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Strategies for international travellers regarding new US Customs seizure policy
tymrwt33:
Customs officials here and abroad have always had the right if inspection and seizure of personal property on entry into their country. If you think US Customs are bad try some of the other countries. They practically strip you and even look in your wallet in some countries. Facts of life. At lest in the US you can seek redress in court.
kartal:
That is not the same thing. Noone is arguing against searches. The issue is confiscation of personal-business data and electronics.
Customs officials here and abroad have always had the right if inspection and seizure of personal property on entry into their country. If you think US Customs are bad try some of the other countries. They practically strip you and even look in your wallet in some countries. Facts of life. At lest in the US you can seek redress in court.
-tymrwt33 (August 15, 2008, 09:25 PM)
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Target:
this from slashdot today
News: Judge Rules Man Cannot Be Forced To Decrypt HD
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday August 19, @06:21PM
from the cold-dead-fingers dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes
"In Vermont, US Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier has ruled that forcing someone to divulge the password to decrypt their hard drive violates the 5th Amendment. Border guards testify that they saw child pornography on the defendant's laptop when the PC was on, but they made the mistake of turning it off and were unable to access it again because the drive was protected by PGP. Although prosecutors offered many ways to get around the 5th Amendment protections, the Judge would have none of that and quashed the grand jury subpoena requesting the defendant's PGP passphrase. A conviction is still likely because prosecutors have the testimony of the two border guards who saw the drive while it was open."
The article stresses the potential importance of this ruling (which was issued last November but went unnoticed until now): "Especially if this ruling is appealed, US v. Boucher could become a landmark case. The question of whether a criminal defendant can be legally compelled to cough up his encryption passphrase remains an unsettled one, with law review articles for the last decade arguing the merits of either approach."
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BC5:
Do you have to submit only those devices which you carry as hand luggage or also those devices which is part of your main luggage?
So I understand that the TSA cannot force you into giving away the password for an encrypted Hard-drive but what if the data is not encrypted, but on start up you are prompted for a password by your system - i.e. the regular laptop start up password prompt? Are you required by law to give the TSA that password?
The problem is I store many passwords on my laptop - passwords and other confidential data in word/excel files that provide access to my email accounts and other sites. I'm afraid of this falling into the hands of the TSA people. I'll have to change each and every password once I get home from the airport and that can take a while and will be a big pain, and how do I know some TSA person hasn't already gone through the contents of my computer by then?
I can still delete this and transfer this data online and download it later I guess because it's not a big file or something.
What's more worrying is the media content on my laptop - not that I have anything to be embarrassed about the contents, but how I obtained it. Songs I downloaded from friends and other p2p sites like Kazaa etc. and thus their legality can be questioned. I don't know what to do about this. I can't delete so many songs collected over the years either. Will they also ask me about the legality of the songs on my iPod or laptop? What kind of proof would they need if I were to tell them I got them for free and got them legally as well?
Deozaan:
The problem is I store many passwords on my laptop - passwords and other confidential data in word/excel files that provide access to my email accounts and other sites. I'm afraid of this falling into the hands of the TSA people.-BC5 (August 21, 2008, 01:00 AM)
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I suggest you stop storing your passwords in Word/Excel and use something much better like fSekrit. Also, make sure you have a good passphrase. Even 1024-bit encryption would be practically useless without a good passphrase.
The worst imaginable pass phrase (eg, "this is my secret password") is many times more secure than an average single word password (eg, "god123"). And it's easier to remember.*-http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000360.html
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