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Posted by Monty Solomon on August 4, 2008, 10:58 pm
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Travelers' Laptops May Be Detained At Border
No Suspicion Required Under DHS Policies
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 1, 2008; A01
Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop computer or other
electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period
of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search
policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.
Also, officials may share copies of the laptop's contents with other
agencies and private entities for language translation, data
decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16
and issued by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection
and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/01/AR2008080103030.html
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Posted by MC on August 5, 2008, 11:15 am
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> Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop computer or other
> electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period
> of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search
> policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.
Amendments 4 and 5 to the United States Constitution seem to have gone right
past them.
I can understand that in wartime, "probable cause" might sometimes be fairly
thin, but a policy saying it is not required at all is unacceptable.
***** Moderator's Note *****
Customs enforcement enjoys a special status: IANALB I was a customs MP
in Vietnam, and the way it was explained to me was that "Nobody forced
them to get on the plane", so travelers consent to having their
belongings searched because nations have always had a right to protect
their borders and to levy tariffs on imported goods.
This is almost, but not yet, a moot point. Those who travel overseas
regularly, my brother-in-law amoung them, simply use VPN's to
communicate with their home base, and assume that their laptops may be
lost/stolen/confiscated at any time. Ergo, they never leave anything
on the machine that's not replaceable on short notice just by
connecting back to the mother ship with a new machine. Since any
proprietary info on their local hard drive is always encrypted
anyway, they know they can safely shrug their shoulders and pick up
where they left off.
Those (very few, btw) travellers who have proprietary info they need
to protect from crypto-savvy prying eyes are told to say that the VPN
takes care of all passwords, and to deny that they can unlock a
machine. A customs agent who demands that they log on to the company
server and thereby make the machine's contents available for
inspection will be told that the server contains privileged
attorney-client communications and that since it's not being taken
across a border, is not subject to inspection. Very few customs
inspectors are willing to fill out the necessary paperwork to
confiscate a machien anyway, but if they do, they just get an
encrypted hard drive and complaints from travellers who tend to be
both well-off and well aware of the congressman's phone number.
Notwithstanding all that, I think news editors always keep stacks of
these stories for slow news days: it's the kind of "The Sky Is
Falling" fluff that turns out to be a non-event as soon as you look
into it. My brother-in-law's machine has been regularly x-ray'd at
border crossings, and they usually ask him to boot it up so they can
see it's a genuine computer, but he's never been threatened with
confiscation or even been asked to display the contents of the
machine, so I think this story can be safely filed in the same trash
bin used for supermarket tabloids.
Bill Horne
Temporary Moderator
Please put [Telecom] at the end of your subject line, or I may never
see your post! Thanks!
We have a new address for email submissions: telecomdigestmoderator
atsign telecom-digest.org. This is only for those who submit posts via
email: if you use a newsreader or a web interface to contribute to the
digest, you don't need to change anything.
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Posted by AES on August 5, 2008, 4:09 pm
If you were Registered and logged in, you could reply and use other advanced thread options > into it. My brother-in-law's machine has been regularly x-ray'd at
> border crossings, and they usually ask him to boot it up so they can
> see it's a genuine computer, but he's never been threatened with
> confiscation or even been asked to display the contents of the
> machine,
Haven't been asked to boot my laptop at airport security for at least
several years now (U.S. and Western European travel) -- although having
to take it out of its case and send it through the X-ray machine in a
separate plastic tub seems to be a universal requirement.
Are procedures significantly different elsewhere?
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Posted by Geoffrey Welsh on August 6, 2008, 8:16 pm
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AES wrote:
> having to take it out of its case and send it through the X-ray
> machine in a separate plastic tub seems to be a universal requirement.
A long time ago I was told that X-rays are harmful to semiconductors. If
this is so, then I would think that they should be even more harmful as the
mask gets finer. I suspected that X-ray damage may have contributed to the
early demise of laptops which appeared to be otherwise well taken care of.
Does anyone have any knowledge as to whether X-rays can really damage
electronics? If so, does the package around CPUs, chipsets, etc. protect the
innards from it?
--
Geoffrey Welsh <Geoffrey [dot] Welsh [at] bigfoot [dot] com>
"XP is just a pretty Windows 2000. Vista is essentially the old hooker
with a bad facelift and too much makeup." - John Dvorak, "Microsoft,
the Spandex Granny", PC Magazine, 17 July 2008
.
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Posted by John Mayson on August 7, 2008, 1:55 am
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> Does anyone have any knowledge as to whether X-rays can really damage
> electronics? If so, does the package around CPUs, chipsets, etc. protect the
> innards from it?
X-ray inspection is an integral part of test in electronics
manufacturing. Machines such as the Agilent 5DX systems are
comparable to airport x-ray equipment, except they subject the board
to several minutes of x-ray energy instead of a few seconds. I can
not believe airport inspection equipment could harm electronics if
they aren't harmed in the factories during test.
John
--
Austin, Texas, USA
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