Travellers' mobile phone data seized by police at border | Hacker News Reader

Travellers' mobile phone data seized by police at border

telegraph.co.uk

42 pointsthex8630 comments

"David House, a former MIT researcher who cofounded an organization to raise money for Bradley Manning, accused the Department of Homeland Security of violating his civil rights when he passed through a Chicago airport in November 2010."

"Homeland Security agents did not have a warrant when they seized House’s laptop, camera, and a flash drive, then asked him questions about his relationship with Manning."

"The Department of Justice had tried to have the lawsuit thrown out, asserting that the government has the authority to conduct routine searches at a US border."

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/05/30/supporter-leak-s...

London (and other) police ofrces have been doing similar for a while.

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/may/17/met-softwar...)

(http://www.publicservice.co.uk/news_story.asp?id=19807)

(http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/met-police-acquires-mob...)

Police grab as much data as they can, and keep it for as long as they can. So it's a problem if they can cheaply and easily slurp cell-phone data because we know that they probably will.

See, for example, the length of time they keep DNA data.

Due to the UK's key disclosure laws (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_Kingd...) encryption doesn't help. If you don't provide your key to the government they can put you in jail for up to two years.

If you hadn't provided a link I would have assumed you were joking. What happens under this law with people who carry USB sticks with truly random noise files on them?

The actual law is called RIPA.

There are serious problems with it. (I speak as someone who's normally okay with 'big government' and legal restrictions.)

In theory you'd have to be doing something to get their attention. The most well known case is of a man who has a psychotic illness and who was also importing "explosives" and behaving in odd ways. But that's what some people with a mental illness do. It's one of the features of illness, that people are not rational and do not do things that are in their best interest.

The "give us your key or go to jail" are not the worst abuses of RIPA though. This would be rare, and people would have legal representation. The local councils mis-using RIPA to see if people are applying to the wrong schools are worse. These are already so common they've had to be cut back, and there's little opportunity for legal representation and the oversight is much less.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Po...)

They do not have a sense of humor. This would be a cute way of writing a blog post about your day(s) spent in detention before being sent back to your country of origin/citizenship.

This is disgusting. White noise is all around us - how is possessing a recording of it in any way a crime?

I'm sorry I sound so naive, but I'm still incredibly flabbergasted by this.

The police might think that the white noise file is an encrypted document, demand that you provide the (non-existent) decryption key, and imprison you for "refusing" to provide it.

Then surely they must logically also assume that when the prime minister's FM radio is tuned between channels he is receiving encrypted transmissions from terrorists. Are they going to xkcd-538 him for the key then?

This stuff is not ok. Not at all.

Two things here.

1) These are not the police. Police are trained law enforcement officers. These are customs and immigration employees. They get training, but it's more important that they can get a security clearance.

2) Can you think of a reason for having a file of white noise that you could explain to this person that they would understand and believe?

You really don't have many rights outside immigration/customs. "Probable cause" is "he acted weird." Cars have been destructively disassembled for less.

I don't know about the UK, but the average customs and immigration employee in the USA does not have a security clearance.

You may be confounding ICE, CIS, and CBP, which is completely understandable (never mind EOIR, which is over in the DOJ and muddying the waters even more). The majority of CBP are federal "law enforcement" and are required to obtain clearance in addition to the suitability investigation(which is the equivalent of a lifestyle + polygraph background check for s/ts clearance).

If they look at a computer based on information provided by a person entering the country, they have to have clearance. Uncleared or precleared people will often hang out over the shoulder of someone with clearance, so it's not really that "secure", but it ensures that queries are handled by cleared personnel.

The UK is beyond unreasonable with that nonsense. What if you ask a foreign partner to create a key and secure the device without telling you until you are past the border or out of the country? What if you were collecting atmospheric data?

You make it sound like the US doesn't do anything similar.

Not that I think the US has any moral high ground overall, but they only court-order your password under circumstances where someone's already seen evidence of something illegal on there.

I disagree with the UK stance on such things but such behaviour on your part would rightly be taken as proof of ill-intent because it would be an unreasonable thing to do and so could only have been intended to avoid complying with the law. These people may be 'unreasonable' but they are much, much, much cleverer than you.

False.

Counter-example: You work for Company A and need to deliver documents to Company B. Your comrade X creates the key. You pass through a dangerous part of town where Company C works. Fearing that C might kidnap you, X created the key so that X must be present when they reach Company B through their alternate route.

>"but such behaviour on your part would rightly be taken as proof of ill-intent because it would be an unreasonable thing to do and so could only have been intended to avoid complying with the law."

There is a policeman in your head.

What will they do when someday our phones are chips in our brains? "Please sir, I need to cut your head off for a bit". Eventually technology will make it almost impossible to do a real border search.

"For reasons I'm not permitted to disclose, I need to stick this wire up your nose."

They'll require root access as a condition of travel.

(A variant of this idea appears, as a throwaway peripheral detail, in the excellent s01e03 episode of the TV series 'Black Mirror', 'The Entire History of You'... which according to Wikipedia has been optioned by Robert Downey Jr. as a potential film.)

Probably best to mail it to yourself. If you carry something over the border, it's fair game to deny you entry to the country until you cough up whatever useless information they want. But if you mail it, then you're already in the country and have some rights if the government feels like searching what you've mailed.

You don't even have to mail it. You just need to store it on a server abroad and ssh into that server and copy your encrypted files.

This is pretty alarming but the article points out something often overlooked: "nowhere in Britain do you have less rights than at the border."

This is the same in the USA and most countries. "The border" (really, any ingress point where you haven't passed CBP) is effectively a rights-free zone. It's important to remember that you should have nothing that will cause you difficulty if it is seized, copied, or damaged no matter how you enter the country.

Sounds like North Korea

North Korea is known for many things but not, as far as I can tell, traveller's having their data seized. If anything it sounds similar to the way travellers to the US are treated. Care to elaborate on your comparison?

They take away your phone, when you enter North Korea. There are no reports of seized data, but you never what they are doing with your phone.

Whilst I'm only one data point, when I entered the DPRK everyone's phone (except mine - left it at home) was put into a plastic bag which was then sealed in such a way that opening it was irreversible. It was then entrusted to our British tour rep, who held onto the bag for the duration of the trip. People got them back from the still sealed bag a week later at the hotel on the last morning (for those flying out) and at the station (for those getting the train to Dandong, which is well worth doing and an excellent way to finish off the trip).

I wonder how you consider visiting such a place in such a way that fosters commercial gain for the establishment morally defensible? Particularly when you can see enough across the Chinese portion of the border (particularly in the east, near the town of Chiangbaishan) to understand the situation. Have you no shame?

Well, firstly, I examined the opinions on the subject of a number of refugees from the DPRK. The consensus amongst them is that foreigners visiting is a good thing; not only do we provide hard currency to every ordinary citizen we encounter, which is always welcome, but every interaction between a DPRK citizen and a foreigner acts to combat the official government propaganda. We talk to them, we show photographs, we demonstrate that we're not imperialist aggressors seeking to occupy the country. When you grow up with that lie as accepted truth, it's extraordinarily valuable to actually meet foreigners, or even just see them wandering about smiling and waving.

It is certainly true that some of my hard currency went to the government. Given that there are a few thousand tourists a year, this means that what they got from me is a tiny, tiny fraction of what they get through their (limited) trade and their black market dealings (they export opium, for example). Given that all of life is a series of compromises, I judge that the income the government got from my visit is far outweighed by the income a number of ordinary citizens got from me, and also the exposure of those ordinary citizens to foreigners. We wandered around in crowds on our own talking to people, met some people in a pub, encountered people on their way to and from work as we wandered around Pyongyang, all that sort of thing. Yes, our trip was carefully organised and monitored, but it's simply not the case that everyone we encountered was some kind of government actor.

"Particularly when you can see enough across the Chinese portion of the border (particularly in the east, near the town of Chiangbaishan) to understand the situation."

How is that relevant? I didn't need to see the situation from China. I went to Pyongyang and Kaesong and Nampho and a whole lot of other places.

Presumably you think that the correct way to go is for no foreigners to ever visit, and for the DPRK population to live in ignorance of the outside world, never encountering foreigners and never having the chance to realise that actually their government is lying to them? What's your moral defence for that? I went to the DPRK and I put hard currency in the hands of ordinary citizens and I talked to them and I showed them bits of the outside world and shared a pint with some and, on the whole, did more good than harm. The hard currency I put into the hands of the government is regrettable, but outweighed.

What have YOU done?

"Have you no shame?"

The moral high ground and five dollars might just get you a cup of coffee. Shame? I'd be ashamed of myself if I had your attitude, I can tell you that. Shame? That's a product of local customs and folk-beliefs and other such backwards crap. If you're going to travel more than a day's walk from your village, dump it and make decisions based on something a bit more reliable.

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