SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Saturday January 06 2018, @10:30PM (3 children)
The Verge [theverge.com] is reporting that Customs and Border Patrol has been told to dial back the searches of electronics to only those cases where they have ever so slightly changed the rules about what they can and can't search.
Of interest they can not search cloud data, or any data that is accessible ONLY when the radios are on. So Airplane mode and password protected OwnCloud are your friends. And theoretically CBP’s policy would at least require officers to have some level of suspicion before copying and using electronic methods to search a electronic device.
CPB's 12 page pdf of their newdirective [cbp.gov]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by terrab0t on Sunday January 07 2018, @04:10AM
I don’t care what they have been officially told. When they force me to log into my device and take it down the hall to do whatever they want with it I assume they will sack all data stored on it and all data it has access to. They just won’t officially admit to it.
(Score: 2) by Bobs on Sunday January 07 2018, @03:25PM (1 child)
I don’t know, but my guess is it is a head fake, part of a two- pronged approach between border security and NSA.
‘Don’t store anything on your device - put it in the cloud’. Then NSA slurps it up from there.
Who is more likely to find, decrypt, process, combine analyze and store any electronic data?
Random border agents, or the NSA’s central systems aimed at scanning and indexing everything online?
We need to revisit the ‘right to privacy’ as the current implementation is broken.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 07 2018, @05:59PM
ding
hearing 'cloud' and 'safe' is like 'marketing' and 'stupid consumer'
maybe if we were allowed to sync to our own servers... but like even the mainstream techies with blogs act like knowledge means powerlessness. we're supposed to use the coolest new whatever from apple or google.
probably they are shills. but knowing that doesnt make it any easier to set up a server that you can sync data to. its not like the fcc guy really cares about letting people mind their own business, and now the isp industry doesn't have to.