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NZ Customs Wants Power To Require Passwords
First time accepted submitter Orange Roughy writes New Zealand customs are seeking powers to obtain passwords and encryption keys for travelers. Supposedly they will only act to obtain credentials if it was acting on 'some intelligence or observation of abnormal behaviour.' People who refuse to hand over credentials could face up to three months jail time. From the story: "Customs boss Carolyn Tremain has told MPs the department would only request travellers hand over passwords to their electronic devices if it had a reason to be suspicious about what was on them. The department unleashed a furore last week when it said in a discussion paper that it should be given unrestricted power to force people to divulge passwords to their smartphones and computers at the border. That would be without Customs officials having to show they had any grounds for suspicion."
Kills tourism to N.Z.
Even if the person is the biggest paedophile terrorist drug-dealer in the world, do you honestly believe that there would be evidence on his phone WHILE HE IS TRAVELLING?
I don't believe that Carolyn Tremain understands this "Internet" thing.
Easy workaround: dual-booted laptop, one partition with WindowsXP and weak password, full with celebrity porn, 9/11 conspiracy documents and spyware to keep them busy for a while. Fully encrypted Linux partition for everything else.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
A department such as customs, police, wellfare etc. will always ask for the maximum possible powers. It is a given. There can be no argument against the fact that a speed camera on every light pole will lower the amount of speeders (either by fear or getting them off the roads). The police therefore will ask for that.
The role of the legislative body is to control the power of the departments and offset their wants against the negative outcomes of those wants. *Customs* We want everyone's password *Legislature* No, but you can seize equipment and a password may be demanded by a judge.
The fact that they don't always get it right is a different issue.
Protip: whenever some government official says that they won't use their power for some purpose, you know that it will be used in exactly that way or for that purpose. Case in point, RIPA in the UK, which has been used (abused) in cases related to petty crime in exactly the way it was originally claimed it would not be used.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
for i in `seq 1 2160`; do echo "Hello, jail! It's hour $n."; done \
| gpg -a --symmetric --passphrase "$(dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1024 count=1)" > ~/important.txt
"Travellers" includes citizens of New Zealand returning to their homes.
Anyone with a brain that doesn't want to have their files read will stick it in a private "cloud" and access it remotely and securely anyway.
Hell, £100 NAS boxes have this functionality nowadays without any third-party storing the data. Or rent a VPS for the duration.
The problem I have with laws like this is that you ONLY catch the stupid people anyway. If they are going through customs with a laptop full of "how to beat customs" documents, then they get what they deserve and shouldn't be that professional.
What you're doing, though, is doing NOTHING to stop an actual, determined guy with half a brain from doing whatever he wants.
Spend less on junk like this, and just get more passengers a five minute interview to find suspicious people, or spend fives minutes longer on checking the faces, passport lists, etc.
and just have a card in the machine with your music and ebooks to keep you amused on the long flight. (its about 12 hrs from LAX)
Hopefully, all your music is legal and your ebook titles don't sound suspicious.
And how many customs officials do they have on duty at AKL anyway? do they have time to go through all 300+ passengers phones/tablets/laptops?
This can be fully automated. In the UK, I recall they recorded the entire hard drive of your laptop. They said this was a measure against pedophiles, although this policy seems to only have affected a couple of reporters as far as I can tell. They never did this to me when I entered the UK.
This is in contrast with France.
At least, the French make a copy of your hard drive when you don't know they're doing it. Waiting until you've left your hotel room, or waiting until you've fallen asleep, is much less obtrusive.
Canadian border agents have vaguely broad powers to search travellers; whether that includes demanding passwords is not explicitly stated and is untested in the courts. That's likely to change, however, as they recently charged someone for refusing to give up his phone's password:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
This is totally about storing that password to your phone, PC whatever. You can bet if its not for everyone, its for everyone fingered as a potential troublemaker by the NSA/FBI/Five Eyes accomplices - like privacy advocates. Everyone will just travel with "travel" phones and PC's - something new to work around.
Looking at what we've learned over the last 2 years and then the statement of what NZ wants to do - makes me wonder if the governments of all (thats the really troubling part, all) the western democracies have completely lost their minds. Nobody has stood up for the privacy of their citizens, and privacy is vital for the long term survival of democracy.
New Zealand actually is a signatory of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says that "everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country", "no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence".
I don't even know where to begin with the child/parent analogy. The relationship between a ten-year-old and her mom is obviously and fundamentally different than the relationship between a citizen and their representative democracy.
Alternative theory: I choose not to travel to somewhere where such mall cops have any authority, or where border authorities like to throw their weight around.
There are more places in the world that I would like to see than I will ever be able to in one lifetime. I choose to visit those where I feel welcome, and they get my tourism revenue in return.
There are more clients in the world than my company will ever be able to do business with. I choose to work with those in places where doing business is easy, and those places get more business and probably more tax revenues in return.
Of course there are some people who realistically need to travel to certain places, though I don't think it's nearly as many as the apologists tend to claim and I think the number is coming down as more convenient and much cheaper long-distance communications technology improves. And of course there are some people who are willing to put up with a lot because they really want to visit a certain place. But not everyone who travels is in these categories, and by making travel unpleasant and making a country unwelcoming, in the long run those places will lose out on the rest of the visitors they might have had.
I recently travelled from the UK to another country in Europe, and chose to go by train. It was significantly more expensive than flying with a budget airline, and of course the travel time itself was significantly longer. But it was so much more pleasant in all other respects than all the hassle that comes with flying these days that I did it anyway.
The thing I most noticed was that although I was going through several different countries, once I was out of the UK and into the Schengen Area I just got on a train to go from place to place and the fact that it was international was no big deal. And you know what? No-one died in a horrific terrorist incident on the train. The criminal underworld has not taken over half of Europe. They don't seem to have any worse problems with contraband and black markets and illegal immigrants than we have at home. I doubt anyone was sneaking state secrets (or a dodgy rip of the latest movie) out of the country in a USB stick hidden in their handbag. And at no point on the journey did I feel threatened or unsafe because of the lack of overt security.
In fact, the only times I felt threatened and unsafe on the entire trip were going out of and back into my own country, and that's because we're doing it wrong. But it was still far less unpleasant than flying and all that goes with it these days.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.