 | Administrator with 9,801 posts. | | Join Date: Feb 1999 Location: Chambersburg, PA Experience: Advanced | | Taking your laptop into the US? Be sure to hide all your data first |
Last month a US court ruled that border agents can search your laptop, or any other electronic device, when you're entering the country. They can take your computer and download its entire contents, or keep it for several days. Customs and Border Patrol has not published any rules regarding this practice, and I and others have written a letter to Congress urging it to investigate and regulate this practice.
| | | Distinguished Member with 2,532 posts. | | Join Date: Jul 2000 Location: Location: USA Experience: Somewhere between Beginne | | LOL, let us see if they are willing to spend the time cracking my encrypted files only to discover useless data. LOL I can hear it now "My word, he has moderate to high encryption on his computer. Multiple files with two different applications! is he a terrorist or somebody who just had enough sense to protect his personal data?" Let us waste more valuable tax dollars to find out.
My point is will this turn into a form of digital profiling? Everybody has some capacity of digital data on them at any given time. How do you know who to stop? How do you know if the data is erased from their database after it has been 'inspected'?
Think I better by better encryption software. | | Administrator with 9,801 posts. | | Join Date: Feb 1999 Location: Chambersburg, PA Experience: Advanced | | I've also heard of some encryption software that will allow you to create two keys -- one that will unlock "safe" data if force to type in a key, and one that will unlock "private" data when you're not under the gun. | | Moderator with 95,995 posts. | | Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: South Eastern PA, USA Experience: Advanced age & experience | | I need that dual key program, just to tick them off! | | Member with 39 posts. | | Join Date: May 2008 Experience: not quite enough. | | Seriously. That's madness.
What can they possibly gain by doing that? Carrying a computer across national borders doesn't seem like a way that anyone would use to hide their data. | | Distinguished Member with 3,158 posts. | | Join Date: Jan 2006 Experience: Intermediate | | JohnWill,
TrueCrypt allows "plausible deniability" - a conealed hidden area within the obvious hidden area.
But on the sunny side - think of all the IT jobs that this policy will offer! Unless everyone stores stuff on remote backups.
Richard. | | Senior Member with 517 posts. | | Join Date: May 2008 Location: Couer d' Alene, Idaho Experience: Knower Of Nothing | | | | | Distinguished Member with 3,604 posts. | | Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: Massachusetts Experience: what we call our mistakes | | Glad I don't travel anywhere, I'd have a really hard time letting go of my precious ol' Thinkpad to some random people to search it. I store everything on my network anyway, with the exception of some music. That way it's backed up nightly.
I don't understand their logic in all this airport security. They can't prevent everything, why bother trying?
__________________ "America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week." - Evan Esar | | Senior Member with 1,434 posts. | | Join Date: Sep 2005 Location: UK Experience: Skilled: Know all i know and little else | | One of the many reasons i dont plan to go to the US.
Seriously though how anoying you've just got of 16 hour filight or whatever and you get to customs where they spend another hour donwloading your eniter 500 GB HD. If i where to go to the US i would do what jonasdatum does and encrypt everything to hell. | | Distinguished Member with 3,604 posts. | | Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: Massachusetts Experience: what we call our mistakes |
20-May-2008, 09:39 AM
#10 | ...if they found everything horribly encrypted they'd probably never give up until they broke through. It would be hilarious to do that to irritate them, though.
I still don't see the point...couldn't a potential terrorist still just ship the laptop over and get on the plane without it?
__________________ "America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week." - Evan Esar | | Distinguished Member with 3,158 posts. | | Join Date: Jan 2006 Experience: Intermediate |
20-May-2008, 10:58 AM
#11 | ... or have the stuff e-mailed to him/her once through Customs? | | Member with 54 posts. | | Join Date: Mar 2008 Location: waterford, ct Experience: Advanced |
20-May-2008, 12:08 PM
#12 | Yeah, i would purposely encrypt documents and photoshopped pictures that read Ha Ha, you guys just waisted your whole day cracking my hdd for nothing!!
oh the expressions on there faces would be priceless, and i would not stop laughing. | | Junior Member with 12 posts. | | Join Date: May 2008 Location: Bronx, NY Experience: Advanced |
20-May-2008, 12:38 PM
#13 | If I turned back to doing what I used to do I would make a program for free to give to all people that go in and out of the US that when they try to copy any data when activated disables any hardware that can be used to move or copy any data (Network cars, USB, CD/DVD...)
Shoot if I could I would make new security screws for all laptops that we only have the screwdrivers for.
It's bad enough they listen to our phone calls.
US Government Leave us alone start boosting our internet speeds, pull our people out of the middle east, and do something about these ISPs we have. (packet shaping or network management AKA blocking or slowing down the net for us)
Dragon Out | | Moderator with 95,995 posts. | | Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: South Eastern PA, USA Experience: Advanced age & experience |
20-May-2008, 07:10 PM
#14 | Quote:
Originally Posted by DragonMasterNYC US Government Leave us alone start boosting our internet speeds, pull our people out of the middle east, and do something about these ISPs we have. (packet shaping or network management AKA blocking or slowing down the net for us) | Well, at least they did one of them. | | Former Administrator with 104,744 posts. | | Join Date: Jan 2001 Experience: Advanced |
22-May-2008, 05:32 PM
#15 | I posted this somewhere else, quite some time back............. |  THIS THREAD HAS EXPIRED.
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