Defending Privacy at the U.S. Border: A Guide for Travelers Digital Devices
eff.org
eff.org
Of course if someone really suspects you personally and wants to scrutinize your machine in detail, that's another story, but just random dragnet-type searches of machines at borders are laughably easy to foil, with dozens of different methods, so the stopping-terrorism justification doesn't seem plausible.
I've been thinking about this internet freedom movement quite a bit lately & I am convinced the single most powerful thing we can do is to come out of our anonymous hiding places & publicly declare our intentions. That's why I created my freedom.txt & hope others will do same: http://fr.anc.is/freedom.txt
When the people who are targeted, are the ones who avoid being caught, the result will be near zero.
We need intelligent accounting here.
For example, when the result of this law is: We spent 100 Million to catch 0 terrorists and 20 people for minor felonies.
Is it in the public interest to pay 5 Million for catching a person who downloaded an illegal movie?
The politicians should be accountable for these things, or they should say in advance "we try this for a month and if it doesn't work or is inefficient we stop it".
I also know that statistics are often manipulated, but that is another problem.
I think this goes back to how politicians are deathly afraid of ever, anywhere, being wrong. This seems to even preclude improving/changing their own positions on most things.
There is nothing wrong with realizing you were wrong and changing your opinion, rather there is something wrong with hanging onto a belief or opinion when the pile of evidence is not only against you but continues to grow.
I guess you could literally eat a MicroSD card and deliver it safely and intact in another country. This would even make it better than smuggling something the old way (swallowing a condom) because an air bubble has the chance of showing up in an x-ray. A MicroSD card would likely be completely invisible. Any copper would obviously show up, but the amount is likely to be indistinguishable from the iron we digest and the iron in our blood that is concentrated around our intestinal walls.
Bonus points for modifying the firmware on the SD card so that it looks like 1 gig at the low level.
- Use full-disk encryption.
- Secure it with a very long hard to guess password.
- Turn your computer off at least 10 minutes before going through customs.
- You don't legally have to tell anyone the password with out a court order.
- You don't have to give them any information to aid in their search.
- Secure delete everything before you travel.
- DO NOT LIE.
- You can simply not answer a question. But never lie.
- Say, "I'm sorry, but I cannot answer that question."
- Plan!!!
- Decide what you will do *before* you get to customs.
- Don't stress out, just relax and don't answer questions you don't want to."Not to my knowledge." or "I'm sorry, but I cannot answer that question."? Which would then likely raise the alarm in the interrogator.
My concern is while that is often stated, those people aren't sitting in the detention centre with you for hours while your digital devices and the material on them is being searched and you are being 'threatened' with further detention, likely bogus charges and pressured to admit guilt for using your laptop as a normal user does.
Standing up for your rights and privacy isn't always going to be easy. But sitting in detention for a little while is really a small price to pay for your liberty. Plus, you'll waste a lot of public money in the process.
Not if you aren't a US citizen.
I thought that was the point of guantanemo? Because the US doesn't want the prisoners there to have any rights.
Quote:
Citing Yick Wo v. Hopkins, the Court, in the case of Wong Wing v. US, further applied the citizenship-blind nature of the Constitution to the 5th and 6th amendments, stating ". . . it must be concluded that all persons within the territory of the United States are entitled to the protection guaranteed by those amendments,
(Note "within the territory of the United States")
http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/rightsandfreedoms/a/illegalrig...
And when they ask why say, "Because I believe that it is my right not to."
But nothing more. Just be short, to the point, and courteous. You're not guilty of anything for saying that, and they will understand that you understand your rights.
They may make your life a tiny bit harder because of it, but if your courteous and patient you can maintain your dignity and your privacy.
Remember, in this case the burden of proof is on you. Somewhat similar to the way the BSA does audits (or the IRS for that matter).
If you're that concerned, make sure it contains nothing but Free (libre) software. Then you will be able to prove your innocence.
My answer was just to help someone stay out of trouble. Trying to mislead border control is a bad idea.
I know the chances of being asked anything, including, "have you bought pirated movies or software while in Asia?" Is pretty hard to refute if you've lived or traveled there for the last decade.
Two points here. First, don't answer specific questions about anything. This means refusing to answer questions about piracy, terrorism, etc.
Second, unless there is evidence you're breaking criminal distribution laws they're not going to care about the MP3s your friend gave you or the copy of Doom you downloaded from a BBS 15 years ago.
As suggested in the pdf, a wiser approach is cross the border with an immaculate system and download your data afterwards.
Although TrueCrypt hidden volumes may have some practical applications, we think they are unlikely to be useful in the border search context because they are most helpful when lying to someone about whether there is additional hidden data on a disk. Lying to border agents is not advisable, because it can be a serious crime.
I'll add this here, so it can be read by someone reading your resume.
How to Avoid Going to Jail under 18 U.S.C. Section 1001 for Lying to Government Agents
http://library.findlaw.com/2004/May/11/147945.html
Excerpt:
Title 18, United States Code, Section 1001 makes it a crime to: 1) knowingly and willfully; 2) make any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation; 3) in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative or judicial branch of the United States. Your lie does not even have to be made directly to an employee of the national government as long as it is "within the jurisdiction" of the ever expanding federal bureaucracy. Though the falsehood must be "material" this requirement is met if the statement has the "natural tendency to influence or [is] capable of influencing, the decision of the decisionmaking body to which it is addressed."
(Ironically, the government lies to us all the time, but there are apparently no penalties for that.)
I would highly recommend reading it. Even if you don't think you're personally the target of an investigation, the way these things go, anyone that they can catch in the net is a potential target, so you should be nervous - it always looks better to indict N+1 people than N, and if you talk to the investigators at all without a lawyer present, you greatly increase your chances of being that +1, even if you truly and honestly haven't done anything wrong.
10 years of pacificity towards the erosion of rights and privacy, and here we are.
Maybe to you, but not for me. I'm a doctor and a geek. I work on confidential patient data which I manipulate with custom software I write (some C, some perl... even some php at times :-).
But every devices this data goes into is encrypted.
To avoid any problem, when I travel I take my special "travel laptop" which has a brand new OS install from the night before. I take absolutely no data at all, unless I absolutely need to work on it during the trip - and in this case, this piece of data travels on an external media, in an encrypted form.
The macbook and the external media are disposable - should any agent want it, they can have it and keep it. I won't even complain.
What I care the most about is preserving the data confidentiality.
Why exactly wouldn't you want this kind of protection on your data from your doctor?
There was a time that I wanted to live and work in America. These days, I don't even want to visit for a holiday.
Currently it seems that the worst that typically happens is that they take your hardware away from you. I don't care too much about that as all my data is securely backed up in the cloud (tarsnap). The value of the hardware is maybe something like 1000 euros alltogether. Given how unlikely it (currently) is that this happens this is an acceptable monetary loss for me.
The only thing that bothers with my setup is that encryption in Android 4 is absolutely braindead, as it forces you to use the same password for the encryption as for the screenlock, although the security requirements are completely different: You want to use a really strong password for the encryption, but for the screenlock a short password is sufficient. Hopefully that will be possible in either one of the next versions, or one of the inofficial forks.
What's super ironic about this legislation is that it makes local law enforcement's job of actually catching criminals harder. No one's going to get caught at the border with anything but parakeets shoved down their pants. And now criminals are forced to use full-disk encryption and secure delete for everything if they want to travel which will likely lead to more security at home and more obstacles for local law enforcement.
When I was young, people having to take precautions like this were clicheed signs in a movie of someone oppressed by a totalitarian regime. Invariably the "good guys" were working to free people from it.
Can we reverse this trend?
Here is a direct link to the full screen version, and arrow keys work for turning pages: https://www.eff.org/file/33930#page/1/mode/2up
Direct link to pdf: https://www.eff.org/sites/default/files/filenode/EFF-border-...