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NZ Traveler's Electronics Taken At Airport; Interest in Snowden to Blame?
An anonymous reader writes "A New Zealand backpacker stripped of all electrical equipment at Auckland airport suggests attending a London talk on cyber-security following the Edward Snowden leaks may be to blame. Samuel Blackman was returning home for Christmas on 11 December from London Heathrow to Auckland via San Francisco when a customs officer at his final destination took the law graduate's two smartphones, iPad, external hard drive and laptop, demanding the passwords for all devices." For a quieter version, see also The New Zealand Herald.
It is baffling how easily civilization reverts to medieval behaviors.
We'll take your stuff, which you possibly use for your business or work, and won't tell you why, or for how long.
There need to be laws and yes, intelligence agencies, but barring a crime, this ends up being bad PR.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
taking the piss out of the Soviet Union, the Iron Curtain satellites nations and their citizens for the entire "Papers, please!" nonsense that occured whilst I was growing up in the 70s-80s. Is this crow I taste?
The lesson in this is NEVER carry sensitive information on you when entering an international airport.
That's not the lesson at all. This guy probably didn't have any sensitive information but that didn't stop his devices getting nicked.
The only people with lessons to learn are not the travellers but the security services unreasonably targetting them. Unfortunately, they're not interested in lessons.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Looks like Saruman is now running The Shire.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Don't play that game.
The whole issue is contained in the US Constitution where it says,
"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." - Amendment 4.
This needs to be a universal human rights declaration world wide and it needs to be a condition where no government is tolerated forcing people to give up their computers or their passwords. In the mean time anyone taking a computer on international travel is an idiot! We also need that every computer has a kill password where it is reset to factory default condition and the disk is wiped with a single password. You just give the government demanding your password the kill password and the game is over for them. Every OS should contain this in the future.
The list of countries you shouldn't travel to if you don't want to be detained and would like to keep your stuff: US, England, New Zealand.
Not many countries are worth traveling to these days but the UK and the US are probably on my bottom 10 list for reasons like this.
In this world you cannot be both ridiculously reasonable and neutral on most things.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The biggest surprise here is this happened in AKL instead of SFO. There is no transit freedom in the united states. If you're connecting you need to clear US customs and immigration and then re-check into your connecting flight. So if this was really a US demanded search one would think the phones and electronics would have been taken in SFO.
governments in general dont need to care about what particular policy or procedure to which one may object or find questionable. random crackdowns like this one on dissent are designed to impart a chilling effect that would discourage any challenge to a plutocratic united states governing policy. The take-home lesson of this hardship the government wishes you to embrace is that questioning the war on terror, its means or its methods, is absolutely forbidden.
but why? in america heart disease, obesity, cancer, and car accidents kill more people by the day than terrorism has ever aspired to. but these afformentioned blights on american society can be explained away by freedom to consume, the capitalist healthcare and societal model, and the idea of personal responsibility; none of which pose a threat to the government. Terrorism is the forceful demand of very reasonable requests that have been iterated thousands of times over the past fifty years to a deaf audience of american plutocrats. people forget that Osama Bin Laden had rather reasonable requests of our foreign policy that were familiar, even embraced by a number of americans seeking to reduce foreign spending, but entirely ignored by our empire: Namely to leave Saudi Arabia, withdraw from Iraq, and withdraw support from Israel.
The occupy protests are another fine example. it would have cost nothing to begin engaging protestors in constructive dialog and working to mitigate their grievances. We could have helped ensure the disenfranchised among them had a voice in the decision making process of their elected government and emerged championing the american way. Instead they were systematically targeted and demonized by media, their message marginalized and obfuscated. the protestors were arrested, beaten and some killed. free speech areas were closed and voraceously defended from protestors. A new I-Phone came out and as intended, america changed the channel.
many will see that in america, "protests arent allowed to go on forever" and this is true for a number of reasons. grass is trampled, sidewalks are congested and eventually the government grows tired. but like every government we demonize around the world, our leaders laud the idea that protests are not allowed to go on forever. That if they can control the media outcome of the event, they stymy the calcification of resolve and interest in the protest and never have to do anything more than continue with business as usual. Protests in america are as genuine and lawful as protests in china in many respects, because instead of addressing fundamental failures of north american capitalism ad foreign policy we patch over the cracks with arrest warrants and detention camps. Its the reason protests at presidential inaugurations do not take place anywhere near the inauguration, and why Occupy new york does so nowhere near Wall Street.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The lesson everyone is supposed to get is "Be afraid". It's not yet "Be very afraid", but just wait and we'll get there. So this guy was in a meeting where the Guardian editor Rusbridger was present. Perhaps that fact was what the intelligence services used to tag this guy as suspicious? If so this is sending a signal that you shouldn't be too (physically or intellectually) close to people like Rusbridger. This is a classic case of a "chilling effect" in action. If this isn't what the security services want, then they are stupidly incompetent. If it's what they want they are dangerously oppressive.
There doesn't seem to be any pleasant solution to this equation.
he transited through San Francisco and apparently US Customs had no interest in him. If US Customs felt that he was a source of useful information about Snowden, they'd have confiscated his electronics there. I'm pretty sure that New Zealand customs does not randomly target backpackers for confiscation of electronics and this is not an example of a police state gone mad. I'm sure he knows the real reason they took his stuff and he doesn't want to mention it because he wants to play the "I'm being singled out for nothing!" angle to the press right now.
The international terminal of the airport is not considered to be part of the US. Until you try to leave the terminal area, you do not need to pass through customs. If all he did was change flights, he likely did not go through US customs at all. It is possible that they became interested in him at US Customs though and asked the NZ customs officials to detain him.
Exactly, thank-you. So what proves that they're legitimate cops? If they're acting outside of law, and ordering you to do things without telling you why, taking you stuff, not giving you a reason - all the while you're cooperating as though they're real cops - to me that tells me that they're not real cops, and should be reported to the authorities. I mean, how do you validate the authority, if not by it's actions?
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Granted, after you do this, you're in for the full treatment, but that's a judgement call you need to make.
This is the mentality that these type of cops love, and wish everyone would develop. If you feel that by simply verifying that you're not about to get raped by someone who is acting outside the law, you are then "out of line" and deserve some form of "the full treatment" (whatever the hell that is) then you are the reason that things have lapsed into the state as they have. Allowing someone to push you around in ways that are illegal, simply because they represent the legal authority, is placating and nourishing the wrong mentality. What good do you expect to come from that? I'll tell you what. Eventually every woman and child will be anally probed by such "authorities" because they'll see you as weak and possibly doing wrong. Stand the fuck up for yourself when you're in the right. It's what the actual universal authorities demand! It's how things naturally balance themselves out.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
What you're missing is that people said the same thing regarding security concerns about all sorts of other things (SSL, TOR, deliberately-weakened key-generation algorithms, etc), but the Snowden leaks proved those concerns justified. Not all of the information Snowden found has been made public yet, so there's still opportunity for this concern to be proven justified too.
At this point, the only safe thing to do is to assume that if an attack is theoretically possible, then the NSA is exploiting it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz