Border Agents Fail To Delete Personal Data of Travelers After Electronic Searches, Watchdog Says (gizmodo.com)

The Department of Homeland Security's internal watchdog, known as the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found that the majority of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents fail to delete the personal data they collect from travelers' devices. Last year alone, border agents searched through the electronic devices of more than 29,000 travelers coming into the country. "CBP officers sometimes upload personal data from those devices to Homeland Security servers by first transferring that data onto USB drives -- drives that are supposed to be deleted after every use," Gizmodo reports. From the report: Customs officials can conduct two kinds of electronic device searches at the border for anyone entering the country. The first is called a "basic" or "manual" search and involves the officer visually going through your phone, your computer or your tablet without transferring any data. The second is called an "advanced search" and allows the officer to transfer data from your device to DHS servers for inspection by running that data through its own software. Both searches are legal and don't require a warrant or even probable cause -- at least they don't according to DHS. It's that second kind of search, the "advanced" kind, where CBP has really been messing up and regularly leaving the personal data of travelers on USB drives.

According to the new report [PDF]: "[The Office of the Inspector General] physically inspected thumb drives at five ports of entry. At three of the five ports, we found thumb drives that contained information copied from past advanced searches, meaning the information had not been deleted after the searches were completed. Based on our physical inspection, as well as the lack of a written policy, it appears [Office of Field Operations] has not universally implemented the requirement to delete copied information, increasing the risk of unauthorized disclosure of travelers' data should thumb drives be lost or stolen." The report also found that Customs officers "regularly failed to disconnect devices from the internet, potentially tainting any findings stored locally on the device." It also found that the officers had "inadequate supervision" to make sure they were following the rules. There's also a number of concerning redactions. For example, everything from what happens during an advanced search after someone crosses the border to the reason officials are allowed to conduct an advanced search at all has been redacted.

Comments

Two out of Five ain't bad...

[bobbied]

I'm surprised that two out of the five actually did delete the data.

I wonder how much of this is "Quick Format" and "Hey we found old data here!" kind of things?

But I think we buried the lead here. What really concerns me is that the documentation about the searches and why they where conducted is woefully lacking (see page 6 of the PDF). Seems that this process is ripe for abuse and that the controls in place for keeping this on the up and up are being ignored.

Think of it this way.. IF nobody is documenting why and when this is being done, there is no real proof and no real way to get it to stop if it really is out of hand.

So...

[Locke2005]

What's to stop you from removing the Micro SDHC card from your phone before the search? They're not getting their hands on MY MP3 files!

Re:Thumb drive prophylaxis

[morethanapapercert]

That could be the plot of a decent movie. DHS decides to spend a LOT more attention on tourists coming in and out of Las Vegas during the Black Hat conference. Licking their chops in anticipation of all the grey and black hats they're gonna catch. But word of this plan leaks and attendance to the Con spikes massively as hacker and cracker folk from all over the world rush to Las Vegas in hopes of scoring the major coup of being the one who provided the poison pill mobile device that brought the DHS system down. Security checkpoints buckle under the unexpected load, supervisors calling in everybody for unscheduled overtime, the whole thing blowing up and social media, some grey hats going through security over and over, with ever decreasingly plausible disguises to see what it takes to make the overwork slobs on the front lines go "wait a second..." And then, when misery is at its peak, someone's carefully crafted data finds a weakness in the data upload system and brings down the DHS-NOC links for every customs point in America and a few in other countries.

TALK ABOUT BRAGGING RIGHTS. It's xkcd's Bobby Tables gone hard core.

(innocent look) Does any one know if DHS sanitizes its data inputs?

Re: CBP is tasked to protect against any illegal i

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a gotcha procedure, and has nothing to do with protecting anyone or anything. It's simply about catching people in an arbitrary violation of rules in order to extort money or exert power.

That sort of arbitrary game playing is the very essence of government corruption, it's simply a matter of scale and scope. They get away with the little shit they pull, and keep pressing the boundaries until the gotcha games exceed some critical threshold - either populist in nature, or someone with sufficient power and money gets irritated.

Gotcha games should be identified and eliminated by their essential qualities, instead of citizens having to play along. In fact, that's kinda the whole fucking point of the U.S. constitution. These things are only possibly because the core principles have been irrevocably buried in two centuries of corrosive minutiae.

The solution is the modern digitization, review, simplification, and constitutional ratification of all federal law. Fat chance of that ever happening, when known loopholes and ever more nebulous, incoherent laws allow essentially unlimited abuse by the ruling class.