Originally Posted by
jetsfan92588
i havent yet travelled out of the country, but im about to. my laptop is encrypted with like gutmann or something like that, but ive heard they can "force" you to give them the password/keyfile and some people have even had their laptops taken and not returned apparently (this was before the post article). theres no child porn on there, but its a company laptop so i just want to know my rights before-nothing will probably happen, but if something does, i want to know what to do. since i didnt do any of the actual encrypting, i don't know exactly how it works and whether or not the gov't can crack it. when i asked our IT guy he had never heard of this, but he said it would be difficult for the gov't to crack it and would probably take months if they really wanted to.
quite frankly if this happened to me
a) I would voluntarily decrypt the first level (which would allow the computer to boot)
b) the chances of them bothering with the 2nd layer are low and if they find it they have no way of proving that the file actually contains anything (it can just be a huge /corrupted file......)
I don't think you have any rights .....which is why many executives are issued CLEAN laptops everytime they travel to the US (I have heard of some companies doing this )
In my case I do have an old laptop that can be used for travel....and if you are truly paranoid ..the problem is that this becomes quite inconvenient
one way to solve this is leave your laptop at home and log into it remotely .....but not everyone has the know how/resources to do this in a secure way (you could use logmein ....that would be the easiest I can think of but I just dont use that service)
as far as some open source encrypting tools (like truecrypt.....or pgp) they are EXTREMELY SOLID.........can there be ways to decrypt it ? yes.....but its very very unlikely............normally it would require a huge amount of resources and if they want you THAT BAD they probably have a reason