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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

This is a revolution for transporting confidential information through customs :) If it's not electronic they won't even bother checking it!

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No, sorry, it's not. That's already trivial: Take a microSD card with your info. Put it together with a couple of tablespoons of oatmeal into a tightly and well wrapped plastic package. Swallow it. Travel. Arrive. Poop. Voila.

Also, if you bring big stacks of paper it will often be inspected, since a common way of smuggling currency is putting hundred-dollar bills between the pages of books.

I guess it's better to upload TrueCrypt container somewhere in the cloud and transfer just password/URL. Password/URL may be derived from the first letters of each sentence in the U.S. Constitution or other similar public source of static random data.

Or just remember password and URL. It's not that hard if you really need to.

Why not public key cryptography?

Because you can't carry a key.

All the keys that are exchanged can be exchanged in plain text.

I think you (unintentionally?) are proving the OP right. Because it's far easier to swallow and poop out a plastic bag with a microSD card in it than it is to put a piece of paper in your carry-on.</sarcasm>

Plus--wouldn't full-body scanners catch something like this?

Airport/security full body scanners would not catch something like this. They only image through clothing for the most part. They only image through the top layers of skin. See figure 4 in the linked to document:

http://www.tek84.com/downloads/Holt-Letter2010-12-2.pdf

It depends on the amount of information you want to transfer, and how likely it is that you'll get a full customs inspection. A single microSD card can hold 512 GB of data; try bringing that in paper format through customs.

Obviously this technology is not for bringing Terabytes of information with you. But you can put an awful lot of information in .txt format and something like 3 megabytes.

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