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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday January 06 2018, @08:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-say-no dept.

Encrypt and lock your electronic devices, because the border agents want to touch them:

Customs officers stationed at the American border and at airports searched an estimated 30,200 cellphones, computers and other electronic devices of people entering and leaving the United States last year — an almost 60 percent increase from 2016, according to Homeland Security Department data released on Friday.

Despite the surge, Customs and Border Protection officials said the searches affected fewer than 1 percent of the more than 300 million travelers who arrived in the United States last year.

Homeland Security officials say border searches are an important investigative tool and are used sparingly by its agents. "In this digital age, border searches of electronic devices are essential to enforcing the law at the U.S. border and to protecting the American people," said John Wagner, the deputy executive assistant commissioner at Customs and Border Protection. Mr. Wagner said the agency was committed to preserving the rights and civil liberties of travelers whose devices are searched.

Also at ABC.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Saturday January 06 2018, @09:15PM (4 children)

    by edIII (791) on Saturday January 06 2018, @09:15PM (#618875)

    Moreover, have a travel OS for your systems in general. Encrypted like normal, but honeypot data you don't give a shit about. Data should be backed up to the "cloud" with zero-knowledge, like tarsnaps. You can ship the working drives via courier, insured for the loss of the drives.

    I'm hoping to create a "dual-boot" system that loads up a honey pot OS with one passphrase, then loads up the real system with a second passphrase. Deniable computing if you will.

    That's where we are pretty much. Privacy has to be actually fought for, and privacy from the government is illegal apparently.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 06 2018, @09:34PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 06 2018, @09:34PM (#618889)

    Sounds like grub should be able to do that with minimal hacking... Ik have to check it out

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 06 2018, @10:27PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 06 2018, @10:27PM (#618910)

      I have 2 hard drives, one with Linux and grub bootloader, the other with Windows. It boots directly to Windows via bios hard drive selection. Press F-whatever to change boot drive and you get grub, then Linux. Windows doesn't see the other drive.

      • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday January 07 2018, @01:18AM

        by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Sunday January 07 2018, @01:18AM (#618955) Journal

        See, although this is a good idea and is a solution, I should not have to put myself to the trouble of saying, each time, "Don't boot windows" (or reactos or whatever) every time, but instead, boot what I actually use.

        Source: 4th amendment.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 06 2018, @09:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 06 2018, @09:41PM (#618893)

    veracrypt hidden partitions, and virtual machines are your friend if you *need* to carry data around locally. Would it stop the NSA? No, but they dont work the border either.