I sometimes have to go to the US for business purposes but from now on will only do so with a wiped computer with just enough installed to look like a normal user's data.
I leave a dummy partition with Windows, office and other shortcuts and a wallpaper of a cat during my US visits. I also have both a facebook and a gmail subscribed to all the spam you can get.
Not because I have any criminal activities but my customers deserve to have their information protected.
If authorities want to check my private and work data, they can ask nicely through a judge.
I am confused,surely non-citizens have no rights or recourse to the law at an airport?
In any case, I am concerned that your approach would be defeated if they took an image of your hard drive and threw some basic tools at it. They probably have this as a kit.
On a laptop? All laptops I've seen have the hard disk plugged directly into the motherboard, with no cables in between. Having a SATA cable is more of a desktop thing.
Perhaps nowadays it's the norm to have it all soldered in but I'd just not buy such.
That said, I'd imagine there's an economies-of-scale advantage to having soldered-on drives (to say nothing of the economic benefits of un-upgradability: sorry folks, but there aren't enough people to whom part-swap upgrades are important to sway the hardware industry at large on this issue, though a few small manufacturers/lines will probably target that market). As a result, I'd imagine that we'll see more and more of them in years to come, though I'd be happy to be wrong about that.
'course, I don't recommend bringing your data into a country you consider hostile regardless of whether you've set it up so a cursory search doesn't find it. If the country really is hostile to your interests, that won't stop them if they want your info.
I knew some programmers who worked for a EU company that had a military contract.
When they traveled to US (talking around 2005 here), their entire harddisk was encrypted and they got a short education on how to handle certain suspicious situations.
US is known to use intelligence data any way they want, including economical gain. So if your laptop contains any confidential data of any big European company, it's already a good idea to not make that data available.
The whole Edward Snowden debate was only an issue because US was collecting data of their own citizens. Let's be honest, nobody cared who they were spying on abroad.
It's really sad to see how "friendly" nations treat each other like that.
So to answer your initial comment: The one who has the confidential information is not the spy. The spy is the one who wants to get access to it.
The normal user browses the web and almost nothing else.