Leave your electronics at home?
 

"I don't carry my laptop overseas anymore," said Sacramento attorney Mark Reichel. "The fat lady has sung for the fourth amendment."

Maybe he should have studied harder in law school. Nothing has changed with regards to border searches. Legally, what is the difference between personal papers, luggage and laptops? The 4th Amendment covers all equally.

Put down the glass and step away from the Kool-Aid.

"Officers may not read or permit others to read correspondence contained in sealed letter class mail"

The difference between encrypted data on a laptop and sealed first class mail is?

I think that CBP needs to be slapped back to into their role of preventing physical contraband from entering the country.

If sealed mail means it can't be copied, travel with a stamped/addressed envelope and just get a laptop with a removable drive. Pop the drive in the envelope and seal it before entering the TSA area.

Gee why am I not suprised. The 911 excuse is getting abused and used as a vechile to strip the rights of US citizens and travelers, but why am i not suprised since the US is no longer home of the free, but looking more and more 3rd world home of the scared.

CBP can search my laptop and all of the drives they want but there encrypted, but if you dont know where to look and have the passwords your not going to see whats really on the drive. That and the moment they begin to initiate the search I will get their infomation so that i can pass it on to the organization I do research for so that they can send there legal team(HIPPA violation) after that person and who they work for as HIPPA has more teeth and bite then CBP, not to mention all the research partcipants could seek recourse for attempted ID theft.

A) its CBP, not TSA
b) Its first class letter mail. A hard drive would not be letter mail.

this is not new.. its becoming more common as more people travel with laptops.. I don't think 911 has ever been invoked for border laptop searches..
Good luck on that.

How do you figure a CBP agent is violating HIPAA for searching items which contain PHI?

CBP is not a covered entity under HIPAA. Hence there is no enforcement action that can be taken against them by the Department of Health Services Office of Civil Rights (the "HIPAA Police").

If anything, HIPAA may enter into the equation for the owner of the laptop through inadvertent disclosure of any unencrypted PHI. Now whether or not the laptop owner can legally refuse a request by CBP to see the content of a file (electronic or paper) that contains PHI by citing HIPAA privacy/security regulations is something I'd need to research. I seem to remember some kind of exception buried in the regs regarding national security (figures!) but it has been awhile since I've waded through the HIPAA swamp.

It happened to another researcher and the search stopped right there because the CBP official realized that it was more of a hassle/legal trouble then its worth. There is a very large HIPPA notification (with the penalties for violation) on the splash screen and the background on the laptop so its very obvious, to prevent "I never saw XYZ" syndrome.

Beyond that truecrypt will keep them at bay.

The actual policy:

Sealed Letter Class Mail. Officers may not read or permit others to read correspondence contained in sealed letter class mail (the international equivalent of First Class) without an appropriate search warrant or consent. Only articles in the postal system are deemed "mail." Letters carried by individuals or private carriers such as DHL, UPS, or Federal Express, for example, are not considered to be mail, even if they are stamped, and thus are subject to a border search as provided in this policy.

Policy Regarding Border Search of Information

A slap isn't going to do it. I'm not sure an enema with fifteen molar battery acid would get the message across.

ICE had 4 arrests within the last week or so for people traveling to Cambodia for the purpose of molesting children. This tends to make me think there is a bunch of kiddie porn being brought in. I'm not saying that anyone should gleefully give up their rights, but personally, I'd let them search my computer if I knew eventually some of these sick .......s were going to jail. That's just me.

But what permits you to determine that I need to give up my 4th amendment rights and my right to privacy?

Did you miss the "That's just me" part? I don't make policy, I was merely offering an opinion. Please don't draw conclusions that aren't there.

Easy there, WWNF, consider it a hypothetical if need be; I read the 'That's just me' part just fine. I'm well aware, and perhaps thankful, you don't make policy, and that we have something of a constitution left to prevent those policy makers who would rush to trample the 4th from doing so. Fact is, you claimed there's been several arrests in the past week for travelling to an exotic location for the purposes of child molestation, made a tenuous link from that to importation of kiddie porn, and then trip all over yourself rushing to have CBP invasively search your computer drives in the hopes that those who (hopefully) deserve to be locked up, receive that punishment.
It's a frequent and often (mis)used tactic to claim that if only certain rights were not in our way, we could stop kiddie porn, drunk driving, deadbeat dads or whatever hysteria du jour is currently being whipped up. And if some line up for voluntary laptop searches, as you suggested you would, it's too easy for some in CBP to conclude that those who don't want their laptops searched, and are tired of the government claiming that any search they decide to undertake is legal (me) must have something to hide.

As the law stands, they're going to search my laptop whether I want them to or not.

- Leave your computer at home
- Encrypt your drive with toughest encryption existed (try searching, ie PCP with 1024-bit key)
- Scrub your drive before returning
- all key data on encrypted HD
- or email encrypted data back home

Question: As FTers I believe that we do quite a bit of international traveling.

Which of you has ever had your laptop examined beyond the point of being x-rayed (or, before that, having to show that it can be turned on)?

I am including both CBP and TSA examinations in this.

(In my own case, the CBP has only checked anything I was carrying one time. That was in Boston and consisted of putting my suitcase on an x-ray machine.)

Laptop has never been checked by CBP or any other immigration body.
Been swabbed about 15 times by a few TSA checkpoints and at CBR, MEL and LHR. Normally when I get the ‘random’ secondary.
Been asked to open it once, at MSP in 2005. Most likely because it hadn’t shut down properly and the lights were still flashing when it went through the checkpoint.

Or use a web-based backup drive like X-Drive or Amazon S3. Firefox has add-ons for both.

I have never had my laptop inspected after an international trip, but I sympathize with those who feel their 4th amendment rights have been violated. While it's true a few who carry child porn on their laptops may be caught this way early on, in the future they can easily evade detection by putting it on a DVD and mail it back home to themselves. In fact, everything one puts on a laptop can be put on a different media and sent via First Class mail (or international equivalent).

While I'm not qualified to determine the constitutionality of such searches, I find it hard to believe that in the long term, all these searches will result in anything other than a modification of behavior.