Securing Your Notebook Against U.S. Customs
May 15th, 2008Via: Guardian:
Last month a US court ruled that border agents can search your laptop, or any other electronic device, when you’re entering the country. They can take your computer and download its entire contents, or keep it for several days. Customs and Border Patrol has not published any rules regarding this practice, and I and others have written a letter to Congress urging it to investigate and regulate this practice.
But the US is not alone. British customs agents search laptops for pornography. And there are reports on the internet of this sort of thing happening at other borders, too. You might not like it, but it’s a fact. So how do you protect yourself?
Encrypting your entire hard drive, something you should certainly do for security in case your computer is lost or stolen, won’t work here. The border agent is likely to start this whole process with a “please type in your password”. Of course you can refuse, but the agent can search you further, detain you longer, refuse you entry into the country and otherwise ruin your day.
You’re going to have to hide your data. Set a portion of your hard drive to be encrypted with a different key – even if you also encrypt your entire hard drive – and keep your sensitive data there. Lots of programs allow you to do this. I use PGP Disk (from pgp.com). TrueCrypt (truecrypt.org) is also good, and free.
While customs agents might poke around on your laptop, they’re unlikely to find the encrypted partition. (You can make the icon invisible, for some added protection.) And if they download the contents of your hard drive to examine later, you won’t care.
I have taken thousands of innocent landscape images as well as countless pages of mundane text and encrypted them using a 128 bit system that would take NSA’s best computers millions of years to decipher. These I keep on all of my computers just in the hope that some day the Nazis will seize my hard drives. Good luck to them!
Just after the TSA got operational here in the American Police State, I had to take my daughter to the Portland Jetport in Maine for a flight overseas. I had my camera to take a series of Bon Voyage shots and happened to take a number of pictures of the TSA screeners as well as TSA personnel operating the baggage X-ray systems. They were so flustered at me pointing my camera at them that I observed them making multiple errors. I thought it was funny at the time that these guys were so freaked. It is probably some violation by now. Under BushReich, we are not to think, see, hear, do, or photograph!
I was at Standsted Airport in London recently and saw a guy saying goodbye to his friends as they headed off into the security check area. He took one last photo of them, but alerted by the camera flash, a security guy came running, grabbed the camera and made the guy erase the photo.
Put in a clean ‘shop new’ HD before going anywhere near the UK/USA. Add some productivity apps. Use the ‘internet’ to get any files needed within the USA.
When you get home, put you real hd back in.