Originally Posted by
alanh
Note that shipping or encryption does not guarantee no inspection. ICE can and does open packages at the border.
As for the hidden file, I don't know what scanners they use but if I were designing it, it would look for encrypted files. And yes, if you won't unlock it, they can refuse to let it in the country. It also looks like you're trying to hide something, because you are.
Really, store nothing sensitive on a laptop is the best policy. It's official policy for my employer.
It might be hard to write a scanner that looks for encrypted files, but it wouldn't be hard to have it search for abnormally large files. My opinion would be to keep the container files relatively small. Also finding the encryption program itself on the harddrive could be a trigger.