Legislation has made it possible for customs officials and border patrol to search the contents of your laptop as if it was a suitcase. No probable cause required. This ruling has actually been around for awhile, but it has only been lately that it is becoming more common – and more worrisome to travelers. The details of this legislation can be found at the New York Times and Associated Content.
Ostensibly, if you have nothing to hide (generally they are searching for child pornography), then you have nothing to fear. Unfortunately, they will look through all your information in their search. This means looking at business documents, financial records, personal photos and videos, tax documentation, emails, IM chat logs, etc, etc…
Even encrypting data won’t work because they’ll just ask for the encryption key… and get it by court order if necessary. Same holds true for that USB key or camera memory card – they’ll search that too because this search includes all media, not just the internal storage.
As more and more of a person’s life ends up in the digital realm, the more a search of a laptop or even a cellphone or PDA becomes an intrusive breach of privacy.
Downloadsquad does a good job of coming to the rescue with some practical resolutions to this situation. They detail a good set of options for how to travel with your laptop, but still have all the access to the information you need. It just takes a bit of planning.
One option they present and seemed like a good solution to me is to upload all the info you need to an online location and leave nothing on the laptop. Services like box.net or Google Docs or Delicious or Flickr can hold tons of information for you without it sitting on your laptop to be pawed through.
On the other side, you want to be sure what you deleted stays deleted, you’ll want to use a secure delete program. On OS X, if you click on Finder->Secure Empty Trash it will do a more thorough delete job than the regular empty trash. On Linux, the CLI command srm does the same thing. Windows doesn’t have a built in secure delete so a program will have to be downloaded. SDelete is a good CLI tool and is free.
Lastly, if you want your entire hard drive wiped clean and no data to be recoverable – use Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) disc and you should be good. This is especially good to use when selling your computer.
Do you do anything to protect your computer privacy while traveling?
