Comments on: Customs Now Performing Laptop Strip Searches. Protect Yourself.

By: John

John — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 05:34:00 +0000

If I want to keep Trade Secret, I use remote access to my office PC. I followed advice given at http://remote-access-software.net/security/reflections-about-cbp-and-remote-access.html.

By: D R

D R — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:50:46 +0000

Quote:

“Laptop searches have proven essential to detecting people and materials that should be blocked from entering the United States. Officers have discovered video clips of improvised explosive devices being detonated, a martyrdom video and other violent jihadist materials. In addition, these searches have uncovered scores of instances of child pornography, including a home movie of children being sexually assaulted.

How often do we search laptops? Of the approximately 400 million travelers who entered the country last year, only a tiny percentage were referred to secondary baggage inspection for a more thorough examination. Of those, only a fraction had electronic devices that may have been checked.

As a practical matter, travelers only go to secondary when there is some level of suspicion.”

Source: http://help.cbp.gov/cgi-bin/customs.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1071&p_created=1216327692&p_sid=KrtZi6wj&p_accessibility=0&p_redirect=&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9MjEsMjEmcF9wcm9kcz0wJnBfY2F0cz0wJnBfcHY9JnBfY3Y9JnBfcGFnZT0xJnBfc2VhcmNoX3RleHQ9Y29tcHV0ZXI*&p_li=&p_topview=1

Honestly, I think they’re going for the big catches and not petty file sharers like you and me.

By: Keith Guthmiller

Keith Guthmiller — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:38:00 +0000

I think the truly important point here is the eroding of our rights as human beings. It can be said that this is done for money and that may very well be true. For example, water is not guaranteed to be a basic human need but a commodity that can be bought and sold. Yes, trying to prevent crime is important. BUT when the ability to protect oneself and stop others is taken out of our hands and handed to a select few, then we have a Draconian government. Our rights are being violated everyday and more rights will be removed as time passes. The thing that misses most people is that WE, the people of our respective countries, HIRE people to run the country for us IN OUR BEST INTERESTS. That means those employees (representatives, leaders, etc) must listen to what the collective will of the people is. But no. That is not the case anymore. Our employees tell US what to do! As a business owner, I have fired people for that kind of attitude. So what needs to happen is that everyone must lose their awe and fear of our “governments”, realize that we can pull them out of office just as easily as we hired them and take back our dignity. If this doesn’t happen, we lose. Oh and the government secret meetings? Garbage! All government must be transparent. That is a principle. So folks, no matter what the issue is, laptop searches, wiretapping, cameras everywhere, basic human rights being discarded, please realize that you can take action and stop this mess. If you are one that believes our governments have created a better world, look around; global climate change, clear cutting, war, famine hunger economic recession, erosion of human rights, abuse of power, bailouts to companies that cannot be self-sufficient, the list goes on and on. Sorry I babbled, this is not very organized. Very emotional topic for me.

By: Tom

Tom — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 18:51:27 +0000

It seems the objectives of the search have changed over time. In the past, we wanted to keep harmful substances, explosives, poisons, illegal drugs, etc. out of our country, and wanted to make sure that nothing was being exported/imported illegally. But data is different. Yes, data an be illegal or potentially harmful to someone, but moving it from point A to point B shouldn’t be such a big deal. If you’ve stolen information (e.g. MP3′s), why is that an issue for border security? Child pornography isn’t generally a border security problem either. If you plan on blowing something up, you could easily carry that plan out without bringing the project plan over in your laptop. In short, searching laptops might catch a few of these incidences, but it doesn’t prevent them, and the purpose of the search shouldn’t be to enforce those types of laws.

On the other hand, I don’t personally mind getting all my data searched, as long as I can trust it to be protected by those who do the searching. If I need to abide by client-attorney privilege, or EU privacy laws, or SEC guidelines, I’d like to believe that complying with border security policy doesn’t mean I have to break all those other laws for information security. Without that assurance, computing ‘in the cloud’ looks all the more compelling.

By: Scott M.

Scott M. — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 16:06:11 +0000

I personally don’t agree with this. As a Canadian, if I go to the U.S. on business and bring my business laptop with me, I shouldn’t have to worry that confidential records can be copied. In a nutshell, I’ll run linux, encrypt the hard drive, leaving the pgp key files on a flash drive. You could even store the flash drive in your luggage, so that you can’t boot the laptop (just have a bootable usb linux flash drive so you can boot the laptop and show the laptop in a working state).

You don’t insert the hard drive, you have a very difficult time decrypting the contents of the hard drive.

For general folks you could always take the hard drive out, run a live linux distro on a usb flash drive. That way there is no confidential information on the laptop at all. No data on the USB flash drive either for that matter.

Usb flash drives are cheap as sin these days.

By: guy

guy — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 22:11:04 +0000

uh, sorry @Don Crossland, it’s already too late. It was too late 6 years ago… Headlines should read “America new internet backwater” given the degree of chill the Homeland Security business is causing (not to mention RIAA). I don’t mean to be insulting, I’m canadian and not intending to bash americans, but your current government is clearly a problem. You are right and to be commended for quoting Ben as you do: the world looks to america to live up to its promise as the leading experiment in democracy, but too often we are let down by reality…

@Rob W and @cunni, see Bruce Schneier on this subject http://www.schneier.com/essay-199.html (among others)

By: cunni

cunni — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 21:35:35 +0000

One nice way to protect your private data is to create a hidden volume oder even hidden os using truecrypt. http://www.truecrypt.org

By: Rob W

Rob W — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:34:23 +0000

Another good way around this is to run a second OS, a linux distro that loads but doesn’t mount any of you HDD’s that way they can’t be searched by people that don’t know linux. If your really really worried you can always take a DD image of a drive with info on it and then save it on a separate drive, then you can restore all of your data. If you have encrypted the dd file they won’t know what to do.

By: Don Crossland

Don Crossland — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:16:20 +0000

It is a pretty sad day in this country when we have to take steps to protect ourselves against our own government. Our rights are slowly vanishing in the name of protecting us from terrorism and the term “Police State” is not so far fetched. As Ben Franklin said, “Those who are willing to give up liberty for security deserve neither.” It’s time to speak out for our freedoms before it’s too late.