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from the all-your-coin-are-belong-to-us dept.
In May, the bill S.1241 (archive) was introduced in the U.S. Senate by Chuck Grassley, a Republican Senator from Iowa. The bill, if enacted, would call upon the Department of Homeland Security to develop
a strategy to interdict and detect prepaid access devices, digital currencies, or other similar instruments, at border crossings and other ports of entry for the United States
According to a story at btcmanager.com (square brackets in original),
the bill would "criminalize [those] intentionally concealing ownership or control of a [digital currency or digital exchange] account.
The Senate held a meeting about the bill on November 28. Witnesses included Charles Davidson of the Kleptocracy Initiative of the Hudson Institute conservative think tank; Douglas Farah of IBI Consultants, which specializes in "issues of national security, transnational crime, terrorism, terror finance and non-state armed actors"; and Kathryn Haun Rodriguez of Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange. Ms. Haun, however, made no mention of cryptocurrency in her testimony (PDF).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Tuesday December 05 2017, @08:08PM (5 children)
LOL, yeah like the won the Drug War right? It's hardly a losing battle. You're talking about interdicting digital data at border crossings and entry points, which includes airports. That assumes one would do something like that in the first place, transiting with data devices. If I was going to transit a border crossing, airport, whatever, I wouldn't have any digital devices on me, or a few of them with teletubby videos or other funny honey pot shit.
Interdiction in any realistic sense would need to be conducted in cyberspace as much as meat space. Good fucking luck. How are they supposed to make sure I've got no other little caches of information somewhere? No secure email services? Government is doing swimmingly cooperating with big corporations that run the major tech sites and offerings right?
Considering how small a data bearing device can be, and that the Internet is effectively a magic bag of holding you can summon at will, the task presented to Homeland Security is the lost cause.
That, and civil disobedience is never a lost cause. They've no right to perform such invasive searches on me without due process.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday December 05 2017, @10:38PM
Professional criminals can do reasonably well at circumventing restrictions. International crime is their life. They can do everything securely, within their own networks.
You and I, meanwhile, have insecure lives full of insecure relationships that keep sending insecure data through insecure means. If you or I tried to hide our things from the government based purely on ideology, we will lose, because ideology is not enough to keep us from getting sloppy.
The dragnet may be full of holes, but it's still pretty good at catching ordinary people dabbling in the kind of tech that only international criminals will ever be good enough at to avoid detection.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday December 05 2017, @10:40PM (3 children)
Data can be hidden right in plain sight. An IoT device could have extra storage with a few added files added to it. Even if they are looking for data bearing devices, they are not going to attempt to search them all. Such as an IoT teddy bear. Or IoT electric razor with web based interface to check the battery level along with history of how many times you have used it and for what durations.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @12:36AM (1 child)
Yes they will. They can just take your stuff and never give it back to you. They have all the time they could want in searching your stuff and if you lie about anything then that's it for you. They can also follow you back to your home and effectively kidnap you. The majority of the population lives within the constitution-free border zones which covers everywhere within 100 miles of the border, and the border includes all international airports in the country. It's not abused too often, but they already have the power.
If you get raided by the FBI, they take everything electronic and keep it.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday December 06 2017, @04:38PM
Increasingly every day things contain electronics that could be subverted to hide information. Toasters. TV sets. Children's toys. Meanwhile, information can be stored on a micro-SD card smaller than your fingernail which could be cleverly hidden in numerous places.
Are you suggesting the TLAs are going to start taking every innocent looking electronic item from everyone all the time because someone might be smuggling information in or out of the country?
Better yet, publish this information in a book. The dead-tree format of book. Not an e-book. A book like Applied Cryptography. Would this book be stopped from being brought in or out of the country?
What if the code to access your bitcoins is penciled lightly somewhere in the pages of a very innocent looking paper back novel you are carrying?
As for what you say, I actually agree. We are becoming, if not have already become a police state. The line is fuzzy. Sort of like the event horizon of a black hole. It is difficult to know when you have crossed over. Just as with the tipping point for Microsoft's best days being behind it. I predicted it, but I said (years ago) that we wouldn't recognize it for sure until it was already behind us. Similarly with the black hole and the police state.
We already have:
Secret Laws
Secret Interpretations of Laws1
Secret Courts 2
Secret Warrants
Secret Court Orders
Secret Trials
Secret Evidence3
Secret Convictions
Secret Prisons4
Secrete Enhanced Interrogation
It sounds like we've become everything we were fighting in the previous century.
1TLAs claim their interpretation of certain laws must remain secret, otherwise people might try to comply with how they are interpreting the law and thus could not be arrested
2FISA, others
3evidence not made available to the defense. Stingray for instance.
4Gitmo, other black sites in countries that practice torture
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday December 06 2017, @12:31PM
... on the side of a wall in downtown Camden New Jersey.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]