Laptops and Other Electronics May Be Seized on Entry to US | Hacker News Reader

Laptops and Other Electronics May Be Seized on Entry to US

news.yahoo.com

For the record, I didn't submit this to start a flame war. I get the whole concept of "if you cross the border, you're subject to a full search" -- after all, that's the entire purpose of customs: to control stuff moving across the border.

The thing here is that government took the guy's computer, then sent it off to some lab 150 miles away for analysis. If I understood the article correctly, the judges said that was fine to do, even without probable cause.

Since a notebook computer is a tool for my trade, I'm left with the conclusion that not only can I be fully searched, but the government can also take my tools away from me for a long period of time while they examine them. There's no guarantee that the tools I left with will be allowed to re-enter.

Lesson? The U.S. government is effectively killing the personal PC, at least as a centralized place to keep my stuff. Move everything to the cloud, and make the notebook, phone, tablet, etc disposable.

Amazing. I must be missing something somewhere.

Here's an idea:

Take your primary hard drive out of your machine when crossing borders and put some vanilla install of whateveer on the machine. Fedex the primary drive to your destination or keep all your shit in the cloud.

Some years ago I did a design spec for what is now the atrix -- I wrote a paper and tried to get some google eng contacts to work with me on the idea that all machiens are jsut a KVM for your data - and that our primary data device would be both our phones and datasets in the cloud...

Sadly, I couldnt convince them this was true then - but i is clear now.

So it would be great to have a /home/ on your mobile that you can sync to your machine when they are close. If the machine dissapears, no big deal.

Here is how I would model that today:

You carry three devices - laptop, mobile and a USB stick and cloud storage.

Under normal operating circumstance, you work on your laptop as you would any other time.

The mobile has some 32GB of storage -- this is a clean install backup of all your installed apps.

The USB has a BASE install of your OS and whatever apps you can fit -- in a live USB install.

All your personal data is in the cloud, such that if you lose any of the three devices - none of your data goes with it.

Swap the HDD of the laptop when travelling to a clean install drive with no data - do not sync till you get to the destination.

Should you lose your laptop, you can use the USB to run a live session on any machine you can boot to it from.

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