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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."
I assume your employer has rules concerning travel with the laptop containing the oh-so-special secrets. Mine does. Leave it at home and take a burner. It's the cost of doing business and the burner costs less than $5000.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
My employer would have something to say about it. They would issue me burners. Or more likely have the local office give me a loaner while I'm there so I don't have to carry devices across the border. This just imposes a huge expense on business travelers in order to apprehend the dumbest of criminals.
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 ...
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