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Laptop border searches OK'd
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| ogvh5150 |
Just when you thought that drive your friend just gave you is "clean":
| quote: | Police blotter: Laptop border searches OK'd
By Declan McCullagh
http://news.com.com/Police+blotter+Laptop+border+searches+OKd/2100-1030_3-6098939.html
Story last modified Thu Jul 27 05:30:52 PDT 2006
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"Police blotter" is a weekly CNET News.com report on the intersection of technology and the law.
What: A business traveler protests the warrantless search and seizure of his laptop by Homeland Security at the U.S.-Canada border.
When: 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rules on July 24.
Outcome: Three-judge panel unanimously says that border police may conduct random searches of laptops without search warrants or probable cause. These searches can include seizing the laptop and subjecting it to extensive forensic analysis.
What happened, according to court documents:
In January 2004, Stuart Romm traveled to Las Vegas to attend a training seminar for his new employer. Then, on Feb. 1, Romm continued the business trip by boarding a flight to Kelowna, British Columbia.
Romm was denied entry by the Canadian authorities because of his criminal history. When he returned to the Seattle-Tacoma airport, he was interviewed by two agents of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement division.
They asked to search his laptop, and Romm agreed. Agent Camille Sugrue would later testify that she used the "EnCase" software to do a forensic analysis of Romm's hard drive.
That analysis and a subsequent one found some 42 child pornography images, which had been present in the cache used by Romm's Web browser and then deleted. But because in most operating systems, only the directory entry is removed when a file is "deleted," the forensic analysis was able to recover the actual files.
During the trial, Romm's attorney asked that the evidence from the border search be suppressed. The trial judge disagreed. Romm was eventually sentenced to two concurrent terms of 10 and 15 years for knowingly receiving and knowingly possessing child pornography.
The 9th Circuit refused to overturn his conviction, ruling that American citizens effectively enjoy no right to privacy when stopped at the border.
"We hold first that the ICE's forensic analysis of Romm's laptop was permissible without probable cause or a warrant under the border search doctrine," wrote Judge Carlos Bea. Joining him in the decision were Judges David Thompson and Betty Fletcher.
Bea cited the 1985 case of U.S. v. Montoya de Hernandez, in which a woman arriving in Los Angeles from Columbia was detained. Police believed she had swallowed balloons filled with cocaine, even though the court said they had no "clear indication" of it and did not have probable cause to search her.
Nevertheless, the Supreme Court said police could rectally examine De Hernandez because it was a border crossing and, essentially, anything goes. (The rectal examination, by the way, did find 88 balloons filled with cocaine that had been smuggled in her alimentary canal.)
Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall dissented. They said the situation De Hernandez experienced had "the hallmark of a police state."
"To be sure, the court today invokes precedent stating that neither probable cause nor a warrant ever have been required for border searches," Brennan wrote. "If this is the law as a general matter, I believe it is time that we re-examine its foundations."
But Brennan and Marshall were outvoted by their fellow justices, who ruled that the drug war trumped privacy, citing a "veritable national crisis in law enforcement caused by smuggling of illicit narcotics." Today their decision means that laptop-toting travelers should expect no privacy either.
As an aside, a report last year from a U.S.-based marijuana activist says U.S. border guards looked through her digital camera snapshots and likely browsed through her laptop's contents. A London-based correspondent for The Economist magazine once reported similar firsthand experiences, and a 1998 article in The New York Times described how British customs scan laptops for sexual material. Here are some tips on using encryption to protect your privacy.
Excerpt from the court's opinion (Click here for PDF):
"First, we address whether the forensic analysis of Romm's laptop falls under the border search exception to the warrant requirement...Under the border search exception, the government may conduct routine searches of persons entering the United States without probable cause, reasonable suspicion, or a warrant. For Fourth Amendment purposes, an international airport terminal is the "functional equivalent" of a border. Thus, passengers deplaning from an international flight are subject to routine border searches.
Romm argues he was not subject to a warrantless border search because he never legally crossed the U.S.-Canada border. We have held the government must be reasonably certain that the object of a border search has crossed the border to conduct a valid border search....In all these cases, however, the issue was whether the person searched had physically crossed the border. There is no authority for the proposition that a person who fails to obtain legal entry at his destination may freely re-enter the United States; to the contrary, he or she may be searched just like any other person crossing the border.
Nor will we carve out an "official restraint" exception to the border search doctrine, as Romm advocates. We assume for the sake of argument that a person who, like Romm, is detained abroad has no opportunity to obtain foreign contraband. Even so, the border search doctrine is not limited to those cases where the searching officers have reason to suspect the entrant may be carrying foreign contraband. Instead, 'searches made at the border...are reasonable simply by virtue of the fact that they occur at the border.' Thus, the routine border search of Romm's laptop was reasonable, regardless whether Romm obtained foreign contraband in Canada or was under "official restraint."
In sum, we hold first that the ICE's forensic analysis of Romm's laptop was permissible without probable cause or a warrant under the border search doctrine."
Copyright ©1995-2006 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. |
If you ever need to wipe the free space or the whole drive you want to use then select either the DoD or Gutmann wipe methods.
Here are a few places to check out:
File Deletion Tools
Acronis Drive Cleanser |
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| Lover Boy |
| Sounds like another step towards Oceania to me :( |
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| josh4 |
| quote: | Originally posted by ogvh5150
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i can never read your articles. at first i thought it was unprofessionality the of the sites you visit but now it looks the blame rests with you.
format your postings better |
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| ogvh5150 |
Who died and left you mod?
Police blotter: Laptop border searches OK'd
If you need more specific help then next time give me a more complete question rather than a generalized one.
The post was done using a firefox bbcode extension that didn't drop the text right. I've used the regular paste option. |
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| josh4 |
| quote: | Originally posted by ogvh5150
Who died and left you mod?
Police blotter: Laptop border searches OK'd
If you need more specific help then next time give me a more complete question rather than a generalized one. |
its just common courtesy etiquette. i mean look you left the advertisement in and its ing up the spacing of the whole page.
in PDD we try to maintain standards, damnit! :) |
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| ogvh5150 |
| quote: | Originally posted by josh4
its just common courtesy etiquette. i mean look you left the advertisement in and its ing up the spacing of the whole page.
in PDD we try to maintain standards, damnit! :) |
I use various ad filters that didn't show that image. I saw the ad in the pasted bbcode and deleted it.
I use firefox and use the bbcode extension. I also use another extension that says "Paste html as bbcode" to pass any links along. It also passes annoying ads so it's my bad.
Now I just pasted the regular text sans any linkage. |
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| Q5echo |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lover Boy
Sounds like another step towards Oceania to me :( |
yeah, those those f**king kiddie-porn perverts ruined it for everybody.:whip: |
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| ali92 |
| Uh-oh. Gotta be careful with my drive full of PS1 CD images, ROMs, and my MP3/FLAC collections... :-S |
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| jdat |
| I have had my laptop searched and customs go through spindles of burnt cd-rs and dvds ..... not sure how it's always worked out :stongue: |
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| Fir3start3r |
| quote: | Originally posted by Nou
Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN)
Works well.
I'd also suggest you have a travelling laptop that you can use in international areas. Somethings that are perfectly legal here are illegal in other parts of the world (some forms of encryption as an example). I would suggest taking a laptop thats dedicated to international travel and only carrying things you wish to have related to that travel.
Also if you think you have taken pictures that might be illegal or cause trouble when leaving or entering another country my advice would be to securely send them to your home via email, ftp, etc then securely deleting them. |
We use NUKE at our work.
Does a great job. |
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| rustyryan |
and for protecting/hiding the data that is on your drive, use TrueCrypt, you can pack all your private data into its own filesystem that lives inside a file on your regular filesystem. It has tons of bells and whistles. Most importantly it supports two levels of plausible deniability. It's really easy to use also. It mounts your encrypted filesystem as a drive in whichever OS you are using and anything you copy to it is encrypted on the fly.
http://www.truecrypt.org |
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| Wicked Neo |
| quote: | Originally posted by josh4
its just common courtesy etiquette. i mean look you left the advertisement in and its ing up the spacing of the whole page.
in PDD we try to maintain standards, damnit! :) |
Usually by letting you post as little as possible in here :p |
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