My oldest daughter travels a lot on business. In the last few years she has been held and interviewed by the FBI because her name was on a list somewhere. Missed her flight by the time they discovered that she was much younger than the bad gal. She has lost a digital camera because one must leave ones bags unlocked. She lost some costume jewelry -- stolen in an airport.

My point is this -- why should I believe that an examination of the contents of my HD would respect the privacy of those contents -- that the very people examining it wouldn't steal valuable images, engineering plans, creative works, patent data in process, contract information, legal briefs, etc. when they can't even keep their hands off some inexpensive costume jewelry? The problem is that no one minds the minders.

How is searching your hard drive fundamentally different than a customs agent searching through the same materials (legal papers, health data, social security numbers, personal finance, pending patents, etc.) only in paper form contained in your briefcase?

My initial reaction to this was the same as the OP.... outrage. The more I ponder, though, the less sure I am that outrage is appropriate. Think maybe NovaScotian has a point.... the real problem is somebody needs to be monitoring the monitors.

Other than obviously being PO'd about the delay and an intrusion into what we consider personal, how would we feel if they were allowed to look at our hard drives only in our presence and were prohibited, under penalty of criminal charges, of keeping or producing any record/copy whatsoever of the contents that were legal? Would that change anything?

From Juvenal, in the first/second century A.D.: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (sometimes translated as "Who watches the watchmen?")

The ACLU, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), the Association for Corporate Travel Executives, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the Rutherford Institute, and prominent technologists such as Bruce Schneier are all engaged in fighting this.

Trevor

Search ≠ seizure
 

I have accentuated the key word in your post. I would have somewhat less problems with customs agent searching, in a controlled and controllable fashion, for specific things on my harddisk.

What I cannot stomach is them copying the entire harddisk, or a very large portion thereof.

You said it: You might tolerate customs agents flipping through your legal papers, contracts, negotiations briefs etc (perhaps to ascertain that they are not SAM blueprints).

But I am reasonably sure that you would not appreciate Customs photocopying the lot of your papers.

Or am I wrong?

I think that's a key point, AS. When a customs agent riffles through your briefcase or through your suitcase, they do it in front of you, and they don't take anything out of your sight unless you haven't declared it or it is not permitted (oranges, etc).

We're in agreement on the photocopying. In fact, I don't like the idea of them searching anything that does not represent a potential threat to the aircraft and its passengers..... i.e. looking at my laptop to verify it is not a bomb is one thing, checking data on the hard drive is another matter entirely in my view. The latter is simply fishing for a crime when no reason exists to suspect one.

I was trying, ineptly, to make two points:

1. There is a long tradition of border searches in most all nations. Is this a simple extension of that tradition to a high tech search of high tech baggage (and nothing to do with terrorists)?

2. It is as much the way it is being done as it is the fact that it's being done (without any safeguards/protections for the citizen being searched).

Course, it goes without saying that likely none of us trusts the bureaucrats to keep anything private.

Did you catch the news story about the woman who couldn't get through the metal detectors because of a nipple ring? Officials ended up requiring her to remove the ring, which she did but sustained an injury in doing so. That one is going to court.... I mean just how intrusive and humiliating has this got to be to make sure a boob is not a bomb? Can they really not tell the difference?

ah, me... you forget that 'the terrorists' were nothing more than an excuse in the first place. no state or organization in the middle east has ever been a valid threat to the US (except maybe Saudi Arabia and Israel - lol). this whole thing was engineered as a power grab from the getgo. keep in mind that the Patriot Act had been popping in and out of Congress on Republican initiative since about 1990; their concern was not terrorism, but rather keeping closer control over financial transactions on the internet (purely domestic surveillance). 9/11 just gave them the excuse they needed to get it past, and the resultant wars were ways of solidifying their domestic agenda.

very sad, really.

The terrorists were an excuse to invade Iraq, but they were/are more than that. In their minds, they've been fighting us since after the first Gulf War. They bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, US Embassies in 1998, the USS Cole in 2000, and were planning 9/11 as far back as 1993.

I wasn't claiming that the terrorist would lose because of anything we're doing to stop them. Our efforts have been wasteful at best. I was just saying that the things that the terrorists do have never caused the kind of change they would like. They never will, no matter how incompetent our leaders are, because it isn't what we do that limits their success. It's what they do that ensures their failure.

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Let us not expand this into a discussion of the First, Second or Third Gulf War, or terrorism in general.

I hadn't intended to, but they are closely related. If terrorists are doomed to fail against even modest or inept resistance, then unreasonable searches of papers and/or computers become even more absurd.

I do not travel in my current job, and when I did I had the option of driving or flight. I took driving, as taking flight, left me without a car, and a taxi as my only mode of transport. Work would not pay for a rental, but would reimburse me for a taxi.

Enough of my background for this post.

I was wondering, if you kept any sensitive data in an encrypted disk image, password protected, would you have to give up that password? If they copied it, because they deemed necessary to copy my hdd, they would not be able to decrypt it, without significant time, or me giving up the password. Would they even know what it was?

I am posting this because of other posts saying to mail themselves a DVD of their data (what if it gets lost, or sent to the wrong address?) or "cloud computing", which is nice, but if I have to work on multiple gigs of data, and my connection is really slow at the hotel, this could be bad for business.

Even though I do not travel, I do use my laptop in public places. I always keep my data for work in am encrypted disk image. I unmount it via sleepwatcher, if I forget to unmount it when I sleep my laptop. If someone were to steal the laptop, because I left it, or because I was robbed, at least the data would be encrypted, and somewhat safe.

"terrorism" is just the contemporary flavor of WAR. Since wars have been always won and lost the same will go for terrorists. Some of the battles will be won, some will be lost. But the ultimate purpose of war to kill and destroy will succeed.
As for americans(people in general) who did not vote for particular government does not leave them out of responsibility of deeds of that government.

wow, i can see where this thread is beginning to head.... and it dont look good

Agreed. And if it goes there, it’s dead.
Please! The issue of this topic is search and seizure of data contained on laptop harddisks.

hmm well as far as i see it (granted im young and not as wise as some members in this topic) regardless how the topic starts, if its something to do with homeland security, the topic will eventually go towards terrorism and the inevitable aftermath that this thread is so close to....

Maybe we should have a politics section, be it, it would have to be strictly modded.. but allow a little more freedom then you guys allow?

The problem isn't technical, it's political.
 

We all (ok, most of us) know how to encrypt our files or use the internet to get them to/from a server. It would be relatively simple (although tedious) to arrive at an airport with a laptop that has no personal or business data on it, get to your destination, download the needed items, do your work, save it back to the server, and then head back home with the laptop wiped of all data.

Anything else would be a political statement — not that there's anything wrong with that! If you encrypt a bunch of Disney or Norman Rockwell type images to your computer, you're setting up the TSA to feel your wrath through a passive aggressive use of Free Speech. It's a political solution to a political problem, and if enough people do it, it might work!

more to cwt's point, this topic was explicitly political from the first post. you guys just don't like it when it strays into 'unacceptable' political opinions. the simplest and fairest solution to the problem would be to ban *all* posts that are political in nature.

make for kind of a boring forum, though. :)

True. I was trying to couch it in technical terms! :D

yeah... I never have been good at that 'subtlety' thing, though. ;)

A bit of self-moderation...
 

Granted, the simplest solution is to ban absolutely all posts that are political in nature. And there are some who are itching to have it be just this way. And purely political posts are expressly forbidden.

I for one believe that it is meaningful to discuss those aspects of technology that touch on the political, and sometimes those aspects of legislation that have a technological dimension. In my opinion some of the most worthwhile discussions of the past have been of this nature.

The first post in this thread was mine, because I thought this topic was of precisely such a nature. So if the topic itself is to be faulted, the fault is fully mine.

Such discussions require a fine balance of all participants. And we have seen that balance achieved many a time before. That does, however, require a bit more subtlety (I believe that’s the word you used TW), and refraining from not blowing the topic wide open. Perhaps the most accurate term for this is self-moderation?

Can we do that?

The alternative is far stricter moderation -- and, in my humble opinion, a more boring Coat Room.


Respectfully,
ArcticStones

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