US border laptop searches
p2pnet.net News:- Increasingly, people are taking a risk when they visit the US, or pass through it.
With the Cheney /Bush anti-terrorist campaign still in full swing, it doesn’t take much for US enforcement agencies to zero in on visitors, and now there’s a new danger, says The New York Times:
That laptop will be seized or their contents, “scrutinized at United States customs and immigration checkpoints upon entering the United States from abroad”.
It’s a, “a hot topic this week among more than 1,000 corporate travel managers and travel industry officials meeting in Barcelona at a conference of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives,” says the story, going on:
“Last week, an informal survey by the association, which has about 2,500 members worldwide, indicated that almost 90 percent of its members were not aware that customs officials have the authority to scrutinize the contents of travelers’ laptops and even confiscate laptops for a period of time, without giving a reason.”
Officials, “don’t need probable cause to perform these searches under the current law,” the NYT has Tim Kane, a Washington lawyer researching the matter for corporate clients, saying. “They can do it without suspicion or without really revealing their motivations.”
Laptops may be subjected to a ‘forensic analysis’ under the so-called border search exemption, “which allows searches of people entering the United States and their possessions ‘without probable cause, reasonable suspicion or a warrant,’ a federal court ruled in July,” the story says, adding:
“Besides the possibility for misuse of proprietary information, travel executives are also concerned that a seized computer, and the information it holds, is unavailable to its owner for a time. One remedy some companies are considering is telling travelers coming back into the country with sensitive information to encrypt it and e-mail it to themselves, which at least protects access to the data, if not its privacy.”
Also See:
The New York Times – At U.S. Borders, Laptops Have No Right to Privacy, October 24, 2006
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September 14th, 2007 at 4:52 am
If you have to take your laptop with you ,leave the hard drive at home.
The hard drive is what they are after ,however if you yank out the drive and change the bios to seek out the CD Rom drive first plus download a copy of puppy linux (happens to look just loike win 2000) you can boot off that CD and work online just like you would if you used a hard drive.
I they decide they are going to take it -they will have your hardware but not your software.
While using the puppy disk you access your work online via WIFI…you won’t need a hard drive with puppy linux since it alol works out off RAM.
When you shhut down puppy the power gets cut to the DDR on the motherboard and everywhere you visited online and everything you accessed evaporates–provided you did a complete shutdown.
However if the laptop is only in standbye anything you have done since you booted can be recovered doing a (LIVE FORENSICS) you don’t want that so shut down before you go through.
Your portable OS is also FREE because it’s open source because it’s linux
and is compatible with sandisk cruisers and other portable storage.
Just don’t take that cruiser through customs because they store in real time and customs would like to get ahold of it too.—(allways) store to your online storage!!!!!! when dealing with government entities–they will look everywhere till they find what they want.
Why am i telling the world about Live operating systems?
Because the (governments) are taking away our freedoms and our privacy.
There are other live OS’s you can use like
SLAX
PUPPY
DSL
KNOPPIX
PC LINUX OS
MEPIS