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Laptops Searched and Confiscated at U.S. Border
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Oct 24, 2006 06:11 PM
from the step-away-from-the-laptop dept.
from the step-away-from-the-laptop dept.
An anonymous reader writes, "According to an article in the New York Times, the Association of Corporate Travel Executives is asking the U.S. government for more detailed guidelines on when and why a laptop gets confiscated at the U.S. border, which, anecdotally, is happening more often. The story includes a report from a business traveler who had her laptop confiscated over a year ago and has yet to have it returned." According to the article, a knowledgeable lawyer said: "[Border guards] don't need probable cause to perform... searches under the current law. They can do it without suspicion or without really revealing their motivations." And an ACTE exective is quoted, "Potentially, this is going to have a real effect on how international business is conducted."
Related Stories
[+]
Your Rights Online: US Courts Consider Legality of Laptop Inspection 595 comments
ceide2000 writes "The government contends that it is perfectly free to inspect every laptop that enters the country, whether or not there is anything suspicious about the computer or its owner. Rummaging through a computer's hard drive, the government says, is no different from looking through a suitcase. One federal appeals court has agreed, and a second seems ready to follow suit." This story follows up on a story about laptop confiscation at the borders from a few months ago.
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Beige Alert! Beige Alert in terminal B! (Score:5, Informative)
"Sir, please place your laptop computer on the table for inspection."
"OK"
"Please turn it on, Sir."
"Um.. er.. ah.."
"Turn on the laptop, Sir!" (Suddenly it grows quiet as everyone stares, particularly some armed security personnel)
"Er ah, OK." Click. zwinnngg zwikka zwikka bweet.
"Pornographic wallpaper, no problem. Thousands of mp3's, no problem."
"Um-er-ah.
sniff sniff sniff Arf! whine Whine Arf! Arf!
"What's this then!?!"
"Huh?"
"Sir, we're going to have to confiscate this laptop computer, our highly trained canine has detected the presence of a banned and extremely dangerous substance!"
Read about it here [nzherald.co.nz] and here [news.com.au]
Re:Beige Alert! Beige Alert in terminal B! (Score:5, Funny)
I realize that Aussies love their vegemite, and Brits love their marmite, but for those of us who didn't grow up eating it, it's a substance worth confiscating at the border.
That stuff is just nasty.
Parent
Re:Beige Alert! Beige Alert in terminal B! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Beige Alert! Beige Alert in terminal B! (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Would they search a video ipod? (Score:4, Funny)
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Sounds like a job for... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Sounds like a job for... (Score:5, Insightful)
Better yet, can Captain Encryption keep the G-men from stealing it in the first place?
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Mailing you a clue by four (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you ever even traveled overseas before? It's like you just lifted this information from an Orwell novel or made it up off the top of your head just to be an anonymous contrarian. Your language is stilted and sounds like something you heard somebody smarter saying years ago: "Your person" indeed. I'm no Richard Stallman, but I've traveled extensively in the Middle East, Lower Asia, and in Eastern and Western Europe. For an American, I do alright.
Everywhere I've gone, airport and border security has been lax. You are searched, but not invasively so. They ask questions about where you're going and why, but it's not Jeopardy-level stuff. A valid passport does its job for you. Nobody throws you in quarantine for having a cold or pretending to, for godsake. Why don't you do us all a favor and stop bothering us with this unrealistic Checkpoint Charlie crap you saw in a late-night Spike TV Jean Claude Van Damme movie.
Interestingly, it's only when you re-enter the United States as an American citizen that you are subject to the most harassment, at least at O'Hare and Kennedy. They are not afraid to use dogs to sniff you while you're waiting on your luggage. They will whip out the rubber gloves when handling your property, and they will give you that knowing look like "Give us any trouble, and these can be used for you."
But thrown into quarantine? Laptop and briefcase-toting American businessmen? Please get a clue.
Parent
Required to enter your password? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Required to enter your password? (Score:5, Informative)
In the US? Probably confiscate your laptop, bang you on the head with it and send you off to Guantanamo for sleep deprivation and beatings. But anything else would be considered abusive and thus forbidden by law.
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Re:Required to enter your password? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Required to enter your password? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Required to enter your password? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are a US citizen I suppose the US criminal code and possibly anti terrorist legislation act apply. If you are not a US citizen they can pretty much do whatever they bloody well want with the worst case scenario being that you get dragged into a Learjet sporting a fake civil registration which flies you to some US allied country in the Middle East or one of those covert jails in E-Europe for 'harsh interrogation' [wikipedia.org].
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Required to enter *A* password (Score:5, Interesting)
First of all, don't put it to sleep. Turn it off, so that the password they ask for will be a login password rather than some kind of state-restoration password.
Next, when they ask for a login password, give it to them. Give them a username too.
Now they log in. They see a very boring directory, which is very easy (and here's the important part: quick!) to search through. They yawn after a very brief investigation, give the machine back, and you go on your way.
Why did everything work out? Because you gave them a username and password that you don't use everyday, so all your personal stuff isn't sitting in there, needing to be sorted though looking for stuff related to kiddie porn, terrorism, drugdealing, and .. (oh damn, what's the 4th horseman? I forgot.)
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Re:Required to enter *A* password (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Required to enter your password? (Score:5, Informative)
In the United States, I presume?
Well, the current law that Bush and his rubber stamps passed allow them to arrest you, hold you indefinately without a trial, rape you (injuries during torture up to but not including death are perfectly OK -- Rape is perfectly acceptabe under the word of the law and has already went on at Abu Ghraib), and prohibit you any contact with any outside sources.
Forever.
According to current law, they could make you disappear, and you'd spend the next 50 years in solitary confinement, only being let out long enough to torture for your password. Of course, having given said password, they would just throw you back in and forget about you. You have no rights to a lawyer, no rights to contest your confinement (this is what Haebus Corpus is all about. It was one of the cornerstones of our society, and the founding fathers assumed that no one would be stupid enough to ever try to overturn it -- nor none of their decendants stupid enough to accept it).
Essentually, no rights at all, since they can simply lock you up and you CANNOT FIGHT IT if they do not want to let you. Want to use your 1st Amendment rights to free speech? Sorry, you can't because you're behind bars in some secret European prison. All other rights are trumped by the loss of the right to contest your imprisonment.
(BTW, think it only applies to "brown people" like Jose Padilla or random "Terrorists"? Think again -- the law SPECIFICALLY STATES that it applies to US Citizens.)
If your family protested, they'd either be arrested too, or simply ignored, or the government, when needing a political football, would make something up about you -- like what they did with Mr. Padilla, who they originally accused of having plans of blowing up a dirty bomb in the US. 4 years later, they've never bothered to charge him with that, only even bothering to charge him with anything when he got thiiiis close to getting the US ruled out of line for it. (He's currently being held, still without trial, for "conspiracy to murder, kidnap, and maim people overseas.")
Pardon me for waxing political, but... I felt this was important, since there's not NEARLY enough outrage going on about this.
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Re:Required to enter your password? (Score:4, Informative)
The article at least mentions the two recent apposite federal cases, if not by name (Romm and Arnold). If the judge's ruling in US v Arnold is upheld on appeal, the circuit split between 9th and 5th circuits will probably lead the Supreme Court to address the question. I hope -- against hope, given the presence of usually big-government and usually pro-security justices -- that they would agree with the California judge in saying that laptop searches do implicate dignity and privacy interests.
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Re:Here's a Good Question (Score:4, Informative)
I was expecting to see plenty of debate around this when I saw the article but no, most people were focused on hiding their mp3's and pr0n....
I travel the border occasionally and have carried commercially sensitive information that my employer would not like released - i.e tender documents / competing bid information / commercial contracts. I'm 100% sure the customs guy isn't willing to sign the NDE before he searches my laptop either!!
If someone is serious about smuggling illegal pr0n or ITAR restricted data, they're not going to have it on their laptop. And the Customs guy better be looking for a 'Blue pill' or making sure he's not in a Virtual Machine setup just for him.
If I was a customs agent I'd be looking for people partitioning half a 60GB iPod and encrypting the other half with the data on it: "hey its a 30GB iPod". Then you better be looking for the the USB stick key-chain, ear rings, cufflinks, wristband, watch etc. Also the customs guy would have to rely on others (NSA) to catch e-mailing that encrypted file to yourself....
Someone above discussed exporting encryption technology... well if a 'bad man' has their hands on it - its already too late. I'm sure most of you have heard of Truecrypt - its free, open source and available world wide. Truecrypt also offers reasonable plausible deniability. Its also pretty hard to break. Just use that, then hide the data on a CD-R in your CD music album inside some files labelled "me_singing_creative_commons_songs.mp3"
Sure, they might catch some careless fools, - which goes toward justifying the laws and the processes. But its all just part of the 'security theatre' that Bruce Schneier talks about. It makes everyone feel safe because the TSA are doing something. Its the wrong thing, but its mighty comforting...... (to those that aren't under the magnifying glass.)
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Re:Here's a Good Question (Score:5, Interesting)
If my laptop is confiscated, it will be a pain, but not terrible since the encrypted partition is backed up when I'm on the work network. If they must decrypt it, then they have to go through my company's security officer and the company's lawyers. If they take the laptop, then its my company's problem and they can decide if it's worth the legal fight.
Why? I handle other people's sensitive personal data (and try to keep even that at a minimum on my laptop.) I do what I can to protect the privacy of anyone who has trusted us to keep it private. If I'm dealing with someone who is trying to legally obtain the contents of the drive, they are forced to go through a legal process that protects our clients and by extension myself. If I'm dealing with a personal criminal with a gun, hopefully I can just hand over the laptop and valiently try to run away.
No lying to officials is necessary. I don't think I'd volunteer to explain that there is an encrypted partition, but if asked directly I can tell the truth.
If you're worried about it, you could probably set up the same with friends instead of a company and have most of the benefits.
If the climate is really nasty, then I'll probably just ship the drive. Boot? Sure, that's knoppix by they way, let me know if you need help finding the games.
Parent
it isn't just the USA that does this... (Score:5, Interesting)
I shudder at how long it would take the good customs folks to work their way through a Linux box, or a decently encrypted hard drive.
In both of the Canadian searches, I was asked questions specifically based on email messages cached in my mail client. That was awful disturbing.
In the "long search" case they apparently also spent most of their time browsing the iPhoto and Photoshop albums and asked me a lot of questions about other places I had been.
This entire story is awfully disturbing. (Score:5, Interesting)
But an obvious way around this search would be to transfer the data electronically, and perhaps rent a laptop in the US to retrieve it.
So my question is this. If searching files on a physical device is legal, would it not also be legal for customs to "inspect" all electronic data that crosses international borders? And in the same way that it is legal for the authorities to sieze a laptop for more intensive analysis, would it not also be legal for customs to "embargo" electronic transmissions until they can be analyzed? (Perhaps compelling the sender or receiver, whichever one is on their soil, to disclose the key?)
Think about the implications for a couple of minutes. This would put the Great Firewall of China to shame, and you have to know that somebody in the justice department is thinking about doing it.
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Re:This entire story is awfully disturbing. (Score:4, Interesting)
As I understand US law (IANAL, I'm not even an American) there's a difference legally between data that's in transmission and in storage. One falls under wiretapping laws, one is just under search laws (if I remember).
Here's an mp3 of the talk where I heard about it at HOPE Number Six: http://www.hopenumbersix.net/mp3/16/network_monito ring_and_the_law.mp3 [hopenumbersix.net]
Incidentally, the same conference that I had my laptop searched coming back from. Canadian customs officials, I'm a Canadian citizen. They used spotlight for a couple minutes in a back room and then returned it. I would /love/ to know if there is some legal info about this, since I would have been willing to assert my rights, I'm just not sure what they are in that situation. I figured that they have roughly the same rights as if I was carrying a stack of (paper) notebooks and wanted to read through 'em, but that'd be logical, and I've rarely seen the law work logically where a computer was involved.
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Stateless client (Score:3, Interesting)
Security (Score:5, Funny)
Hard Drive Encryption? (Score:3, Interesting)
Globalization Demands Open Borders (Score:5, Insightful)
Some will reply and tell me this is crazy. How it can never work. That somehow we just have to have walls. Why? And if walls are so good and necessary, would you support building them between the States? Why not?
My Lack of Surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't like it, get the law changed.
Otherwise, all they'll get is a policy change... which is the equivalent of a "I promise" but without any garauntee or accountability.
Re:My Lack of Surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
The Supreme Court has held in several cases, such as Hernandez and Ickes, that the ability to conduct searches is an inherent sovereign right of the country. The President, through Customs, is able to exercise this right through Article II.
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Re:My Lack of Surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:My Lack of Surprise (Score:5, Informative)
See United States v. Arnold, 2006 U.S. Dist.
The central holding of this ruling is that the so called border-search exception to the 4th amendment (argued as implicit in the ability of the gov't to levy and enforce tariffs) cannot apply to personal effects such as notebook computer as the information it contains retains 4th amendment protection.
Consequently, searchs of your computer at the airport are illegal without a warrant.
Searches which do not access the information content--e.g., x-ray examination--are still allowed.
This case even had the "save the children" gateway to degrading the rights of the people--the defendent was found to have child pornography on his computer.
Parent
+1 informative on the MQR standard, and I'll raise (Score:5, Informative)
Thank you. If I had mod points I'd give you one, but instead here's a link [fourthamendment.com] to the case you mentioned.
--MarkusQ
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Re:My Lack of Surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
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Scary (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Scary (Score:4, Insightful)
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confiscation without a reason is called . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Dumb move USA.. (Score:5, Informative)
I thought that after 911 the government departments were meant to be 'beating to the same drum' for national security and yet here we are, 5 years later, with a case of the geniuses that run border security stuffing up other government departments.
Re:Dumb move USA.. (Score:5, Informative)
Have had equipment confiscated in a number of places, had to pay 'import' taxes on company owned equipment with access tags (got it reimbursed after 8 months)... but FedEx gets it there, no hassles, no problems.
Best of all? I travel for the government. So in essence, I'm charging them cost plus to ship my equipment so that it won't be confiscated by their agents.
&*shakes head*&
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L.A. Federal Judge Disagrees (Score:5, Informative)
law.com article [law.com]
opinion [uscourts.gov]
Of course, this is not the end of the matter, but highly relevant.
-puk
I had my laptop taken at the border (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a u.s. citizen and had my laptop confiscated at the canadian border when re-entering the u.s. about three years ago. They also held me in a cell for a few hours until a person from ICE (immigration and customs enforcement) could arrive to interrogate me and my friends. After a few hours they let me through, turned around my canadian friends, and kept my laptop. They returned the laptop to me about four months later (with a burned copy of an EnCase [guidancesoftware.com] client cd left in the cd rom drive).
I had nothing to hide and there was nothing I could imagine useful to them on that laptop. If I thought I had something to hide or a reason the government would think I was up to something that would warrant their taking my laptop (something more than my political activism), I would not have carried it across the border. In any event, this taught me me a few things: 1) always encrypt entire partitions, including one's root partition, not individual files as I had been doing, 2) don't carry one's private encryption key when crossing borders [or in any obvious way the rest of the time], 3) always keep plenty of encrypted backups in different physical locations so that you can be back up to speed as soon as possible if your laptop is taken, 4) avoid carrying electronics across the border at all if one can't afford to replace the hardware soon afterward.
Personally, it made me happy to know the government spent time and resources copying and possibly picking through my innocuous files while there were other people out there busy with bringing an end to a government that found such activity useful.
Funny side note: my canadian friends, after being turned around and having to cross back to the canadian side a few hours later, were asked by the canadian border person, "why were you there at u.s. customs so long?"
My friends told them, "they said our friend was a suspected terrorist."
The canadian border person *laughed*, said "those americans are crazy", and let them on their way without any further hassle.
Friend coming back from Thailand talked about it.. (Score:5, Funny)
So, why wouldn't I just have two partitions, dual-boot, and on the plane make sure it's setup to boot the 'boring' partition?
Think the customs guys will notice that dmesg shows the drive has more space than df -k does?
They _are_ comfortable with emacs in a text window, right? That's what _I_ boot into
Re:Friend coming back from Thailand talked about i (Score:5, Insightful)
If the customs officials have no clue what your computer is doing, their likely reaction would be to:
A) Pat you on the back, apologize for wasting your time, and send you on your way.
B) Put you in a holding cell while they spent hours attempting to figure out your notebook.
How does appearing like you have something to hide help you at all? Best to make it boot into an innocuous windows partition.
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great business model (Score:5, Insightful)
What happened to all the "conservatives"? Am I the only conservative who actually believes in limited government? That may be the most tangible benefit of a Democratic victory in an (any) election--the conservatives would be (ostensibly, if dishonestly) anti-government again. Right now we're stuck with the dichotomy that government-funded healthcare is creeping totalitarianism, but government torture is innocuous. Strange world we live in.
Re:hmmm. (Score:5, Funny)
I crossed the border twice on Sunday. They didn't care about my laptop. There's your anecdotal evidence.
Years ago, on a ski trip to Searchmont (in Canada near the Soo*) a friend and I were returning to the US and had pulled into US Customs. "Are you bringing anything into the country?" "Um.. just these doughnuts"
Bad. Very bad. They nearly tore the car apart (apparently looking for more doughnuts.)
Still a sore point to this day when I visit my friend and his wife and go to Canada. "Do not mention doughnuts!"
*Sault Saint Marie
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Re:Search Where? (Score:5, Funny)
> You need to search where?
> That doesn't even make sense!
It does, for a USB thumbdrive.
~wavy lines, a bombed-out shack in post-Civil-War-II America~
This USB keychain I got here was first purchased by your great-grandfather to hold pictures he took during the First Gulf War. It was bought in a Best Buy in Knoxville, Tennessee. Made by the first company to ever make USB thumbdrives. Up till then people just carried floppy disks that was read by magnets. It was bought by private Doughboy Ernie Coolidge on the day he set sail for Iraq. It was your great-grandfather's USB thumbdrive and he carried it everyday he was in that war.
When he had done his duty, he went home to your great-grandmother, took the thumbdrive out of his pocket, put it an empty dresser drawer, and in that can it stayed 'til your granddad Dane Coolidge was called upon by his country to go overseas and fight the Ay-rabs once again. This time they called it The First Global War On Terror. Your great-grandfather gave this watch to your granddad for good luck. Unfortunately, Dane's luck wasn't as good as his old man's. Dane was a Marine and he was killed -- along with the other Marines at the battle of Baghdad. Your granddad was facing death, he knew it. None of those boys had any illusions about ever leavin' the Green Zone alive. So three days before the Ay-rabs retook the Green Zone, your granddad asked a gunner on an Air Force transport name of Winocki, a man he had never met before in his life, to deliver to his infant son, who he'd never seen in the flesh, his USB thumbdrive. Three days later, your granddad was dead.
But Winocki kept his word. After the First Global War on Terror was over, he paid a visit to your grandmother, delivering to your infant father, his Dad's USB thumbdrive. This thumbdrive.
This thumbdrive was in Daddy's pocket during the Second Civil War when he was flyin' to Canada. He was captured at the airport, which was a place that was sorta like bein' in a Halliburton prison camp. He knew if the TSA ever saw the thumbdrive it'd be confiscated, taken away. The way your Dad looked at it, that thumbdrive was your birthright. He'd be damned if any bureaucrats were gonna put their greasy hands on his boy's birthright.
So he hid it in the one place he knew he could hide something. His ass. Five long hours, he wore this thumbdrive up his ass. Then he died of a perforated colon, but before he did he gave me the thumbdrive. I hid this uncomfortable hunk of plastic and silicon up my ass two more hours. Then, after a total of seven hours in secondary inspection, I was sent on home to my family. And now, little man, I give the watch to you.
- With apologies to Tarantino [whysanity.net]
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Re:The REAL truth (Score:5, Insightful)
Western police are not immune to this. "Our cops don't do that!"... BS. I don't know why we (westerners) think that we're inherently better human beings than say, Soviet Russian police. Nothing about us makes our societies better, it is our political and economic freedom that has made us better. Define power roles and remove the controls... the "Stanford Prison Experiment [stanford.edu]" could easily have been a prototype for Abu Ghraib.
When you consider that Customs officials increasingly don't have to answer to anyone, and there is no longer any useful process of complaint or appeal, it is inevitable that they will abuse their power. After all, you could be a terrorist/communist/anarchist/whatever it was 150 years ago.
As for customs guards, the fact that you're a business traveller, earn 10x what they do, and that this is the only context in which they will ever have power over you will surely cause them to abuse their authority. This is human nature.
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The logic of bureaucracy (Score:4, Insightful)
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now, yes, but why maintain it? (Score:4, Interesting)
The approach the White House is taking to, well, everything, is bound to trickle down, because everyone in the world would find it convenient to be free of oversight and accountability. If the position of the upper government is "trust us, and no, you can't check, because that would help the terrorists," then that incredibly convenient pretext for hiding everything they do will trickle down the ladder.
THAT, not an irrational hatred of Bush, was why the civil libertarians yelled so loudly about the White House redefining torture, due process, habeus corpus, and everything else. If one government agency can just sign a document to lock you up for as long as they want, exempting themselves from judicial or legislative oversight, redefining or ignoring laws they don't like, then well, hell, EVERYONE wants to do that, and it will trickle down to your local police department eventually. It happened with the war on drugs, and the war on terrorism is a lot more useful. Ever hear of civil asset forfeiture? Ostensibly, it was a critical tool to go after the drug dealers, but over 80% of people whose assets (cars, houses, boats, even cash) were seized WERE NEVER CHARGED. This happened under Clinton, too. Government abuses power. That is a truism, and it doesn't stop being a truism just because you voted for a particular administration. The "conservatives" have gotten so excited about being able to remake the world however they wanted that they have become the very totalitarians they claimed to fear from liberalism.
But back to the police and those laptops. You seem to think that there is some independent life-force or truth-force in existence that will spontaneously, without any legislative mandates, cause the police departments across the country to do the right thing even when no one is watching over their shoulder. That is naive to the point of hilarity. People don't handle power well. Would you like to give high school teachers the ability to strip-search any student at will, with no legislative oversight, and just assume that they won't abuse that? Do you hate teachers? No, and I don't hate cops either, but if you remove oversight that was provided by due process and probable cause, and excuse them from having to justify their actions before a judge and risk censure, then their authority will be abused for gain. It's just human nature.
Parent
NO! Dont encrypt your whole HDD (Score:5, Informative)
The trick to hiding something is to make it look innocent.
Encrypting your whole hard drive just screams "kiddie porn" or
"terrorist's handbook here" to any agent that looks. And the first
thing he will do is ask for the password. You'd better hand
it over or get ready for a quick trip to Gitmo.
Instead, have a normal drive with a normal OS install. When
they scan the 200,000 files on an average drive they'll find
nothing unusual. Certainly no
But on that drive have a file named "corrupted.doc" or
something like that. It is really a Truecrypt file/drive.
You mount it manually when you log in and all your important
stuff is in there.
If they log in and search and manage to find "corrupted.doc"
(which they wont be looking for), they will ask what it is.
You can say it was an important doc file but it got corrupted
and you were hoping to find someone to fix it. It sure will
look corrupt thanks to Truecrypt not putting any sort of signature
at the start of the file.
Parent
Re:How is this NOT Un-Constitutional??? (Score:4, Informative)
The U.S. government has very specific and limited authorizations under the Constitution. Not just within the borders, but everywhere.
Bush, Clinton, Gore, Obama (Barack), Kerry, Kennedy, all of them have to abide by the Constitution no matter where they're at. When will the courts start charging them with the treasonous act of violating the Constitution and give them the ultimate penalty [unanimocracy.com]?
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You emphasized the wrong part (Score:4, Insightful)
It does not apply only to US citizens, and it does not apply only within the borders of the US. The US government shall not do this to anyone, anywhere. Full stop. End of fucking discussion!
Why the fuck is this so damn hard for everyone -- including federal judges -- to understand?!!!
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