Truman Boyes wrote:
Hi there,According to the US Customs and Border Protection Policy document it appears that search and seizure at border/immigration centers does not apply directly to sealed letter class mail; and documents inside sealed letter class mail may not be read by officers without a appropriate search warrant.
For folks concerned about this, do at least read:http://www.cbp.gov/linkhandler/cgov/travel/admissability/search_authority.ctt/search_authority.pdf
as it might clarify some things which might be misunderstood otherwise. That document also mentions:"Notwithstanding this law enforcement mission, in the course of every border search, CBP will protect the rights of individuals against unreasonable search and seizure."
Unfortunately they don't specify what they call unreasonable, as IMHO this whole 'mission' of them described in that PDF is unreasonable.
How about mailing yourself a USB drive with encrypted data and taking that along for the trip.
Or what about, trying to use this great invention called... The InternetWhich kind makes it completely useless for them to be doing this in the first place (IMnsHO) because the people who want to bring data from A to B will just send it that way and nicely over all kinds of secure channels. Then again, a plane full of tapes is faster than most internet connections of course.
I am still wondering what the real reasoning is behind this lame security theater setup. It is just another annoying step from wanting me to go there.
For me the procedure seems simple and applies actually to any case where you might expect your data/hardware to be stolen (it is the same thing in my opinion if they take it with law behind them, or a thief just steals something from me):
- Don't bring along anything you don't want others to get
- For the hardware you bring along before entering _and_ leaving
the country:
- use shred(*1) on the full disk and other media you have
- re-install a full copy of $distro, so that you have the tools
- just have one account: username=root, password=root
Then after arrival, download and use your data, before leaving
(might take 8 hours++ for the shred) upload your data to your
internet host, shred+re-install in the same way.
Now if they want your laptop or other hardware/storage, you can just
give it up, yes, you loose them for some time, but there is nothing you
have really lost. Yes, it is, like every other Security Theater, very
annoying, but at least you avoid the problem where you loose something
you didn't want to loose, and you can also just tell the guys there
"this is my re-install cd, you can have it, you'll figure out that there
is nothing on this thing that can be illegal or violating anything"
Don't forget that your PSP or DS, that you are using in-flight, might also contain precious save-games especially after 8 hours of gaming in-flight), so don't forget to figure out a way to back-up those after landing ;)
Of course, one can always make use of Tor (http://www.torproject.org/) to send your data around so that you'll remain quite anonymous too.
For these kind of nasty rules, we'll just have to bend over and keep on smiling (but not too much, because they won't like that either...)
Greets, Jeroen*1 = http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/shred-invocation.html
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