Hard Drive For Border Crossings: Will Self-Destruct If Connected To An Unknown Host
from the well-there's-an-idea dept
We've discussed a few times how Homeland Security has aggressively (and successfully) claimed the right to search laptop harddrives at the border without probable cause (sometimes without any known cause). The response from some has been to now encrypt your drive, but it appears that technologists are trying to offer up a variety of other solutions. Dark Helmet points us to the news that Toshiba is now offering a hard drive that can delete itself if it's connected to an "unknown host." It can also take less extreme measures, including just ramping up the authentication needed. While being pitched as useful for governments, it seems like it can be useful to protect against governments as well.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: hard drive, privacy, self destructing
Companies: toshiba
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"Pay no mind to the man behind the curtain [who is searching through your hard drive without probable cause]! Services to which you willingly gave information about yourself may actually be utilizing that information!!!"
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And yet, the personality types able to make it into and function at those bureaucratic levels (defects, socio-paths, what have you) are what we keep choosing.
I think there is something fundamental in our human nature, that expresses itself in our tribal based culture and gives us this result.
Think about it. Through all recorded history, in every single culture, we see the same organizational problems.
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How does bureaucracy help anything? Security we need, bureaucracy we don't- especially not at the cost of our freedoms.
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Attracting attention
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Re: Attracting attention
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This is a poor, expensive, and unreliable solution
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Re: This is a poor, expensive, and unreliable solution
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Ship your power ahead
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Re: Ship your power ahead
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Re: Ship your power ahead
If you're worried about the hard drive, ship the *hard drive*, not unrelated pieces.
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Re: Re: Ship your power ahead
travel with a slim computer and access your data back home on your "real" computer via GoToMyPC or similar service.
Communication is safely encrypted.
If you need a file locally you can use the file transfer utility.
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I can hear them asking already...
"Why are you being so secretive?"
"For all the trouble you're going through to protect your hard drive you must have something on it you don't want us to see." (This one requires the presumption that "something you on it you don't want us to see" only means illegal stuff. So your company documents, sexy pics of your spouse, and your copy of Hello Kitty Funtime Island, are just as damning as having bomb scematics.)
But on a lighter note if self destructing meant this thing actually blew up (after connected to said unknown host) I think it would be pretty funny. However it will not be funny when you go to prison for destroying federal property (which I bet carries a bigger punishment than having actual bomb scematics on your laptop).
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Re: I can hear them asking already...
How about this instead of explosives; Carry a dead laptop with you with a drive that's been specially modified to connect the power lines to all the data lines. I'm no expert, but I doubt that any system they plugged it into would be too healthy after they flipped the switch. :)
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Re: Re: I can hear them asking already...
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Re: I can hear them asking already...
Fortunately, I have a ready answer for that.
"As you can see from my passport I am a resident of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Under Massachusetts General Law 93 sections A through H as well as Massachusetts regulation 201 CMR 17 all laptop storage and all portable storage used in business that potentially contains "personally identifiable information" must be encrypted. Further, under those laws, it is against both those regulations and laws for me to disclose the passwords to a third party."
Effective? Who knows, but doesn't make it less true.
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Re: Re: I can hear them asking already...
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Your mission Jim, should you decide to accept it ....
As always, should you or any of your I.M. Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.
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Never has been
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Re: Never has been
My personal information (i.e. my laptop, journals, diary, anything) are my business and nobody elses. The fact that the government can use threat of force to deprive me of my right to privacy under the guise of border security makes me do two things: travel out over the border less often, and ensure I never travel with anything.
I travel with my tickets and my bank card. Everything else either gets bought on location or shipped.
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