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from the Quis-custodiet-ipsos-custodes? dept.
Homeland Security details new tools for extracting device data at US borders:
Travelers heading to the US have many reasons to be cautious about their devices when it comes to privacy. A report released Thursday from the Department of Homeland Security provides even more cause for concern about how much data border patrol agents can pull from your phones and computers.
In a Privacy Impact Assessment dated July 30, the DHS detailed its US Border Patrol Digital Forensics program, specifically for its development of tools to collect data from electronic devices. For years, DHS and border agents were allowed to search devices without a warrant, until a court found the practice unconstitutional in November 2019.
In 2018, the agency searched more than 33,000 devices, compared to 30,200 searches in 2017 and just 4,764 searches in 2015. Civil rights advocates have argued against this kind of surveillance, saying it violates people's privacy rights.
[...] The DHS said the privacy risks of using the tools are low because only trained forensics technicians will have access to the tools, and only data relevant to investigations will be extracted.
That assurance is in stark contrast from what lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation found, after a lawsuit revealed that agents had searched through travelers' devices without any restrictions, and often for unrelated reasons like enforcing bankruptcy laws and helping outside investigations.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday August 13 2020, @11:20PM (3 children)
The flip side of that is you can't even trust an ATA Secure Erase to do what you expect it to on an SSD. This is bugging me a bit; I intend to get to Canada by 2022 if at all possible, and run a rather strange-looking kit: Gentoo Linux on an LVM-on-LUKS setup, on an NVMe SSD. The kind of meathead who makes a career out of this shit is going to look at that odd "enter passphrase" prompt and immediately assume I've got something to hide. I don't; I do this, like any good geek, for the sheer unadulterated hell of it, with the side benefit that if someone steals my lappy they don't get my data. But try explaining, as I said, any of that to the sort of stolid, drooling asshole who thinks messing with people at the border is a good time...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by NickM on Friday August 14 2020, @12:22AM (2 children)
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday August 15 2020, @01:54AM (1 child)
I don't even have anything to hide, unless incredibly boring half-stream-of-consciousness notes on theology, counter-apologetics, and comparative religion suddenly become wrongthink. That's the irony of it all. People who do have something to hide would probably benefit a lot from my sort of setup but are mostly too clueless to do it.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2020, @01:31PM
In my experience, the technologically-dumbest criminals are the half-legal ones who have a legitimate business or job, but break regulatory rules, launder or embezzle money, shortchange or ghost their workers etc. They almost always leave an obvious paper trail and lots of angry people behind them. Drug dealers and street criminals are usually either idiots who are also luddites, or idiots who pay competent people to do the tech for them. Tech-savvy criminals usually get caught because they run their mouths too much.