RE: Risk of Laptop Seizure by Customs or Border Patrol Officers ...

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>> Michel Py wrote:
>> Besides, there are several ways to carry confidential info while
>> flying. Here's an example: They'll look at your laptop, but will
>> not bother looking at the 4GB SD card you have in your digital camera

> Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
> These days it's called an 'iPod'.

An iPod is a lot more suspicious, IMHO. Unless you accept the risk of
storing a non-music (or non-video) file into the iPod's filesystem and
hope that nobody will notice it's not music nor video (a valid option,
but not bullet-proof) you have to embed the data into actual files,
which so far requires to use a lossless compression process.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I still have to see software that
can embed any significant amount of data into an .mp3 (or .mpg, or
Quicktime or similarly compressed) file; and nobody can come up with a
reason to store raw .WAV files on an iPod, while there are plenty good
reasons to store .TIF files on a digital camera.

In my experience, border agents are not the sharpest knives in the
drawer but some are not completely dumb either: if every .mp3 in your
iPod is 30MB, or if a 5MB file sounds like 11KHz mono instead of 44KHz
stereo, some might wonder why. OTOH, if you're half-serious about
digital photography, you store your pictures in a lossless format
because you want to Photoshop them later without the JPEG artifacts.

As mentioned earlier, greed is the enemy. If you embed 1.5MB of data
into a 15MB .TIF, the compression ratio will go down the toilet; Uncle
Sam might not be able to get your data, but might wonder why when they
save your .TIF as a .JPG it takes 6MB instead the usual 2MB.

Michel.


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