Subject: Risk of Laptop Seizure by Customs or Border Patrol Officers ...

From: JORDI PALET MARTINEZ <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 09 Nov 2006 17:30:28 -0800

Hi,

Somebody brought to my attention this:
http://www.acte.org/resources/press_release.php?id=91

It seems there have been several cases and the problem is increasing.

I wonder if anyone from IETF had (unfortunately) experienced this problem or
has first hand information about cases (googling you can find many cases and
it shows that the laptops and other devices are returned after years, not
just days or weeks).

Also I wonder if you can confirm if other countries have similar laws or is
an isolated case ?

Regards,
Jordi

**********************************************
The IPv6 Portal: http://www.ipv6tf.org

Bye 6Bone. Hi, IPv6 !
http://www.ipv6day.org

This electronic message contains information which may be privileged or confidential. The information is intended to be for the use of the individual(s) named above. If you are not the intended recipient be aware that any disclosure, copying, distribution or use of the contents of this information, including attached files, is prohibited.

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

---

From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2006 18:11:20 -0800

Cisco had a case in which a traveller had their laptop detained and  
its disk copied by border authorities in Ben Gurion Airport. There  
was some embarrassment related to customer-confidential files, which  
some at Cisco believe may have been the objective of the border service.

That said, I have been through many airports, even US ones, and not  
had this issue.

What I would suggest is that people encrypt confidential information  
on their laptops, and perhaps the entire laptop.

On Nov 9, 2006, at 5:30 PM, JORDI PALET MARTINEZ wrote:

> This electronic message contains information which may be  
> privileged or confidential. The information is intended to be for  
> the use of the individual(s) named above. If you are not the  
> intended recipient be aware that any disclosure, copying,  
> distribution or use of the contents of this information, including  
> attached files, is prohibited.
>
>
>
>

---

From: "Michel Py" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2006 21:34:48 -0800

>> JORDI PALET MARTINEZ wrote:

Ah, our brilliant government in its infinite wisdom....

> Fred Baker wrote:
> What I would suggest is that people encrypt confidential
> information on their laptops, and perhaps the entire laptop.

I would not recommend encrypting the entire laptop. As George Carlin
would say (*), border service agents with a double-digit IQ and a
triple-digit income might think that if dude encrypts the entire laptop,
dude must really have top-secret stuff on it, while the only two
confidential files dude has on his laptop are the payroll spreadsheet
showing how much more dude makes compared to his office buddies and
dude's mistresses phone numbers (one in each city, needs a database to
keep track of). No need to trigger un-necessary scrutiny: Traveling
Terrorist's 101: do not look, dress or act like one.

Besides, there are several ways to carry confidential info while flying.
Here's an example: They'll look at your laptop, but will not bother
looking at the 4GB SD card you have in your digital camera, which
happens to be a perfectly good plug-and-pray disk for any computer, PC
or Mac. I have stored Excel and PowerPoint files both in and out of the
directories used for pictures and it never bothered any camera I had in
my hands.

And even if they do look at it, there are ways to embed your
confidential data within pictures. You need to use a lossless
compression format such as TIFF. If done correctly, on a digital camera
with a noisy CCD at high ISO settings, there is no way to find out that
the least-significant bit of the picture contains actual data. A
5-megapixel 24-bit picture is 15MB, out of which 1.8MB are useable in
theory and 300KB in practice. In short: configure the camera to TIFF,
noise reduction to off, ISO 400 or higher.

Heck, you don't even need a laptop. Just a digital camera.

Michel.

(*) Info: recorded _before_ 9-11-01
(*) Warning: absolutely politically incorrect and rude language.
(*) If you have a problem with the "F" word, do NOT click the link
below.
(*) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZwMz2bsbNY

---

From: Lyndon Nerenberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2006 21:46:55 -0800 (PST)

> looking at the 4GB SD card you have in your digital camera

These days it's called an 'iPod'.

But if you want to get past the Canada Customs high-school summer 
students, get everything off your camera and put it on your PDA.  They 
will arrest you for smuggling in a (Canadian bought) camera (CAD$50) and 
ignore all the hot European electronics you have (CAD$2000).

Trust me on this.

--lyndon

---

From: "Michel Py" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2006 23:35:07 -0800

>> Michel Py wrote:
>> Besides, there are several ways to carry confidential info while
>> flying. Here's an example: They'll look at your laptop, but will
>> not bother looking at the 4GB SD card you have in your digital camera

> Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:

An iPod is a lot more suspicious, IMHO. Unless you accept the risk of
storing a non-music (or non-video) file into the iPod's filesystem and
hope that nobody will notice it's not music nor video (a valid option,
but not bullet-proof) you have to embed the data into actual files,
which so far requires to use a lossless compression process.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I still have to see software that
can embed any significant amount of data into an .mp3 (or .mpg, or
Quicktime or similarly compressed) file; and nobody can come up with a
reason to store raw .WAV files on an iPod, while there are plenty good
reasons to store .TIF files on a digital camera.

In my experience, border agents are not the sharpest knives in the
drawer but some are not completely dumb either: if every .mp3 in your
iPod is 30MB, or if a 5MB file sounds like 11KHz mono instead of 44KHz
stereo, some might wonder why. OTOH, if you're half-serious about
digital photography, you store your pictures in a lossless format
because you want to Photoshop them later without the JPEG artifacts.

As mentioned earlier, greed is the enemy. If you embed 1.5MB of data
into a 15MB .TIF, the compression ratio will go down the toilet; Uncle
Sam might not be able to get your data, but might wonder why when they
save your .TIF as a .JPG it takes 6MB instead the usual 2MB.

Michel.

---

From: Joe Abley <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2006 06:52:48 -0500

On 10-Nov-2006, at 02:35, Michel Py wrote:

> An iPod is a lot more suspicious, IMHO.

Apparently!

   http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html? 
topicId=11211166&pageNo=1&sid=1

Joe

---

From: Ted Faber <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2006 09:51:07 -0800

> which so far requires to use a lossless compression process.

Not that this is really on topic, but there are steganographic systems
that work just dandy on data encoded with lossy compression.  Googling
"steganography JPEG" is a fine start.  Audio's even better than pictures
- longer files.

-- 
Ted Faber
http://www.isi.edu/~faber           PGP: http://www.isi.edu/~faber/pubkeys.asc
Unexpected attachment on this mail? See http://www.isi.edu/~faber/FAQ.html#SIG
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf