US customs: Yes, we can seize your laptop, iPod

Disneyland Florida

Sorry to all those people trying to be smart. There are two disneylands in the US, one in california and one in florida. So George Johnson would have been able to take his kids there if he wanted. Mines the one with "Disneyland Florida" on the back.

I am ashamed

of how ridiculous this is getting. Knowing this gov't. please everyone request that their equipment be searched. laptops, ipods, zunes, the works. They will have no idea what to do with it. Infact if you have free HD space. zip or rar up your trash and make copies until your drive is full encrypt it, put the key on a post it note on the bottom of the drive it will be madness.

Then use a live CD and VPN back to your office to get work done.

Where the fuck is my moon base, this ride sucks and I want to get off

Johnny Mnemonic

and people thought the plot was ridiculous... the very idea of a data courier carrying confidential data across borders encrypted on a data-drive linked into his brain... I can see there being a stimulus for developing this sort of device for getting commercially confidential data through US customs... because downloading it via ftp or whatever when you get there will mean it gets intercepted and sent to be decrypted.

4th amendment rights

don't apply to non US citizens so you can bleat and quote them 'til yer blue in the face and it will have zero, nil, nada effect. I often tell my friends that in the US you are subject to at least 9 levels of policing all of whom can arrest you, whereas in the UK I think the only people who can actually arrest you are the police.

Paris cos she knows what its like to be arrested, and to have her private video raided.

Efros

"Disneyland Florida"

No.

That'd be "Disneyworld Florida"

Your jacket must be a knock-off.

Package fly-drive

So where's the package deal where I fly to Canada, get a train or rental car across the border and then take internal flights in the USA? Or is that just as bad?

Do you folks believe?

...in secure connections to remote servers and encryption? Really? Do you connect to them via your own satellite and satellite-phone, or how do you do it? I would much rather trust in a hidden micro SD than in anything that has to pass a wire on its way. Fill your lappy with heavily encrypted bullshit data anyway, they can have their fun with that.

It's very very very simple

Really...

Don't go.

Do business with somewhere more enlightened.

How about..

..multiple layers of encryption? or something that auto-expires so you need some kind of physical device (which the makeup of cant be determined) to reset the enc/de-cryption keys of? :)

Flame at paranoid souls (whose x-rays couldnt tell difference between a glass ornament we brought back and a solid clubbing object)

Tempted to do a Madonna

Can you imagine an iPod with 2 days worth of tracks with someone screaming "You b******s; leave my files alone"

I can imagine some low level clerk being tasked to listen to the whole thing, then having to go through it again at high and low speeds (backwards even) to check to see if there are any hidden messages.

Gives me a warm glow just thinking about it.

Just ...

Encrypt your data using Truecrypt but bury the datafile in a windows system folder and call it xyz.temp or similar.

When they try spying on you they will stand no chance of even noticing it.

Alternatively just stop travelling to the US and go somewhere more liberal. Like Burma.

I've only got one thing to say on that subject

Oooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhh

The paranoid bastards.

End

That's it - I quit.

I'm not going there again. I own a few 8GB SD cards and stuff, and my pr0n is on a hidden, 256-bits encrypted, hidden filesystem already, but that does it. My longer-than average hair and casual dressing habits already qualify me for a "random" extensive check every time I go to the US (sometimes *two* extensive searches -I kid you not), each time making it difficult for me to catch my plane, what if the US monkeys want to have a look at my triple-boot laptop and the 2 external drives that go with it? Methink I'll have to get to the airport one week in advance (just to think I could have to explain *why* it is triple-boot -and what it means- to a non-techie USian. Yuck.).

Now there is a problem, as the handbrake works in DC. Heck, she'll just have to find a job in a civilized country.

Now I foresee a solution... GRUB waiting time set to 0, default boot to Vista (it came with it and I didn't remove it), I bet no US custom person (whatever the seniority) will even imagine that there's something else on the laptop. Oh, wait. Given Vista's boot time, I'll still miss my plane. Forget it.

They're not interested in your data

They are not interested in your data -- they are really not. These are arbitrary rules, purely constructive. You can carry any data you like, as long as you acknowledge that they have the right to look at it. If you make it hard for them to look at your data by encrypting it or hiding it, you are not acknowledging their authority, and they will make your life tedious. It's all about containment.

Remember, they are not there to stop terrorists. They are there to :

1. Show you who's boss.

2. Stop an exodus from the city or state should something bad happen.

FTUSA

"...Can you imagine an iPod with 2 days worth of tracks with someone screaming "You b******s; leave my files alone"..."

alternately, just fill your ipod with several thousand copies of "fuck the USA" by 'the exploited'.

or even better just don't visit the USA. OK there might be some nice scenery, but that's slightly outweighed by the fact it's a militaristic fascist shithole - where if the police don't beat you up and shoot you, the local twelve year olds will. why the hell anyone would want to go there in the first place beats me!

do you do it just to make nu-lab-britain seem slightly less shitty by comparison?

I wonder if...

a UK traveller with his encrypted laptop gets his laptop taken. He refuses to give his password and sent back home.

The US tell the UK about your laptop and ask the Met to get the password for them..

A few day's later the police knock at his door saying they want to have a chat about your laptop and it's password.

If you refuse you get locked up for a few years and labelled a terrorist......

Mine is the one with the padded insides and padded envelopes

so stupid

I love americans - they spend so much money on the 'apperance' of being safe. As many people have pointed out - what is the point of this when you have the internet? Just download any dodgy data when you get into the country.

Hopefully if the UK govt pull this shit - we can stop them by telling them its to expensive. (they wont listen the the worthless argument).

Encryption idea

We've all heard that you can be "forced" to give up passwords and the like, regardless of whether you actually know them.

I'm fairly sure something to this effect exists (hell, it's a piece of cake with any assymmetric key encryption), so why haven't we thought (or rather, why haven't I seen the suggestion yet) of putting the decryption key on a stick and _leave it at home_ or whatever? Mailing it forward would work as well, I suppose.

Gah, the fact that circumventions like this have to be made disgusts me. Papers please, indeed.

Icon because I'm not sure what it even represents but it looks like a helicopter.

Going to keep them busy...

So I take my laptop in which has193,000 files in 50GB on it. How can they check that - and thats a tiny amount compared to my wife's laptop or most of my friends.

So I hide my "plans to bomb Disneyworld" in a file with a executable extension and hide it in the windows folder or in a folder under the Program Files folder (and we all know how many apps when de-installed leave crap in there so there is no way of checking each of the files).

Is that 15MB file called photoshopelements.exe really photoshop?

Or what about those .dbf files - Oracle datafiles or terrorist documents? Or that zip file with a MySQL DB with Blobs in it. Innocent data or plots to give Congress a brain?

What about that 4GB pagefile.sys file. Is it really a pagefile?

I don't know which Peabrained moron in the US Government came up with this idea. I get the feeling that people in government just dont understand the modern world - look at this stupid UK Gov Idea that ALL internet videos should be reviewed BEFORE they are made available.

All this crap will, as everyone with two brain cells to rub together will know, NOT stop terrorists. All it does is piss off the innocent people who are sick and fed up of being treated by their OWN government, and the government of supposedly "Friendly" nations, as criminals

@They're not interested in your data

Depends who you work for.

Boeing have been prosecuted in europe for using echelon intercepted communications to win a contract over BAe.

French security got caught so many times nicking stuff from the Paris Airshow that Americans don't go there anymore.

If you worked for Airbus you wouldn't mind handing over a blackberry with all your emails to customers to secuity in Seattle? Or an oil company that competes with the Bush family in Houston?

If you compete with a US company with military business you can assume your data will be handed over to them by the goverment. If you compete with a local company, it will be handed over by a bribed security guy.

So

So , it is now back to the good old microdot behind the postage stamp trick yet again as it hide things in plain sight !

Bow down to your new Overlords

Freedom is no longer an option. America is a cauldron of fear. I love my country and never thought we would roll over so easily. Osama Bin Laden and his ilk won the war, we play by his rules now.

Paris because she knows to roll over with the best of them.

Jokes aside

Jokes aside, it is no longer safe for any businessperson to take more or less any business laptop to the USA (or indeed, just about anywhere else outside the EU). EU law requires personal data to be protected. US law requires you to had it over. So unless you are certain that there is no personal data on your lap-top, you should not travel abroad with it.

Of course, since these days only US citizens are protected by US law and anyone foreign can be arrested, held indefinitely without charge and even be tortured, you might prefer not to go there at all. To think it was once "the land of the free"!

(That's a non-white vulture with the same name as a terrorist, in case you were wondering).

Huh it's not just johnny furriner they're afeared of

Tried my best not to rofl when the guy upstairs told me the TSA refused to let him board his plane with 2 deadly ham and swiss sandwiches. Next they'll be taking our bottles of water from us.. oh wait..

Coincidence that airlines have started charging for meals and drinks? Riiiight, of course it is.

@ Pierre

I'm sure it's something they don't grow tired of; last time I went to america I had long hair unlike now, I wore predominantly black and probably worst of all, I flew out of Belfast International Airport here in Northern Ireland - I was "randomly" selected for two different searches, during which they x-rayed literally everything I owned seperately, X-Rayed my shoes and the empty case and even had some goon from DHS pat down my hair (presumably incase I had stiletto knives hidden in its length). It's absurd and it's not getting any saner.

Look, this isn't that big a deal.

Just follow uncle Anonymous' 1-2-3 below:

1: Upload any data you'll need while you're in the states to your website, in a password-protected directory. My hosting provider lets me do this; I'm sure yours does also.

2: When you enter the U.S. don't bring any electronics with you. Only carry clothes. Once you've touched down and been waved through customs by the guard, who will now be utterly bored with you, proceed directly to Wal-Mart (or a local pawn shop) and pick up a cheap laptop and some single-use cameras. When you get to your hotel, download your data from your website using their complimentary network access. Enjoy your vacation or business trip as you would normally.

3. When it's time to go home, upload your data to your website, format the laptop's hard drive, stick it in a Postal Service mailer, and mail it to your house. Take any photos you've shot, and stick them in a SEPARATE envelope (in case the laptop gets "lost") and mail THOSE back to your house in a regular envelope. Then go through customs with only your clothes, as you came in. On future trips, mail the laptop to your hotel in advance, and so on. It's cheap, so if it gets "lost" you won't be heartbroken.

It's inconvenient, but it'll get you where you're going with a minimum of hassle. What's an extra 500 bucks paid one time, compared to the level of irritation you might otherwise be facing?

Consider it "the cost of doing business"...

Re: the real point is

Sillyfellow wrote:

"also, because we havn't gotten as terrified by all this BOGUS 'terror' stuff as we are supposed to be, this is a way of trying to keep us all scared so we are easier to control and manipulate."

So in other words, we are terrorized to prevent from being terrorized. Same difference. Except that from a statistical point of view, the cure is worse than the problem.

how about this

what about just taking a pox ridden virus infected Trojan packed Laptop with you so as soon as they download your encrypted data to thier Data base it becomes part of a botnet :-)

So what happens...

... when they boot up my laptop and Linux loads. Because they don't see the familiar Windows logo, am I immediately classed as a terrorist/hacker (pretty much synonyms these days anyway) and on the next plane to Gitmo?

Solution: We are Hugh

"Officials can keep documents or computers, take them to an off-site location, copy the contents and share the data with other agencies."

Does anyone remember the Star Trek episode where the Enterprise crew saved some Borg and embedded a paradoxical file that once examined by 'The Collective' would cripple the Borg?

If you don't, here's the link:

http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/series/TNG/episode/68552.html

Anyways, I recommend all US-bound travelers to do the same thing. Just don't wimp out like Picard, m'kay.

Re: Going to keep them busy...

Hiding the stuff you want hidden in some system file folder, thinking they can't find it there because the filename is innocent sounding?

You (and everyone else who made that suggestion) seem to think that they will inspect all those files manually, apparently?

Did it occur to you that they could use ... you know ... computers to do that? Scan through ALL files (computers are good at this kind of stuff), look for strings or encrypted content automatically, etc.

Reciprical

Sounds like very few of you have tried entering the UK without going through the home citizen line. Immigration and customs officials are the same everywhere, the US is no different. There's something ironic about people who live in the UK saying they won't go to the US because it is a police state, especially on a website with regular articles about the latest uk.gov "security" scheme.

The easiest way to get through is to marry a US citizen - the whole family can now go through the fastest and least uptight queues when entering both the UK and US. Still have to wait ages for the luggage though.

Waste of time

Americans are all tossers anyway. I could not care less about their stupid draconian laws. Anyone with a ounce of sense knows this will only impact the law adibing people, the terrorists are always one step ahead..

Oh and leave afghanistan, you will never win, did you not learn from the russians or vietnam, oh sorry i forgot you "solved" the conflict in Northern Ireland, ha ha ha .....

No way never...no way never no more...

Not going. Had it.

I've had that feeling for a few years, since i was "lucky" enough to spend like 6 months over there. Messed up I tell you. And that's not just me.

And they all just sit back and let it happen. I wonder if we, in the UK, would react any differently...I doubt it...When will ya'll waken up? www.realityinfo.org Snap to it:)

Looks like we have Western versions of the Taliban in the making.

First, this is not a dig at the US. It's a complaint about the western response to terrorism.

I have a brother who's a US citizen and has been living there for decades. I also have a nephew who is currently seeking citizenship. Both of them love it in the US. In a recent email, my nephew said how everyone was so polite.

It just goes to show stereotyped citizens of a nation can become. I'll bet that the people of Ibiza have a pretty dim view of folk from the UK.

Wikipedia.com has a page on Terrorism. Interestingly, it says there is no internationally agreed definition, they are acts intended to create fear in the name of an ideological cause. They deliberately target non-combatants. Warfare of this type is unconventional and psychological in nature.

The psychological nature of terrorism is one aspect that interests me. When citizens are frightened, it gives a government an opportunity to introduce measures they would not normally get away with. It seems we get our freedoms eroded bit by bit. Peoples fears are used against them by the people in power, who want more power. Witches, anarchists, the first red scare, the cold war, McCarthyism, the IRA, bask separatists and al-quaeda. The list is truly endless. Each and every one inspires fear, real or imagined.

Ask yourself this, when your next at an airport, with armed police carrying machine guns. Do you feel safer or do you feel more fearful?

Your getting on a plane, there are some men who are talking to each other in Arabic. Are you more afraid to get on the plane? Does the destination matter?

After the events of 9/11 and 7/7 lots of people interviewed said that they would not behave any differently because that would be letting the terrorists win. They were absolutely right. It's a crying shame that our governments feel they should inconvenience everyone, regardless of who they are.

Take Mr. Jayakody for example, prevented from boarding a flight because he had a t-shirt with a cartoon character holding a gun. He was forced to change before he could board. This is the levels at which we stoop in the name of security. Did the official think he could somehow intimidate or terrorise the other people on board the plane with a t-shirt?

This not about a war on terror, it's about inducing terror in your own citizens so (in the UK), local councils can invoke anti-terrorism laws to have you watched for any reason they want and are able to gain entry to your house under the pretence of 'checking what energy rating your fridge has' or 'checking your house plants for insects'. For you non UK citizens, I'm not making this up, these laws have been passed.

The worse thing about this kind of stuff is, WE pay for it in taxes and WE pay for it with our freedom.

I'm off to breath some air now, as I think that's about the only thing left I can do in peace, without some jumped up arsehole with a clipboard telling me otherwise.