Topic: Feds say they can search your laptop at the border but won’t say why (USA) (Read 1354 times)

Also this has been updated so that it now includes anything within 100 miles of the boarder. that includes every major coastal city, 8 of the 10 most populous cities, and 15 of the 20 most populated cities. According to the ACLU this includes 66% of the entire US population as of 2007. That's right 2 out of every 3 US citizens has 0 fourth amendment rights when it comes to personal electronic devices (its like PRISM but worse, because it includes data that you never submit to any external network).

This means a department of homeland security officer has the legal right to walk up to you on the streets of New York, or San Francisco, or LA, or Chicago, or Houstan and, without any suspicion or reasonable doubt, take your electronics from you and search them.

1984 is already here, they just give the masses enough bread and circuses so that they dont notice or care. By the time most people realize what they gave up it will be too late.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/10/aclu-assails-10/

Not really.

The sky is falling!

It must be because most of us are Anarchists here but I'm exactly the same, whenever people pull shit like this it just makes me want to piss them off it would be totally worth it if you did do it.

Even better - use DD and /dev/random to fill the whole harddrive with random data and then restore generic TrueCrypt bootloader. The result is guaranteed to be indistinguishable from real encryption.In USSR there was less than 200 crimes in criminal code. Seems that USA is following their dead sibling USSR into making everybody guilty to something. Slaves must be kept in order by force of legal system. Stalin already knew that.

Please do this and video it then post to YouTube then link us to it in this thread. Omg lol

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22824379

scraped from the NSA servers in Utah

You can attempt to do your best. The best method to succeed without getting in trouble is to smile to everybody, behave polite and don't bring anything with you that might trigger a reaction.

To avoid issues, don't have anything on the HDD encrypted or not that may cause issues. Store it online, and retrieve it when you reach your destination.

If you have a file, and they for whatever reason do a disk image of your laptop, and then later on find out you have a big encrypted file, despite you claiming there was nothing there - then you might be in a lot of trouble, that can easily be averted by using the method I mentioned in the first sentence.

Fortunately they can't steal your thoughts.  They can't make you give a password. I actually feel compelled to Encrypt a drive with nothing on it and run down the border and see if I can get them to chase their tails.

Better yet - just keep everything pristine on the computer. Have windows 7 installed, with some family photos and some business letters, then when you reach your destination, you just download the stuff you need from your private server. Perhaps an image with a linux-distro on it and with all your usual tools and sketchy files.

Some TSA officers would clearly label you a would-be-terrorist if you booted your laptop into a linux command line. You would probably be barred from touching the laptop, and for good measure, they'd probably put a bullet or some more through it. The link is from a visit to Israel, and added for humorous purposes. But, better to stay family friendly than to have eye brows raised!

Or if you feel firsky, just put this as the background. For extra attention, put on some anti US slogans. Surefire way to make the search extended.

hard disk encryption will solve this problem.

My hunch is that any and all Tea Party members ....

government sucks bring on libertopia/ancapistan

If you'd seen some of the discussions I've been involved in on here, you might not have pegged it as sarcasm, either.

The total control and 1984 will come slowly and in small increments. This is just small nudge towards total police state.

Yes, I am - I wasn't expecting to qualify my answer as I hoped sarcasm was worldly wise.

You're kidding, yes?

Good on them - I guess they think it might stop some baddies

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/feds-say-they-can-search-your-laptop-at-the-border-but-wont-say-why/

Under the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Americans are generally protected from unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents. But we generally have less privacy at the border—usually when entering the United States from abroad.

At present, border agents do not have to provide a warrant or have reasonable suspicion to search your laptop—they essentially just need a hunch. For some time now, civil liberties groups have been pressing to change that policy. At the very least, these groups would like to compel the government to explain its legal rationale.

Back in February 2013, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released an executive summary (PDF) of its findings to justify warrantless border searches of laptops. However, that summary did not include any substantial analysis of the reasoning the government provides.

On Wednesday, though, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the DHS released (PDF) its complete December 2011 Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Impact Assessment.

The assessment first counters by noting:

The issue is an important one even though it affects only a very small proportion of the many millions of travelers who enter the United States each month. The table below summarizes the relevant statistics; as it shows, only a few hundred people each month are subjected to any kind of electronic device search (which vary in their comprehensiveness), and of that number, only a small minority have their electronic devices detained for any length of time.
According to the government’s own figures, there were only 302 travelers subject to electronic device searches in 2009 and 383 in 2010. Still, that raises the question: what is the government’s constitutionally based reasoning for such searches? Frankly, we don’t know. A lot of it is redacted.

On Page 18 of the 52-page document under the section entitled “First Amendment,” several paragraphs are completely blacked out. They simply end with the sentence: “The laptop border searches in the [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and [Customs and Border Protection] do not violate travelers’ First Amendment rights as defined by the courts."

Because we say so

The DHS also says that it definitely can’t change its policies to be “suspicion-based,” as that would be “operationally harmful.” Why?

First, commonplace decisions to search electronic devices might be opened to litigation challenging the reasons for the search. In addition to interfering with a carefully constructed border security system, the litigation could directly undermine national security by requiring the government to produce sensitive investigative and national security information to justify some of the most critical searches. Even a policy change entirely unenforceable by courts might be problematic; we have been presented with some noteworthy CBP and ICE success stories based on hard-to-articulate intuitions or hunches based on officer experience and judgment. Under a reasonable suspicion requirement, officers might hesitate to search an individual's device without the presence of articulable factors capable of being formally defended, despite having an intuition or hunch based on experience that justified a search.
However, the government did provide a pointed response to arguments that ICE and CBP should revert to a 1986 policy. That legislation allowed agents to “briefly peruse” a traveler’s possessions to determine if there was probable cause or a reasonable suspicion for a further seizure.

This approach is not tenable in the context of modern electronic devices. Gigabytes of information may be stored in password-protected files, encrypted portions of hard drives, or in a manner intended to obscure information from observation. An on-the-spot perusal of electronic devices following the procedures established in 1986 could well result in a delay of days or weeks; even a cursory examination of the contents of a laptop might require a team of officers to spend days or weeks skimming the voluminous contents of the device. At the same time, a firm time limit for completing a search risks allowing a wrongdoer to "run out the clock" by encrypting and password-protecting his device, or traveling with voluminous amounts of documents, or other measures to make the search very time consuming.
Not surprisingly, the ACLU takes issue with this line of reasoning. In a blog post on Wednesday, Brian Hauss, a legal fellow at the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, wrote:

To be sure, rummaging around through people's personal papers may well turn up the occasional bad guy, but that is not the only consideration. No doubt law enforcement agents would also find it useful to walk into people's homes at will, but we don't allow them to do so because that would intrude on our reasonable expectation of privacy in our homes. And just as we reasonably expect privacy in our homes, so, too, do we expect that border agents will not base their decisions to search through our electronic information on a whim or a hunch. Put another way, requiring law enforcement agents to possess objective reasons for a search is a feature of our constitutional framework, not a bug.