Dean:
The first time I went to China was in 1998; I have been there several
times a year most years since. I bring with me a bible, which is
likely to be a lot more threatening to a communist government than a
thousand naked ladies dancing in the airport, and encryption software
(Cisco VPN and GPG), which at least at one time was technically
illegal in the country.
I don't make an issue of it, and in my experience they have not either.
I'll tell you the one uncomfortable experience I have had in China.
This is June 1999. I was speaking at a conference called ChinaInet,
and was asked to speak about the security of the Internet. In the
talk, I mentioned cryptographic authentication as the strongest means
we had to identify a communicant. At the word "cryptographic", the
translator stopped talking, and picked up again on the next slide.
Following that talk, I was ushered to a room where I was "given an
opportunity to rest" without contact with the other people at the
conference. In my next session, I had a different translator (supplied
by a government agency) and the audience was not permitted to ask
questions. However, I was able to participate in the remainder of the
conference without problem, and have never had an issue since. I
suspect that someone had to find out whether what I said was OK, and
since I was neither advocating the use of encryption (authentication !
= encryption) and was not criticizing the government (which is the one
real no-no), it blew over.
I use encryption every time I travel, including to China. I have never
had an issue doing so, including trips to France, China, Russia, and
Bulgaria. If you're concerned about the contents of your disk drive,
you have a few options. Obviously, make a backup before you leave. You
can leave your computer at home and bring a few files on a USB key.
You can wipe the drive and bring only things you don't mind being
seen. You can use filevault/pgp/whatever. Take the steps you consider
appropriate.
Please feel free to ask questions. When you are given answers, please
feel free to listen to the experience of people who have been to the
country. Please do not feel free to crawl the walls calling people who
have more experience than you "naive" etc. The PRC is not the US, for
sure. Finns and Swedes will tell you that the US can be kind of scary
at times. Get used to it. People from the PRC don't have horns. Really.
Fred
On Jan 11, 2010, at 12:21 PM, Dean Willis wrote:
On Jan 11, 2010, at 1:21 PM, Ole Jacobsen wrote:
Dean,
Get real. When have you EVER had any reading material inspected by
ANY
authority ANYWHERE in the world? OK, so I am not aware of your
particular reading habits and yes, I *can* imagine that *some*
material *might* attract the attention of customs officials in any
given part of the world, but it would have to be pretty extreme and
you would have to literally wave it in front of their faces. WIRED
Magazine does NOT in any way fall into the sort of material I am
imagining, and I think you know that.
That's a pretty naive position, Ole. I've had training manuals
confiscated at the Canadian border, had my laptop "data searched" in
a couple of places, had my bags detained for setting off chemical
detectors (although returned after secondary searching), had a
science-fiction paper-back book confiscated (apparently the cover
image was "pornographic", although they didn't bother to arrest me,
and thankfully, I had already finished the book), and probably quite
a few other events over the years. I've even had the sorts of jobs
where everything on my person, including papers, got inspected by
guards when I was going in and out of the workplace each day.
I'm really surprised you haven't had events like this yourself.
We should obviously obey the laws of the country in which we have our
meeting, but dreaming up worst case scenarios isn't helpful. Really.
Sometimes it is hard for outsiders to understand those laws you so
blithely say we should obey. Laws can and do catch people by
surprise. One of the most effective ways to prevent surprise is by
as king "what if" questions. Do you not think it is reasonable to
subject the real-world to the same sort of scenario analysis that we
would demand of a transport protocol?
--
Dean
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