[Air-L] warrantless laptop searches at US borders

[Alex Halavais]

You mean: another reason not to have international meetings anywhere.
US citizens will be subject to the same rules when returning home from
Copenhagen, as will many of the people who come through the US on the
way from and to other places in North America.

Note also that encrypting your stuff isn't a useful solution, since
you can be denied entry if you don't cough up your passwords when
asked. I suppose you could say you didn't have passwords for some
stuff, but that seems to be a great way of having a lot of trouble
getting back into the US. (Even though I don't think there is a legal
requirement that you not carry encrypted messages across the border.)
If you want to try being my data mule, email me and I'll send you a
large chunk of encrypted data (purely innocuous data--trust me!) to
try bringing across the border, but no password.

Of course, the natural response is to travel with either no data
devices or with a clean laptop. (Actually, given the increase in
baggage fees by US carriers, I suspect most of us will be traveling
naked soon enough.) It's probably a good idea not to have your most
sensitive information on a laptop that you are traveling with anyway,
and I often travel without my primary laptop for this reason. Cleaning
the other devices (mobile, etc.) is a bit more bothersome. If you
don't mind the US government knowing your contacts, that's not a
worry, I suppose. Oh, and did you pay for every one of those MP3s and
video files and can you prove it?

If you are traveling with a clean machine, you'll store your
information, encrypted of course, online and download once you arrive
back to the US. Sure, the government still gets a look (would be naive
to believe otherwise), but least then they have to put in a few
million cycles of decryption work to find out you have a passion for
ABBA.

Alex



On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 9:30 AM, Julie Cohen <jec at law.georgetown.edu> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> If you are traveling to/from the US, please take note of the following.
> (Yet another reason not to have the annual meetings here...)
>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/01/AR200808
> 0103030.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter



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