Laptops at customs
 

im not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but i couldn't think of a different place on here so here it goes:

About a year ago there was an article in the washington post about travelers laptops being searched for files when they came into the country. then feingold introduced a bill that didnt get out of committee and then after the new administration took over he said he was going to re-introduce the bill.

i was just wondering if anyone on here knew what was going on, if he did reintroduce the bill, if they are still searching and confiscating laptops, etc...

I am trying to find the proper link but I do know that there was a ruling to make this an official 'policy' as opposed to before when it was all 'shady and not really clear'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...uting.security

Personally my laptop is fully encrypted and inside the laptop there is yet another layer of encryption.......

In about 50 border crossings noone has asked a thing about it.....I would imagine they would have to suspect something in order to do so (and this probably would be after you are sent to secondary inspection)

The Canadians however do bother me a hell of a lot more as they want you to boot your computer and they actively stare at your 'my pictures' folder in search of child pornography.........can we be any more :rolleyes:

You'd be surprised.

I've crossed many borders with a laptop - no one has ever wanted to look at it. In fact, no one has ever even asked me if I'm carrying a laptop. This includes US, UK, and Canada.

I don't download pr0n...don't most people who do that do something more sophisticated than leave the material in "My Pictures"? :D

as yyzvoyageur accurately said ....

you'd be surprised.......I would love to boot my computer into linux or even something more exotic and look at their faces....."uh uh....eh eh"

that reminds me of the guy from the FARC (Colombian guerilla) who suposedly had a laptop with zero encryption and bunches of important stuff ..........

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.

probably, but when you download things from the internet, be it pictures or something else, its usually saved in the downloads folder unless you changed settings in the internet browser, so its pretty stupid that they're looking in the my pics folder. (not sure about macs)

Customs has the right to inspect anything you bring with you into the country, including laptops. If the laptop is encrypted and you refused/couldn't decrypt it they would most likely seize it and severely delay you.

Gutmann is a method of wiping hard discs to make there data as unrecoverable as possible. In practice I don't recall any commercial companies advertising data recovery from a single over write never mind the 30 or so the Gutmann method uses. Who knows about the NSA :)

Canadian customs inspected my netbook during a secondary, I didn't even have MP3's on there never mind anything else.

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

Neither the US nor China has ever so much as glanced at my laptop at customs.

However, I've never been coming from a sex tourism destination and as an adult I've never crossed the border without my wife being right next to me.

My main destination is the US.. and I always have my laptop with me...

Never even been ASKED a question about it... In fact I am consistently asked ONE question... whether I have any food items.

Coming from a country with very stringent quarantine controls that seems fair enough to me... and they don't care about the Tim Tams I routinely bring for my now-addicted American friends..:D Mmmmmm... Tim Tams....)

Yeah--they are strict about any food materials that could possibly carry anything harmful. That's simply being prudent.

They can search your laptop in Canada....
 

A Bishop was just arrested in Ottawa after customs found child p0rn on his laptop. Seems his previous travel alerted the customs officer and then evasive answers and behaviour led to a secondary search, including his laptop, then a search warrant etc....
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Bi...846/story.html

I dont do anything fancy, i just put my private and important stuff (nothing illegal) deep in the windows folder structure so it will be mega hard to find if you don't know what you are looking at.

Hello

I used to work for Customs in New Zealand. SO I can tell you what we do here, but obviously our laws are different to other countries.

If a traveler has a laptop and I was searching them I didn't automatically look at the laptop, it would depend what I was searching them for.

My pictures is great, people store pictures of themselves smoking weed, doing lines of coke etc. Always a good way to start a conversation. Lots of people dont even think about what is on their laptop when going through customs.

But as for what we can do. I can examine the laptop whatever way I wish. So I can turn it on, if it needs a password I ask for one, if you decline my request I send your laptop to be examined by our computer lab and it is then returned to you within a reasonable time frame. Reasonable is of course debatable. If you are suspected of having child pornography we don't even attempt to turn it on, we detain all electronic media and send it to the computer lab. So laptops, mp3 players, cell phones. Which could be a nightmare if you are traveling on business.

Anyway, just for your interest that's what we do in NZ.