Slashdot Mirror
New Zealand Travelers Refusing Digital Search Now Face $5000 Customs Fine (msn.com)
Travelers in New Zealand who refuse to hand over their phone or laptop passwords to Customs officials can now be slapped with a $5000 fine. From a report: The Customs and Excise Act 2018 -- which comes into effect today -- sets guidelines around how Customs can carry out "digital strip-searches." Previously, Customs could stop anyone at the border and demand to see their electronic devices. However, the law did not specify that people had to also provide a password. The updated law makes clear that travelers must provide access -- whether that be a password, pin-code or fingerprint -- but officials would need to have a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. "It is a file-by-file [search] on your phone. We're not going into 'the cloud.' We'll examine your phone while it's on flight mode," Customs spokesperson Terry Brown said. If people refused to comply, they could be fined up to $5000 and their device would be seized and forensically searched. Mr Brown said the law struck the "delicate balance" between a person's right to privacy and Customs' law enforcement responsibilities. "I personally have an e-device and it maintains all my records -- banking data, et cetera, et cetera -- so we understand the importance and significance of it."
The term "digital search" is a bit ambiguous. (Prostate exam comes to mind) Is this really what search electronic devices is called?
sig: sauer
$5000 fine might be worth paying, depending on the circumstances, if the alternative is jail or loss of corporate secrets. Way around this is either an erased phone or an SD card with a smaller capacity stamped on it with plus an encrypted partition on the remainder. If what's on the unencrypted partition is innocuous, this should stand up to a casual search at least.
If only there was some other way to transport digital information...
then load it up with goatse and tubgirl. Theres no law that says you have to have a privacyinvaderfacebook and twitface account.
restore that shit from an image downloaded from the cloud after you land.
So funny governments don't understand how futile these laws are.
The ability to force you to cooperate in a fishing expedition targeting you won't be misused. Because I have a cell phone!
An 'e-device'? That maintains all his 'records'?
"We're not going into 'the cloud" ... yet. We'll add that later with little or no fanfare as a simple policy change.
Mr Brown said the law struck the "delicate balance" between a person's right to privacy and Customs' law enforcement responsibilities.
Does it, now? I don't think so. If you'd like to keep invasive species and pathogens and so on out of your ecosystem, I can understand that. Rifling through everybody's photo books, address books, private notes, and whatnot else? What is your justification for that, hm?
"I personally have an e-device and it maintains all my records -- banking data, et cetera, et cetera -- so we understand the importance and significance of it."
So because this idiot thinks he's got nothing to hide, nobody has anything to hide, ever. Right.
Shows what excellent politicians are "leading" the kiwis.
so we understand the importance and significance of it
You clearly don't.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
What are the dangerous files Customs needs to stop people bringing in on their phones?
New Zealand joins Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and of course the United States, forming The Paranoid Five. Everyone is out to hurt them and take away their freedom and liberty.
My Slashdot captcha for this anonymous post: Fascism.
ITT: Reasons not to go to New Zealand.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Don't travel with hardware you need to trust. Don't cross borders with data that you can decrypt but don't want customs to see.
Well it is a ""delicate balance" between a person's right to privacy and Customs' law enforcement responsibilities". The balance being do it or we'll fine you five grand and do it anyway. Balance.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
It seems pretty racist but they are convinced it keeps the crime rate low.
New Zealand was always one of those places on my bucket list. No more!
$20 burner phone for international travel.
Or just don't visit places with laws like this.
It isn't like I need to call anyone with a phone while travelling. Mainly I need a GPS, internet-lookup, and SIP device.
Store what you care about on an SD card. Take it out of your phone before you go through customs. Let them look at everything left. Put the card back in when you get through the gate. No big deal.
I personally have an e-device ...
Sounds likely.
Nope, no sig
Look who's going full totalitarian.
All digital devices should have a 2nd passcode that will wipe the device on the first successful attempt. That will probably cut down on passcode requests for fear of wiping the device.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
If you're traveling for business, ask about corporate policy with regards to this policy,
If it is for personal equipment, it's cheaper to buy/rent something, than be forced to give up your personal/pirated data.
I wonder what happens with a dumb-phone / dad-phone? You hand them a flip phone and they fine you because it's too secure for them to assfuck?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Time to start carrying 'clean phones'
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
Travelers in New Zealand who refuse to hand over their phone or laptop passwords to Customs officials can now be slapped with a $5000 fine.
Guess I won't be traveling to New Zealand then. Pity... Looked like a nice place to visit. They can go fuck a hobbit if they think this is acceptable.
Make your employer pay the fine. The problem will self-correct itself shortly after.
Don't bring personal/business electronics across borders. It's that simple.
Not really much of a choice these days. Are you really going to go on a business trip without your laptop and phone? I'm sure your employer might have something to say about that. Are you really going to go on vacation without your smartphone? It's not that simple and pretending won't make it so.
Reads, “digital strip-searches”... uhm. Oh. Not *that* kind of “digital”...
Not quite enough, it's called plausibly deniable encryption, the volume needs to appear to be using all of the space to appear to be not hiding anything, and the unused space needs to be indistiguishable from random binary (i.e deleted unused space).
You seriously think they wouldn't be aware of this trick and throw you in prison until you break?
Cheap Cells are available everywhere.
Just cross with a new phone and restore your data and settings from your backups over the internet with a VPN.
So which law trumps the other one?
Sadly for you it doesn't matter most likely. The local authorities (where you physically are) can throw you in jail (or worse), possibly beat you with the xkcd wrench, and keep your laptop for as long as they like. Hell they can torture it out of you if they like and you have little to no legal rights. Nation states aren't really accountable to anyone if they don't want to be. Unless you have some sort of diplomatic immunity and the security to back it up then you are fucked well and good. Your job status (or worse) is probably of little concern to them.
It's also not entirely clear how much your own government will care about you if you get held by the local authorities.
Presumably, in NZ, they are most interested in people's chat conversations, and people working on the wrong kind of visa. A friend of mine went to Australia on a holiday visa, had mentioned to someone in a FB messenger conversation that he was going to do a bit of cash-in-hand work (which he obliviously shouldn't have been doing on a holiday visa), and that got him denied entry, and sent straight home again. An expensive mistake.
I have a Chromebook and I run Crouton on it with Debian. Adding a ne user tat does not have that is pretty easy.
So I could just add a user with some pasword. If that where not possible, i would change the password to "pass" for the duration.
Or even better would be if they press "Enter" instead of CTRL-d to go to restore mode. Ir I do it myself.
That way I have a blank PC when I arive. Setting things back takes an hour., if that.
Same for the phone. Just restore factory settings. I could even pop in a cheap sim card and blank sd card.
Sim card can be had for 6EUR. Who cares they know it is in my name. It is not as if I am going to use it.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
One method which privacy protestors sometimes favor is wiping their phone prior to entering the airport terminal, and restoring it to normal after leaving... and with the ubiquity of encryption on smart phones, that makes it extremely likely that a forensic search would be entirely fruitless, regardless of the methods employed. So how long will it take for airport authorities to decide that a wiped phone qualifies as a refusal to comply?
Leave it at home, get a burner phone, or at least ship your sensitive data-bearing electronics separately, don't carry it to the border with you.
.. for dubious privilege of entering a shit hole? Those racist antipodeans can shove their little island up their asses.
My employer would have something to say about it. They would issue me burners.
Then your employer is very unusual indeed. That isn't how most of them roll in my experience.
This just imposes a huge expense on business travelers in order to apprehend the dumbest of criminals.
It's a little worse than that. It also means some genuinely innocent people are going to get to be abused by the authorities. You're right that it will not catch anyone worth catching which should make one wonder what the real point is...
Actually CBP merely request ID and legal status.
The problem is that when an aggressive uniform with sidearm gets in your face and states "Are you a citizen? I need to see some ID!" it does rather come across as a demand.
...never visit New Zealand. That was easy.
Enjoy the missing revenue.
Did everyone miss the part where it said "...but officials would need to have a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing."? You can make snarky comments about the trustworthiness of the "officials," but that's a higher standard than when they randomly ask to search your baggage, and it's about the same as if they pulled you over as you drove out of the airport.
Shouldn't they be worried about the data that is leaving the country? Not the stuff coming in? Anything from state secrets to kiddie porn, they need the be looking for the stuff on its way out, not in.
Have gnu, will travel.
You won't get my business anymore. Goodbye NZ.
So what do they do in North Korea or China?
The same thing?
Besides NZ being 20k miles away by plane as a reason to to visit, I don't have anything on my non-smart phone but I still wouldn't go.
Yes America can do this too but at least I can stay in the country and not have to deal with customs.
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
"Mr Brown said the law struck the 'delicate balance' between a person's right to privacy and Customs' law enforcement responsibilities."
Yes. A "delicate balance" wherein customs officials can do whatever they want to your device and slap you with a $5000 fine if you refuse to comply and you have no recourse if you think they're acting in bad faith.
In so far as dropping an anvil on one side of the scale is a "delicate balance," I suppose that's true.
Does this extend to encrypted data stored on such devices?
So what you can log in if it's all encrypted anyway...
It appears this could only be effective for an ad-hock searches of hobbyist criminals and would do nothing for professionals?
4wdloop
Why not just a dual boot mode? Enter in passcode 1 and you get boot region 1 which can be a generic install with a few downloaded apps for cosmetics.
Passcode 2 gets you the other boot region.
Bonus points for some cheesy option that prevents boot region 2 from loading at all for some time window or number of reboots.
I'm curious what customs expects to find on my phone that a normal strip search would find? Weapons? Is there a way to smuggle in drugs, or farm animals, or plant life on my phone that I'm missing? Is this all about child porn??
That part of the wrold seems pretty damn toxic. Am not gonna go anywhere near there.
...Freedom of Speech. I am appalled by the NZed politicians if this is the way they want to treat travelers
Mine is one family that will continue to travel to Australia, when I can, but I have now put NZed on my "Anti-democratic government" list, until wiser souls in the NZed government returns to its' senses and quashes this kind of nihilism. And, I had such great hopes with their new Prime Minister!
Hahahahaha
coercing or forcing someone to open their phone should start to classed equal to rape i think.
The phone is starting to be a intimate extension of your "self" and having a stranger poaking around even customs official is really not fun.
i dont have anything headline worthy on my phone, but i have my entire life there. Anything from well intimate pics (yea yea you have them to im sure) to my bank access codes, pincodes to cards and what not.
Its grounds for dismissal and will end me in legal trouble... I guess no work phone when going to NZ.
Why all the visibility into phones is needed at the border. Is this more 'security theater'?
Seriously, what do they think they'll find. Like, a file entitled 'how I smuggled $7,000,000 into NZ.txt' on the phone?
... I still carry a windows phone. FIgure that out if you can... and no pw required. : )
It is important to keep in mind that NZ is a party to the "Five Eyes" intelligence-sharing partnership (the others being the USA, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia). Why that's important is that the agreement between them specifies that any intelligence developed by any of the parties is made freely available to the others, both in regular summary reports, and in full, upon request.
What that means on a practical level is that any data NZ's Customs folks uncover in their search of arrivals' devices that they decide might be of interest to any one of their three national intelligence-gathering organizations is automagically rendered to them. They, in turn, make that data available to the other four signatories' national spies. As Edward Snowden's massive document dump revealed, a key goal of the alliance is to enable the signatories to thwart the limits their own laws place on surveillance and intelligence-gathering activities directed at their own citizens and legal residents. (Appropriately enough, the NZ Herald ran an in-depth report on the subject in its March 5, 2015 edition. It makes for interesting reading, both because its viewpoint is a non-U.S. one, and because it traces the kind of egregious, systematic overreach that the port-of-entry personal electronics search policy TFS exemplifies specifically to the administration of NZ's National Party leader and (now-former) Prime Minister John Key.)
As an example of how the Five Eyes alliance enables its signatories' end-run around their own citizens' privacy protections, Snowden likes to point to a routine tactic that he, as an IT contractor for the NSA, personally witnessed every day: when an NSA analyst wants to look at the phone record metadata, web browsing history, email, and/or other "signals intercept" intelligence on a citizen of the USA who currently resides within its borders - which it is legally forbidden to do without first obtaining a FISA court warrant - he or she need only inform GCHQ (Britain's version of the NSA) of that desire. One of GCHQ's analysts then uses the spy tech that the NSA shares with GCHQ - often the exact same program the NSA person is running - to look up the requested record in GCHQ's database, and helpfully sends a copy of the results to his or her NSA counterpart.
Employing the narrowest possible interpretation of both countries' legal strictures, the search itself is not technically forbidden by U.S. law, because the actual surveillance and initial data acquisition was performed by GCHQ (albeit on the NSA's request), and that organization is not bound by U.S. statutes or Constitutional prohibitions on searches and seizures conducted without the shield of a judicial warrant. And the fact that GCHQ's analyst shared the results with the one from the NSA is, likewise, not illegal, for the same reason.
That kind of data sharing, which is based on the sketchiest possible interpretation of the respective nations' laws, happens thousands of times per day - and it works both ways.
Or, rather, I should say it works all five ways ...
Check out my novel.
Oy! It's not us, it's the sheep-fuckers across the Sea of Tasman who are doing this.
So if they search my device and copy the data they better make sure its safeguarded. for example what if i happen to include some medical records on my device knowing that they will search and copy the data. Could i not then file suit stating they stored protected information in an non-approved format?
It seems to always hinge on that word and it generally works out as a way to target groups of people that aren't doing amything really wrong except not rolling over.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
Or, rather, I should say it works all five ways ...
10 ways if it's bi-directional.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
I suck at maths,
5 ways times 5 ways == 25, bi-directional means 50 ways. At least. Then there's data stored someplace where it may or may not be or have been or is about to be, compromised by flaw or design, etc.
But I digress.
here's a few extra commas, place them wherever you want. ,,, , ,,,
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
I suck at maths, 5 ways times 5 ways == 25, bi-directional means 50 ways.
You still suck at math. Five parties sharing means for each party there are four others to share with. Five parties sharing with the other four is 20 ways. Since the reverse direction is included, it's still just 20.
Fair enough.
How many parallel dimensions in a quantum state do you feel safe adding to the equation? Cause in one of those realms I can actually do math. Lol.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
I think I need to start carrying voltage pump USB sticks. You know, the ones that fry whatever machine they're plugged into.
Problem solved.
Search iacr.org, "burn box"; lets you disconnect from your encrypted/secret files, and re-establish the connection later.
Its grounds for dismissal and will end me in legal trouble... I guess no work phone when going to NZ.
Inform your employer of these changes in NZ law. Provide them with copies of the laws or online links to the pertinent laws.
Find any and all documentation that indicates why you have to travel to NZ, especially if it is ordered by a senior official in your company.
If necessary, retain and utilize the services of an employment lawyer, if your country has such lawyers, to represent your interests to your company.
Protect your right to do your job for your company.
Above all else, don't allow your company to place you in the inescapable situation of: "lose your job or lose your freedom".
Upload data to internet. Wipe phone. Cross border. Download data. Not that hard right?
Every which way but loose.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Oy... its the Aussies who are the sheep fuckers, lets look at things. Koalas has stds ...... They sing about tying a kangaroo down, bestiality and bondage.
99.99% of tourists don't read /. or equivalent. Which means they won't be aware of this regulation. Even after a visit, most will remain unaware if the search quota is indeed only 500/year.
Tourists will still come.
The world is a big place and there are a lot of other places to travel which do not insist on prying into your personal business.
I vote with my wallet.
is that rich people just pay the fine and us poor slobs take our chances and hope they don't turn up anything.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I wont be going to NZ any longer.
You have no right to search my phone unless it poses a physical security risk to the airplane or to people around it. Period.
Can someone please modify Android (I suppose I'd have to ask Apple to do the same for Ios) so that I can enter a duress password/gesture at the unlock phase so that it will show a perfectly viable phone, but with everything protected?
What happens if someone innocently forgets a password. I thought you guys were smart.
New Zealand can't force foreigners to pay $5000. That's called extortion. Let them try to withdraw it from your bank account, and they will fail.
Nicely put about the US but... Have you ever been to Mexico or Argentina? I've never seen a bomb detector in a McDonald's in my life. Mexico's said to be dangerous near the border, but in Mexico City I saw nothing like what you describe, not even in Acapulco. Also, Mexico's violence is predominantly related to drug traffic and plain old crime (kidnappings too).
Your description of Argentina is totally inaccurate too. Even though there were two terrorist incidents in the last 30 years to Jewish/Israeli targets, the only sign you can see of that is pylons outside of synagogues and Jewish countries. The terrorist threat is non existent.
Mr Brown said the law struck the "delicate balance" between a person's right to privacy and Customs' law enforcement responsibilities.
Huh? How is "show us all of your stuff if we ask for it or get fined $5,000 and have you stuff stolen" a "delicate balance?"
Sounds like they hold all of the power, the traveler none. Some balance.
What do they think they will find? An actually dangerous person will not travel with information so easily exposed, or, in other words, if someone is dumb enough to leave incriminating evidence easily viewable on their digital devices, by definition, they are not smart enough to be a true danger.
They will surely catch a few low level criminals with some sort of illegal information (what a weird concept... illegal information), but will catch nothing of State level importance. So, why? Why do this? It is like cutting off your nose to spite your face or maybe it is just common control freakery.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen