Documents Shed Light on Border Laptop Searches | Hacker News Reader

Documents Shed Light on Border Laptop Searches

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147 pointsdriverdan57 comments

Is the best strategy here to leave your devices at home and just bring a burner phone on holiday or other travels and no other devices?

It's strange as an ordinary citizen who might choose to contribute to someone like Manning's defence fund, or post statements supportive of Snowden online, to have to consider that GCHQ or the Homeland Security might put your name on a list for questioning and confiscation at the border, requiring drastic action like this.

Given the abuse of them in many countries including the US and UK (which was inevitable), I can't see any case for these powers of arbitrary detainment and confiscation to be given to the police in any country.

I leave mine behind whenever I travel outside the US, not so much because I am afraid to be on a list (although after reading this article, that fear has risen somewhat) but because I employ encryption on my laptop. If they do search my device for anything illegal, they will inevitably ask for my password, which I don't want to give for philosophical reasons. Then it's pretty much guaranteed that I'll be detained and/or my laptop will be taken.

You are right that, as a US citizen, this is a very strange revelation to have when packing for an overseas trip. Personally, this very real possibility opened my eyes on just how far we've fallen.

"I don't remember my password."

That is when they detain/harass him and steal his computer anyway.

And probably use the NSA backdoor to peek at the hard drive, right?

It's illegal not to provide your password in the UK, not sure what the rules are under these special powers in the US.

The more I read about the laws in the UK, the more I appreciate the laws in the USA. We don't have everything right, but at least our system is rooted in the notion of the sanctity of individual rights. Or was.

IIRC the 5th amendment allows you to not divulge your password, unless they can prove that there is illegal content .

What if you genuinely don't remember your password? Is it in effect memory loss that's been made illegal?

Then change your password to something that you don't actually know.

Generate a random password before your trip and print out a few copies. Take one with you and secure the remaining ones. Before you fly through the UK, change the password on your computer to the random one and destroy the printout. When you get back home use the remaining printouts to change your password back and then destroy them.

At this point, why are you even bringing your computer along, if you have no way to log into it?

This obviously depends on your travel plans. For the US, for example, CBP can only search your belongings on entry into the US. If you are traveling from the US -> wherever -> US then you only need to secure your laptop for your return flight.

These sorts of techniques make great comments, but are nearly useless in reality.

First of all, even if you're being truthful, saying "I don't know my password" will likely not be believed. Explaining the process you went through to safeguard your password will merely elicit suspicion by a border agent. Why would you go through such pains if you had nothing to hide? And once they are suspicious of you, you will almost surely be detained and have your equipment seized.

Yes, the government might not be able to decrypt it for years, but they still have your laptop, and they are still in possession of your data, encrypted as it may be. So, I ask you, who won this little battle? It sure wasn't you.

IMHO, the only valid approach here is to host everything on an external server, and VPN / SSH into it to do your work. Don't store the connection info locally, and don't store any passwords / keys locally. Make sure no confidential files ever touch your hard drive, even in a cache. Most agents have no idea how that process works, and unless you have a shortcut on your desktop / home directory labeled "connect to home fileserver" they probably won't even think to ask you for any further info.

EDIT: Stupid spelling error. Thanks, recursive.

> Why would you go through such pains if you had nothing to hide?

Why would you not want a camera in your bathroom, if you have nothing to hide?

Please note that I personally hate the phrase "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." I was using it in this case because many people still operate like that and because, for better or worse, I assume all 'police type' people fall into this category.

I merely figured the HN community would pick up on the sarcasm.

So please do not patronize me.

The assumption is that you are okay with having your laptop seized.

Obviously the best approach is to just not have your laptop.

FYI elicit

I haven't studied this law in detail, but it expect it is worded to avoid precisely this sort of manoeuvre, because the implication is quite clear - you have no right to privacy. If necessary they'd just confiscate your device and detain you on suspicion of perverting the course of justice etc, etc. they can hold you for 3 months for refusing to answer any questions they ask, including questions on your encryption scheme and how they can defeat it. They can also image all your hardware for future decryption, compromise it before returning it, etc.

I think the safer solution is not to travel with hardware you intend to use again.

I haven't studied this law either, but look at what happened to David Miranda who was in a situation very similar to the one I proposed - he was transporting information but didn't know what he was carrying (and given the people involved, the hard drives were probably encrypted).

He was detained for 9 hours and threatened with arrest during that time, but this was under terrorism laws, not encryption laws. And ultimately he was let go (sans equipment).

People have been jailed in the uk for not giving up their password. I suspect Miranda was released because they had the devices/data and had made their point, plus of course it would have become a major international incident given the news organisations involved and their involvement in the story. If he didn't have embassy staff and the guardian lawyers demanding his release, it might never have happened.

Does the UK not have anything similar to the 5th Amendment in the US? Could they ask you "Did you still a hot dog from that hotdog stand"? And force you to confess, or be faced with charges of lying to an officer?

Under normal law, yes there is a right to remain silent, at the border, no, because they have passed laws (schedule 7 of the 2000 terror act) saying they can imprison you for three months if you fail to cooperate in any way or answer any questions.

http://xkcd.com/538/

Look into Hidden Volume technology. Then you can give them the "password" and they can look around all they want.

I have. However, my fear is that it will either not work when it's needed, or that they may have some manner of technology that allows them to scan for such things, or possibly the footprints left behind by such software, or logging them into an OS that looks like a fresh install might be enough to illicit some suspicion.

Politely declining to share your password is within your rights at the US border. However, giving them a "fake" password seems like it may be a crime. And even if it's not, it will certainly get you detained and your laptop taken.

Thankfully, I don't need my laptop that much when traveling overseas and my stupid non-global Verizon phone won't work anyway. Much safer to leave it behind.

You aren't giving them a "fake" password, you're just not giving them all of your passwords.

The point is you might still be considered to be interfering with the investigation, should they find out.

Everything I've ever read about topic stresses that you should be absolutely truthful with a border officer. At least in the US, lying to one is a serious offense. Your post encourages hiding behind semantics and technicalities- and while those might save you in a courtroom (if you have a good lawyer), they won't save you when you're face to face with an angry border agent who just discovered your ruse.

Again, this is why I don't use this method. It didn't work on my parents when I was a kid, and I don't think it will work in this case either.

I understand- the software behind hidden volumes is relatively new. I think this is an area the open source/security community should really put some effort behind.

It is recommended that you use the regular non-hidden volume OS for trivial tasks frequently to make it a normal OS. If you do this, you are giving them your password. You just use a differnet password and a hidden volume for all of your private stuff.

Leaving it behind works as well, if that is acceptable to you! And is probably the most secure thing. :)

Carrying a burner is itself also suspicious -- the safest course it to be as normal as possible which means having a regular computer/phone with some stuff on it, or nothing. Also, it isn't sufficient to focus the the border policies for re-entry to your own country, you also have to consider every country you would travel to, all of which have their own laws, all of which can change at any moment, even while you are in transit. Carrying around "sensitive" data, along with the password (which is in your brain, thus you are carrying it) is just overall a really bad idea.

It's not a "burner" phone, it's an "international quad band unlocked" phone for local sims.

EFF guide to defending your privacy at border crossings:

https://www.eff.org/wp/defending-privacy-us-border-guide-tra...

The fact such an article has to be written at all is highly concerning. What kind of free society are we living in when we have to guard heavily against our devices being confiscated and snooped through just because a border agent feels like it? To my knowledge there's only precedent of this happening in the UK and US, but I wouldn't be surprised if other countries are going to join in on these shenanigans.

I guess you need to make sure all your backups are in order before crossing the border.

I guess you need to make sure your devices are wiped or left at home.

A backup just means you have your own copy of what just got taken off you at the border for no good lawful reason.

Having my own copy would not reassure me of much.

Moxie Marlinespike of WhisperNet has explicitly said that he leaves his devices at home when traveling because of this.

Or make sure that they have full-disk encryption and are cold shutdown when you cross the border.

While jurisprudence is still a bit fuzzy on this (it has flipped back and forth on a few appeals in a few separate cases, and never been conclusively decided by the Supreme Court), there have been ruling upholding the fact that you can't be forced to hand over your password due to the fifth amendment, unless the Government can already show that they know via other means that you have incriminating files on there.[1]

On the border, you would probably be safe from mandatory disclosure of your password without the border patrol getting a court order, and of course the whole point of this complaint is that the government is using border crossing as an end-run around the courts, being able to do searches that a court wouldn't otherwise approve.

So, using full-disk encryption that you trust, on all electronic devices that you carry, and making sure that they are cold shutdown, is probably sufficient. You should of course have a backup as well, as the border patrol may impound your devices while they try to decrypt them.

All in all, how much effort we have to do to defend ourselves from our own government is getting ridiculous. I don't know how to convince the American public of this, but we are not only violating the privacy of tons of people, but killing people who choose to drive rather than fly[2] due to the excess hassle that our "security" systems provide.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_Stat... 2: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/excess_automo...

Even with full-disk encryption, an image will be made of the drive, and the government will keep a copy on the chance that the password will be revealed later. Or the algorithm gets broken/weak enough at some point in the future.

Silly question.

Let's assume you have a device like a Macbook Pro or a Macbook Air, where you can't physically remove the drive without ungluing the device. You hotrod the firmware so only trusted USB devices with a specific encryption key are permitted to connect. How would the drive be imaged?

Thunderbolt target disk mode: http://support.apple.com/kb/PH3838

Perhaps you could solve this by "hotrodding" the firmware, but it's not particularly obvious how you could do that without risking bricking your laptop.

Perhaps Apple needs to require a password to boot off USB or to access target disk mode.

It's too bad the newer Macbook Pros don't come with ExpressCard slots anymore. I used to boot off a fast SSD expresscard. No disadvantages at all, other than the card ran hot. Remove the internal drive and when you pop out the Expresscard, much lower attack surface.

After the past week's NSA revelations, just what full disk encryption system should we be trusting? I think it's fair to assume that any commercial implementation is compromised.

I FDE (on macs, FileVault 2 is by far the easiest, even though Apple is one of the more likely backdoor providers), but I also don't keep anything sensitive on it.

If seized at the airport, it provides a useful bit of information on whether they can break filevault 2. It seems implausible they would even if they could without a "plausible non-cryptographic alternative".

[TrueCrypt](http://www.truecrypt.org/) or [dm-crypt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dm-crypt) are both open source (technically, TrueCrypt has source available but doesn't meet the definition of an open-source license, though there's some debate on that point), and thus publicly auditable.

Also, I'm less worried about FDE being vulnerable to Border Patrol than about, say, SSL vulnerabilities across the whole network. The plausible deniability, which they would need to use to protect their sources if they found information, is a lot lower if you know you have been stopped and your laptop searched, rather than just tapping all internet traffic so you don't even know when you've been searched. Mac OS X's File Vault 2 and Windows's BitLocker are probably sufficient if if you aren't particularly paranoid about being individually targeted for something big, but I would be more inclined to trust the open solutions.

Would this only apply to files that are physically on the hard drive or would this also mean they may have access to connected cloud storage accounts like Dropbox or iCloud?

They already have your data on Dropbox and iCloud.

Anyone know what happens if your laptop is dead when you go through border control? I mean, they probably don't keep laptop chargers for every model around.

I've gone through airport security with a dead laptop before at a time when they would occasionally ask people to turn on their laptop. They just waved me through.

Obviously the officials involved in this case were let go, right? Because who would enter into an official database that they want to abuse border searches to search an attorney for a person in an ongoing case with the government, and for that exact reason?

No one in government considers it to be an abuse. That's the problem.

I have asked this before but didn't get an answer: Do such "you have to hand out your passwords" laws apply to me if I am just a visitor to such countries and my home country does not have such a law?

They say that there were ~5000 such searches per year, which makes them extremely rare occurrences given the hundreds of millions of people crossing the borders in a year.

Next year, there'll be 7,000, and the year after that, 10,000, etc.

Yes, but they are targeting individual US citizens and using the broad authority that has been granted to them "to evade the constitution," as the article states. Ostensibly, this authority was granted in order to protect our borders.

Make sure your SSH keys have a password.

don't store ssh keys.

SSH keys need to be stored somewhere if they are to be useful. Perhaps the safest bet is to move the keys to a smartcard, carry that with you while you travel, then destroy the card before re-entering the USA.

I don't store ssh keys. I remember the (long) passwords.

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