Laptops may be taken for no reason at borders

[Simas]

washingtonpost.com

Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

Seems like a violation of privacy to me.

This warranted to stop the terrorists or no?

[The Dauntless One]

encrypt your hard drives and give them the finger.

[Simas]

Originally Posted by The Dauntless One

encrypt your hard drives and give them the finger.

From the second paragraph in the article

Also, officials may share copies of the laptop's contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

[Tolanin]

Originally Posted by The Dauntless One

encrypt your hard drives and give them the finger.

ya cause if they confiscate it to inspect and find a completely encrypted harddrive they will just give it back...

seems like a huge invasion of privacy to me, hope it gets overturned in court.. cause how is that not illegal search and seizure?

[Aegdaien]

I thought that the thread title implied some Border's employee could just come up and steal my laptop while I was in their cafe. Bastards.

[GrobbeeTrull2.0]

Originally Posted by Tolanin

ya cause if they confiscate it to inspect and find a completely encrypted harddrive they will just give it back...

seems like a huge invasion of privacy to me, hope it gets overturned in court.. cause how is that not illegal search and seizure?

Because it's to fight the terrorists. You should know this, tool.

[Angerz]

I heard about this on the news today (they were interviewing like a customs agent or something), and the most alarming part, to me at least, was that this is kind of old news as far as the DHS is concerned. It may be new to the public, but it has been on the books a while (a couple weeks at least) as a policy (the article specifically mentions an April Appellate court ruling)

[gn0me]

Land of the "free"?

[Soriak]

At the border, you have no rights - doesn't matter if you're American or a foreigner. They can hold you without charges for extended periods of time, while refusing to give you access to lawyers or your embassy. It's why you make sure other people have your travel itinerary and will follow up if they don't hear from you.

One does wonder why anyone would keep sensitive information on a laptop when crossing the border, though... banks have been dealing with this for years and the direction is never to have any client names with you, always use shortcuts, never write out the address/time of meetings and so on. I read that some financial advisers carried business cards from a different department - if someone looked into their employer, it'd check out while not disclosing that they're dealing directly with clients. (ie they can reasonably claim to just take a vacation) Multiple cars, use of public phones (no cell phones, obviously) and other counter-surveillance techniques are also occasionally employed.

Pretty crazy, but industrial espionage is a huge issue. Nothing like getting your hands on confidential data and handing it over to your companies for a competitive advantage. German intelligence recently paid someone a few millions for copying a list of clients from a bank from Liechtenstein. From what I've read, he's in the US witness protection program now, there's an international arrest warrant and a $10m reward on him now.

Anyway, it's common practice in business already, I'm sure terrorists are smart enough not to carry their secret plans on a laptop - encrypted or otherwise. Though I'm curious how they'd crack TrueCrypt. It's open source, if there was a way to detect it, surely someone would have noticed by now.

[Vorph]

Originally Posted by Simas

From the second paragraph in the article

If you use TrueCrypt properly, there is no way for them to tell that an encrypted drive/partition even exists. Being able to deny the existence of data is far better than data that simply takes years to crack.


PS to people who use TC... ver 6.0 was just released in July.

[Tolanin]

Originally Posted by Vorph

If you use TrueCrypt properly, there is no way for them to tell that an encrypted drive/partition even exists. Being able to deny the existence of data is far better than data that simply takes years to crack.


PS to people who use TC... ver 6.0 was just released in July.

cant they check how big the harddrive is suposed to be vs how big it really is?

[Vorph]

In a word: no.

It is impossible to identify a TrueCrypt volume. Until decrypted, a TrueCrypt volume appears to consist of nothing more than random data (it does not contain any kind of "signature"). Therefore, it is impossible to prove that a file, a partition or a device is a TrueCrypt volume or that it has been encrypted.

Plausible Deniability

[Zeitgeist]

In order for you to be able to rely on plausible deniability you have to take care, since the OS (win xp at least) likes to cache stuff...

Edit:
The best way in my opinion is to use the newly introduced hidden os method.
Basically, the whole HDD is encrypted with 2 OS installs. One which you will "gladly" show to the government with absolutely no sensitive data, just some normal surfing done on that. The other OS (hidden) with all your gay porns and whatnot.

That should be pretty hassle free, as long as you use your "open" OS regularly.

[Vorph]

Yeah, if you're a terrorist, kiddie porn dealer, or whatever else that might involve data that could get you killed or sent to jail for a long time, you should be using a hidden OS that only ever writes to hidden volumes.

People who just want to keep other people from poking around their shit may run into issues with their data being left in Windows' swap file, temp directories, recently accessed files list, etc.

[Havelock]

Originally Posted by Tolanin

seems like a huge invasion of privacy to me, hope it gets overturned in court.. cause how is that not illegal search and seizure?

The law covering searches and seizures at the border is extraordinarily permissive. The 9th Circuit already heard a border laptop case and upheld the search; this is consistent with the border search caselaw and it seems unlikely any other courts will create a split.