This problem will go away after I introduce legislation requiring DHS to establish guidelines of "reasonable suspicion" for border searches of electronic equipment -- and prohibit profiling on the basis of race, religion or national origin.
Posted on 09/07/2008 3:41:12 AM PDT by Zakeet
NOW might be a good time to buy some FedEx stock. International travelers are sure to be shipping a lot of laptops on overnight delivery to avoid losing them for hours or weeks - thanks to the Department of Homeland Security's new confiscation policy.
Congress recently forced the department to admit it has assumed authority to take an air traveler's laptop computer (or any other electronic device) to an undisclosed location for an unspecified time to check for suspicious files - even "absent individualized suspicion" of wrongdoing.
[Snip]
Being "randomly" wanded and frisked at an airport-security checkpoint is bad enough, but at least the inconvenience is brief. But the new seizure policy essentially keeps law-abiding business travelers, with their entire professional lives on laptops, hostage to a government agency and prevents them from doing their jobs - again, all without a hint of probable cause. That's more than an annoyance: It's official theft of your ability to make a living.
Plus, even trained computer snoopers sometimes slip, accidentally deleting files. To which bureaucrat do you go if DHS kills essential data?
The obvious privacy concerns inherent in this policy are hardly assuaged by the department's promise to expunge any files it copies for inspection. The program evades any public oversight.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
This problem will go away after I introduce legislation requiring DHS to establish guidelines of "reasonable suspicion" for border searches of electronic equipment -- and prohibit profiling on the basis of race, religion or national origin.
Our company has “sanitized” loaner laptops for this very reason.
I think this is a great program. I buy a broke laptop for $25. I take it overseas and return. They confiscate it. When they finally realize its broke...they return it...then I claim it worked prior to the trip and I want them to pay for it. I fill out the paperwork, and eventually am paid $2000 for the $25 laptop investment. It paid for my trip.
Next month, I buy another $25 laptop, and repeat the same exercise. I travel through a different port of entry, and repeat the same trick. For several years, I repeat this....letting Homeland Security pay for all my overseas trips.
These guys are as dumb as bricks and seem to think that we are going to bring terrorist data with us via some laptop. I can collect all the data I want...on some chat forum in Pakistan on a server...and just hit it via my laptop while sitting at Yankee Stadium.
I’ve been buying EEEPCs for folks partly for this type of reason. Not specifically DHS, but for the whole loss/theft reason. They can get online, they machines are light, reasonably hack proof linux and if they disappear, it’s under $500 bucks. No fuss.
Most just use it for email and to open a spreadsheet/document so EEEPC is perfect.
Good place to bump this thread.
Something tells me this doesn't apply anymore.
So how often does this happen? Has any laptop been taken fro a normal traveling person? I will be traveling soon. I usually back up my important files on USB drives in case something bad happens to my laptop. I might have to back up to a server now.
Anyone who’s been to an airport in the past few years can see how many laptops pass through. It would be simply impossible for the gov. to check anything more than maybe 1%, at best. Of course that 1% could still be yours or mine, but it’s not very likely to happen.
It’s much more likely that you’ll either have it stolen during your trip or have its drive copied (like that dingbat let happen at the Commerce Dept., in China).
Don't people encrypt their data? Don't people encrypt their operating systems?
a.) burn an image of your hard drive to DVD.
(I use Acronis True Image, a great program)
b.) Upload the image to a server.
c.) Wipe your hard drive clean as a whistle.
d.) Show the border Nazis that your laptop is empty of files.
e.) Cross border.
f.) Download hard drive image from server.
g.) Burn image back to hard drive on laptop.
No, it’s not a simple or convenient process, but it can be done and it illustrates the freakin uselessness of DHS when it comes to ‘inspecting’ (translation=snooping) your laptop.
They will take an individuals laptop and play around with it....but a large container ship from Commie China or some petro-terrorist state....well, hey come right in!
They wont let you bring in a laptop...but they wanted to let Dubai Ports (a company from a petro-terrorist state who funded 9/11) run our ports. This is nuts...and of course the Boosh Admin really isnt serious on fighting terrorism
Some do, but lots don’t, and this Commerce idiot certainly didn’t (or he wrote the password on the computer).
I’ve a few questions: how many terrorists have the DHS caught so far? Are these terrorist safely in gaol (or better yet on death row)? How many lives have the DHS saved as a result of their vigilance?
Is this laptop thing going to save even more lives?
Just bring the USB drive. You can rent a computer at the Hotel's business center, and the company you are visiting surely has one. I used to call my drive my "Briefcase". If you have to give a presentation most corporate conference rooms already have one set up. You can use Webmail when travelling.
This is an F’in outrage and inexcusable.
I believe that the claim they make is that since it's not "paper" the word "papers" doesn't apply. And since the information is what they're interested in, not the actual hardware, the "effects" doesn't apply either.
Sort of like how the courts decided that they weren't actually seizing property in drug cases, but arresting it. Since the property wasn't human, it didn't have any rights.
Lawyers distorting language again (it depends on what the word "is" means.)
Mark
Actually, it's not just laptops, but any electronic device. Including USB drives. One reason I've seen for this is to enforce copyright laws, and I believe that they have the authority to hold and confiscate devices with copyrighted material, like DVD movie files.
Mark
That depends, if you are travelling internationally, you may have about a 3% chance of having it siezed. The visited country stamps on your passport will also be a factor.
If you are travelling domestically you will have a zero percent chance.
Do the Feds not realize that the internet exists? With practically unlimited secure storage that can be accessed anywhere in the world.
Something smells extremely rotten about this whole plan.
They track that kind of stuff.
Exactly. Some knuckledragger making minimum wage isn’t going to be able to figure out which laptop is going to contain terrorist data. One minute we complain they are idiots and the next we say they are masterminds.
The 4th Amendment never applied at border crossings. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to anything you carry with you across an international border.
Problem is that there are about a dozen or so countries where it is illegal to have encrypted devices (I'm not sure if China is on the list). That is why we have sanitized laptops for our international business travelers.
If the trip requires the transport ITAR data, it is usually carried on a thumb drive and accompanied by a State Department export license.
“They will take an individuals laptop and play around with it....but a large container ship from Commie China or some petro-terrorist state....well, hey come right in!”
..... I have a background in the ocean freight industry. Here are the options: [a] ban all import shipments from any nation deemed suspect or unfriendly; [b] inspect all incoming freight from such origins.
Exercising option [a] would collapse the US economy.
Exercising option [b] is a practical physical impossibility.
“They wont let you bring in a laptop...but they wanted to let Dubai Ports (a company from a petro-terrorist state who funded 9/11) run our ports. This is nuts...and of course the Boosh Admin really isnt serious on fighting terrorism.”
..... Fot what it’s worth, the US Navy uses Dubai as its principal maintenance and service base in the Arab Gulf. If you want to get upset about something alongthese lines, check into COSCO’s port management operations on the US West Coast (courtesy of the Clinton administration).
Not to question your integrity, but where did the 3% number come from? My one percent number was out of thin air.
One could quite conceivably have plenty of legal downloads (think iTunes or other services). So I hardly see how they can somehow determine you have ill-gotten content on your machine. I have to think they would have to have a very good reason to suspect you had terrorist material on your computer to seize it at the airport.
Mine also was of thin air, the process is random and I have seen devices taken for examination only once so the actual number is probably less.
I’ve never had mine examined, although my only international trips are to Motreal. Next year I’ll be visiting the UK twice and Australia once, it will be interesting to see what happens then.
Copy - I was basing my 1% on the amount of time available, versus the number passing through. It would definitely tie up a lot of time for the feds to spend hours opening up file after file, just to find boring corporate spreadsheets, or whatever.
DHS has a list of every passenger entering the country before the plane arrives in the US. The list is run against a watch list and if a suspected terrorist is on board they can take him to secondary, question him, and go through all of his personal belongings (including his laptop). While I don’t necessarily defend the right of any government agency to go through my laptop without a warrant, I think the ability to go through a suspected terrorist’s laptop is a valuable tool. I could be wrong, but I don’t think any US citizen’s laptop has been probed at an airport thus far.
I think the actual number would be in the range of .0001%. To do a true forensic analysis of a computer takes days. Since they are likely looking for terrorist data the information they want will probably not be files (deleted or otherwise) but email addresses, web site caches, etc. The task of going through 1% of all laptops going through all US international airports would number in the hundreds or thousands every day. It would take thousands of computer experts to meet those numbers.
In fact, they likely have. Data from a terrorists computer can link a lot of terrorists to each other.
> In fact, they likely have. Data from a terrorists computer can link a lot of terrorists to each other.
It makes sense then — people should smile and hand over their laptops. One 9/11 is one too many.
That’s stealing from the taxpayer.
What ever happened to probable cause?
So if I travel on another mission trip abroad with my laptop (as I have done before) and I am coming back through customs, they can just stop me, take my laptop and send me on my way without - just because they want too? Even though I am not on any sort of “watch list” - that I know of?
But of course, participation on a right-wing page like FreeRepublic likely has a whole bunch of us on some sort of Federal watch list...
Don't kid yourself. That "living document" is on its deathbed -- an awful lot of it doesn't apply anymore.
And to take that a step farther - the Government has a bunch of those "lawyers" wearing black robes and making new rules and eliminating genuine Constitutional rights. And those black-robed lawyers trump the Constitution...
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