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Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

They're looking for a file on your desktop named "location_of_smuggled_drugs.txt".

In all seriousness, I don't think there's anything in particular they're looking for. They're just looking for anything that gives them suspicion, which gives them an excuse to question and investigate you further.

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Does anybody know how they tend to react when they are greeted by nothing but a getty on a tty? Should I install GNOME to make border guards feel comfortable?

I haven't crossed the border in the past decade, but may need to semi-frequently in the near future.

Put a linux live CD in your drive and set that as the priority in the boot sequence.

One of the nice things about my Lenovo T430 is that it has both an SSD and a hard drive. You can pop into the BIOS and set the boot order so if you want the 'windows xx' thing to boot for the security theatre you can set it that way when you travel.

Still it is outrageous that a court feels this is not a violation of your 4th, 5th, and 14th amendment rights.

You don't need multiple hard drives to do this. If you have a configurable boot loader (such as grub), you can specify what you want to boot into and skip the menu entirely.

Apropos of nothing, since I don't travel with my machine booted the boot sequence of grub would give it away I suspect.

Is it that the court is basically applying the same border search exceptions that apply to boxes, paper notebooks, and film cameras to laptops and phones that you find outrageous? Or is it the border search exceptions themselves you find outrageous?

I think the parent is objecting to where US courts have decided that their jurisdiction ends.

Which always makes me think of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXfWfJz59pk&t=1m33s

The notion of data-as-contraband is outrageous. It amounts to making certain numbers illegal.

Encryption used to be classified as a munition, funnily enough.

Sure, they will say "hm, this is different, we'll send it in to the central office where our tech experts can evaluate it."

Bye-bye laptop for a few weeks.

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