in the totalitarianism as the Democrats are.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Why use TrueCrypt instead of mainstream encryption with a long key length?
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/the_nsas_crypto_1.html
If you're really paranoid (no offense), you can encrypt with every known algorithm in series. Then only one of them has to actually work.
I'll take the last one first; although it's counter-intuitive, encrypting with every known algorithm doesn't actually increase security all that much. One of the main reasons is that as long as the algorithms used are known, an analyst can use the predilections of the various algorithms against the series, actually decreasing the number of possible outcomes. Of course, to do this the attacker would actually have to have some level of cryptanalysis training, but we're talking NSA here. They'll identify and use these tricks if they think it's worthwhile.
As for the first, one of the things that TrueCrypt (which is pretty bog standard mainstream encryption, and it uses only known and tested algorithms -- it's the implementation we're questioning here) provides that baked-in solutions usually don't, is plausible deniability. TrueCrypt allows you to encrypt data into the slack space of an already encrypted archive, thus allowing you not only to have two sets of data depending on the passphrase used, but to easily overwrite one set by modifying the other.
This means that if you're forced to give up your password at, say, the border, you can give the original password; they'll decrypt the archive, and if any data inside the encrypted image is modified, byebye secondary encrypted dataset. This means that you can protect not only against forced release of data, but also against modification (which can also be done with a hash check, but any fiddling will lose access to the original data).
Of course, anyone suspecting such a setup may write something to the inner archive to wipe your outer archive if it exists, just to prevent you from moving that data in the first place, but that's about as far as they can go.
If, for example, Miranda had been transporting a truecrypt archive on his thumb drive, had memorized the password to the Snowden files (or not even been given it) and then had a scrap of paper with the password to his more benign data on him, the confiscated USB drive would have shown absolutely nothing. IF he ever got the drive back with the data intact, he'd still have all the Snowden data (providing the password came through some other channel -- which wouldn't be difficult).