Court Says Border Patrol Can Take Your Laptop For Off-Site Search If They Have Reasonable Suspicion
from the 4th-amendment? dept
For a while now, courts have said that you have no 4th Amendment rights at the border, and border patrol/customs officials have every right to search your laptop. For a variety of reasons, this is problematic. As we've explained before, the contents of your laptop aren't the same as the contents of your suitcase in two very important ways:- You mostly store everything on your laptop. So, unlike a suitcase that you're bringing with you, it's the opposite. You might specifically choose what to exclude, but you don't really choose what to include. With a suitcase, you specifically choose what to include.
- The reason you bring the contents on your laptop over the border is because you're bringing your laptop over the border. If you wanted the content of your laptop to go over the border you'd just send it using the internet. There are no "border guards" on the internet itself, so content flows mostly freely across international boundaries. Thus if anyone wants to get certain content into a country via the internet, they're not doing it by entering that country through border control.
Either way, this issue has received plenty of attention over the years, with some officials trying to change the law (without much success). Homeland Security initially claimed that there were basically no rules limiting what it could do. However, more recently, the new administration clarified the rules somewhat -- though they're still pretty free to search anyone's laptop. But, one of the rules was that you were allowed to be present in the room while your laptop was being searched (though, you didn't get to see what they were doing).
It seems one aspect of that was broken by a border patrol computer search that involved taking a guy's broken computer to search it. The guy then sued, saying that the content on that laptop's hard drive (which included child porn) was inadmissable, because the search occurred off-site. A court recently ruled that the guy was half right. It basically said that border patrol can't just take laptops off-site for searches, but if there was reasonable suspicion to inspect the laptop, then it was okay. In this case, because some child porn had already been found on another laptop the guy had, it was deemed that taking the broken laptop off-site was reasonable.
That logic definitely makes sense, but I'm still wondering why we're using border patrol resources for this kind of thing? Yes, cracking down on child porn and the like is important, but that's got nothing to do with securing the border. If anything you wonder if this kind of thing becomes a distraction?
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Filed Under: 4th amendment, border search, computers, privacy
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If your laptop is password protected are they allowed to force you to hand over the password?
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Password bios? Built in bypass.
True Crypt is your only defense.
But you will still die in jail if the feds want to push the matter.
Liberty is lost.
Freedom is dying.
Get used to your chains.
When 2/3 of a people do not want a thing and the so called representatives still pass it, what you have is authoritarian government.
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http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=hidden-volume
put your neutron bomb plans and hezbollah email on one volume and naked pictures of yourself and gay porn on the other.
put up a fuss about 4th amendment rights and calling your lawyer, and when they start talking about imprisonment or water boarding, give them the key for the volume with the porn on it.
easy peasy.
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Best solution is probably a hidden True Crypt drive. I highly doubt most of these folks could find one and if what is visible is mundane there would be no reason to look hard. Of course, that's assuming you are not actually smuggling something illegal on the laptop and just want to keep your personal or coporate data private.
If you are smuggling illegal content across a border on a laptop, well, you're just not very smart.
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a hidden volume still looks like an encrypted volume, it just has two keys: one for the "regular" volume and one for the "hidden" one.
the point of the hidden volume is to keep your "real" data hidden when forced to decrypt the volume. as in someone puts a gun to your head and says give me the key, you hand over the key that unlocks the "fake" data.
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I initially assumed they were looking for IRA propaganda, but he told me not to be an idiot.
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Given the unfair nature of our legal system corporate laptops would likely be exempt.
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And now we're back to the question of how far off the laptop can the border patrol look.
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Court Says Border Patrol Can Take Your Laptop For Off-Site Search If They Have Reasonable Suspicion
It seems that the courts have not put there life to a scrutiny that they expect others to endure.
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Re: Court Says Border Patrol Can Take Your Laptop For Off-Site Search If They Have Reasonable Suspicion
i assumed that "off-site" meant sending your laptop to a forensics lab, not using the laptop to connect to resources which were not local to the laptop in question.
that is a pretty scary interpretation of the term "off-site", i have to admit, and all the more reason to use a cheap machine to travel with that has little, if anything, stored on it, including stored passwords or history of any kind, or better yet, just not bother with carrying a laptop or media player over the border.
how does search and seizure work for shipping? could you just fed-ex your encrypted laptop to your destination and then fed-ex it back home when your trip is done?
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Corporate vs. personal laptops
Use an in-country rental for whatever you need and sanitize it before you return it. I haven't used an iPad, but if it can't store stuff, then use it with remote storage for whatever you'd need a laptop for on a vacation.
Corporate execs must have sanitized corporate laptops for overseas work. IT would transfer what was "safe" to it prior to the trip. Anything company proprietary could be saved onto corporate servers to be accessed via VPN. If the Gustapo find porn on that laptop, that exec is toast anyway.
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Re: Corporate vs. personal laptops
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Re: Corporate vs. personal laptops
or just buy something cheap and toss it in the trash before you hit the border. prepaid mobiles and off lease laptops or cheap netbooks come to mind.
in the case of phones, call forwarding and unified messaging systems could keep disruption to a minimum.
an interesting device i have been meaning to check out is a safebook, which is basically a mobile version of a thin client, i.e. embedded system and little or no local storage.
of course this makes working/playing with digital stuff kind of difficult while en route unless you have carefully planned your trip around access to 3g data or wifi.
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Seriously, please direct me to the list of logical fallacies you read from to cobble together your laughable posts, TAM.
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Re: Searches
A lot of my fellow cops tend to parrot this idiotic cliche when the subject of searches comes up. I always ask them, suppose you pull me over on the side of the road and ask to search my car. When I refuse consent, you ask me, "If you've got nothing to hide, you shouldn't mind me searching, right?"
What would you do if I replied, "Officer, I'll give you consent to search my car only if afterward we can go to your home and you give me consent to search it as well. After all, if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't mind a total stranger going through all your personal financial files, looking at your internet search history and rifling through your wife's panty drawer. Only people with something to hide would object to something like that, right?"
I usually get uncomfortable silence as a response.
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War sucks
Sloppy is not good. Sloppy is too close to tyranny and we all know about that. What can we say to somebody with the right to peer into everything we own? I'd like a good calm answer that's better than saying I'll be rude or I'll be silent!
Tough days. It's not a blitz of fire hoses, but it's a blitz nevertheless. We took Kings to the ground and damn iron weapons too. Now what are we supposed to do? Terror isn't comic Hollywood. It's a trillion here and a trillion there and it hurts and kills.
Weapons may never end weapons. Understanding might. But we will wait a long time for that.
In the meantime, let's be sure our people respect us and treat us well. Let's be sure we also give staff every chance to discover threats. That's our policy. No?
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The reason I point this out is I was going to ask how they could have "reasonable suspicion" if the computer did not work to where they had to send it away for inspection.
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Actually I do say that in the post. Last sentence of the second to last paragraph.
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Hide the HDD
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Re: Hide the HDD
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Of course: first, border patrol has any and all authority to search you for the purpose of protecting the border. And then people fighting things unrelated to the border say, "Hey, we can't randomly search people without warrants but I think those border guys can...would you mind?"
Simple enough.
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Do you take pleasure in totally misrepresenting the arguments of others, or is it a compulsive thing with you?
If you send something across the border with DHL it still gets searched at the border. So, that's a totally different scenario. On top of that, you're still talking about a *good* in transit. Content online is available everywhere. It's not crossing borders so much as just available...
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Search of Laptop
You guys bring up some valid points as to privacy issues, it will be interesting to see how it plays out in the courts.
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and on another note: if you are traveling with a laptop and don't encrypt the whole damn thing, you are a fracking idiot and frankly deserve everything you get.
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Our Government Has Gotten A Little
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100 Mile Border Zone Too
http://www.aclu.org/national-security_technology-and-liberty/are-you-living-constitution-free -zone
Constitution? What Constitution?
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Re: 100 Mile Border Zone Too
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20071019.html
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Distraction
No kidding. We have millions of illegals flooding across our borders every year and these guys are searching laptops for dirty pictures.
Talk about missing the forest for the trees...
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help
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Is this just coming IN or also going OUT
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