DHS: No need to apply pesky 4th Amendment to laptops

[IDemo]

Travelers' Laptops May Be Detained At Border
No Suspicion Required Under DHS Policies

By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 1, 2008; Page A01

Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop 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.

"The policies . . . are truly alarming," said Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), who is probing the government's border search practices. He said he intends to introduce legislation soon that would require reasonable suspicion for border searches, as well as prohibit profiling on race, religion or national origin.

DHS officials said that the newly disclosed policies -- which apply to anyone entering the country, including U.S. citizens -- are reasonable and necessary to prevent terrorism. Officials said such procedures have long been in place but were disclosed last month because of public interest in the matter.

Read the Customs search policy (.pdf)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/content/article/2008/08/01/laptops.html

"Your papers and your Dell, please"

[ixion]

1. The DHS is about promoting terror, not eliminating it... there is NOTHING "reasonable and necessary"

or even remotely constitutional about anything that they do.

They are in place simply to herald the final onset of the police state.

[NightWatcher]

2. "or other electronic device" take my iPod and you'll see terror

[ReverendDeuce]

3. TrueCrypt on your laptop... now is the time!

I urge all of you with laptops to install and use this excellent piece of software.

This is not just an encryption tool for certain programs. No, it will encrypt your entire hard drive using single or cascading ciphers. If you don't supply the right password at boot-up time, you simply cannot access the data. In order for the Feds to break it, they'd need to be aware of a vulnerability in AES. Sorry, but that's not happening any time soon.

For the ultra-paranoid, TrueCrypt also introduces plausible deniability! That is, if you encrypt your hard drive using the above mentioned full disk encryption, you can then create a subsequent hidden encrypted drive inside the first. If you are forced to provide a boot password, give them the primary password and let them access your decoy Windows install. They will be unable to ever prove that there is a second, hidden Windows install (with your real business or personal data) unless you offer up the password.

http://www.truecrypt.org/

It is Open Source, widely used, and cross platform. I've been using it on my laptops for a long time because I do a fair amount of travel and am more concerned about theft since I do not travel internationally.