This happened to me driving from the US into Canada with my significant other on a short vacation. After some routine questioning, the agent asked for our phones and passwords. Naturally, I hesitated and wanted to know why he needed to go through our phones. He didn't give a reason, but said if I refuse they'd hold us until their forensics team cracks the phone password anyway. I wanted to make a bigger deal about it but didn't want to ruin our vacation so I complied. They took the phones in the back for about 45 min, who knows what information they downloaded or uploaded during that time, then gave it back to me while interrogating me like I was a drug lord because there was a text message from a year earlier about a friend's girlfriend doing cocaine.
It was extremely unnerving, they went through all our private pictures, messages, dropbox files, email, notes, dating apps, etc. It ruined the vacation for me, and I've stopped visiting Canada because of how disgusted I felt afterwards. I know Canada is not the only country doing that, so from now on when I cross an international border I wipe my phone (after backing up) and just have a few pictures and messages on there. Incidentally though, that's the only time it's happened to me.
>>It ruined the vacation for me, and I've stopped visiting Canada because of how disgusted I felt afterwards.
I don't blame you for this at all, but I will say this is bi-directional; as a Canadian, when I travel to the US, I get the same bullshit questioning and phone snooping on occasion. The current controversy on border crossing is that, despite marijuana becoming legalized in Canada shortly, if you admit to smoking it when asked, you'll be barred from entering the US. So seems to me that both countries just love love love the opportunity to flex their power against people who have no recourse. If you want to see what cops do when they don't have to follow any rules on unreasonable searches, probable cause, reasonable suspicion, etc. then just look to our borders.
I wish our governments could get together and sort this junk out, but that would mean both agencies would have to lose some of their power to "secure the border" so it'll never go anywhere.
Now I want to go to Canada repeatedly just to get them to try to decrypt my phone. "You know, I don't recall the darn password. I'll just go have a seat while you do your thing."
It would be interesting. However those people can vindictive and if you fall in their crosshairs they can ruin your life. I wouldn't mess with them just because at least.
My experience is that entering Canada is a little less of a problem and that it's only become more of a problem due to pressure on the Canadians from the US to beef up their border security or else. The more strict checks seem to apply both to Canadians and non-Canadians. And entering Canada, the law is not actually suspended at the border and its vicinity .. unlike some other places.
That said I've travelled dozens of times in a multitude of ports of entries and the vast majority of people have no problem, they're not searched, they're not detained. I haven't seen anyone standing in front of me in line have a problem either. You can avoid 99% of the problem by being polite, answering questions truthfully, and treating the border guards with respect. Yeah, it sucks if they have a bad day and they're rude to you or they ask you invasive questions, just play along and be nice. You'll be fine. If you are suspicious or if you piss them off they will potentially make your day very very bad.
All that said, I think the land border between the US and Canada should just be open.
By the way, you can also go on vacation without a phone ;) disconnecting will make your vacation better!
I don't know about that. They were a royal pain in the 90's if you had a bus of high school students. I remember them grabbing a couple of girls (didn't even talk to them first) and taking them away while not allowing the adult counselors to be with them. That lasted about an hour and the girls were crying when they returned. They also kept a group of buses their for multiple hours. I'm not even sure what they were looking for.
The US side would nod their heads and says there was nothing to be done about it.
I entered Canada a couple of times in the 90s and it was basically cursory look at my passport + have a nice a day. Something like 5 seconds. Today I am a Canadian citizen and overall the experience is much worse than it used to be in the 90s or even 10 years ago.
Which border crossing had those incidents? So those girls were on the bus with you, they came back crying, and you have no idea why? Is there more context here?
Well, possibly. My point is that in Canada, at least on paper "Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.". Now obviously this is always work in progress and there are situations where asserting your rights is a problem, but people should follow up on these incidents and they do have recourse. Unlike some other places.
"The context of the search, and the activity that brings a person into contact with the state, can have an impact on the person’s reasonable expectation of privacy."
...
"The degree of personal privacy expected at borders, where travellers expect to be searched, is lower than in other enforcement situations (R. v. Simmons, [1988] 2 S.C.R. 495 at page 528; Monney at paragraph 34; R. v. Jacques, [1996] 3 S.C.R. 312 at paragraph 18).
The expectation of privacy is reduced in the school setting in relation to the responsibility of teachers and other school authorities to provide a safe environment and maintain order and discipline in the school (M.(M.R.)).
Prisons carry a decreased expectation of privacy (Weatherall; R. v. Conway, [1989] 1 S.C.R. 1659). However, the lowered expectation of privacy within a prison does not allow the seizure without a warrant of bodily samples taken as part of a medical examination (R. v. Dorfer (1996), 104 C.C.C. (3d) 528 (B.C.C.A.))."
I drove from Detroit to Toronto via Windsor, and was subjected to a vehicle search and questioning. I pulled up my hotel reservation at the agents' request, and he snatched my phone out of my hands and started going through my emails. He couldn't wrap his head around why anyone would want to take a roadtrip to toronto for an extended weekend, other than to run drugs. I've also been interrogated when flying into Canada for work. Canadian border security is notorious for this kind of stuff.
I'm Canadian. I get searched all the time by both sides. Canadian side has been worse for me, so far.
I really like going to other countries, their customs tend to be reasonable. coming back home is always a nerve racking experience.
I haven't been asked for my phone yet, but have been asked for my camera.
I'm being drawn more and more to paying for online storage/sync solutions and clearing my phone and laptop before traveling to the USA or Canada. actually more worried about Canada.
That's what I do. Anything that I think would cause me problems coming back into Canada gets pushed to the cloud while I'm still out of country, then deleted from my devices. Next, I log out/disconnect from my cloud services and uninstall their apps. Once I've cleared customs, I take a few minutes to reinstall and reconnect everything.
It's a hell of a lot better than dealing with the bullshit that is CBSA.
If you have a reasonable internet connection at home this might be the moment to get your own server. Next to online storage (Nextcloud/Owncloud, Seafile) it can host your mail (postfix/exim w/dovecot + spamassassin + sieve), source repo (gogs/gitea), miscellaneous web things you might want to host, media streaming server (airsonic, ampache, etc), personal VPN (openVPN) and more. This gives you far more flexibility (and storage) than commercial online storage/sync solutions for the price of some work to set it up and the electricity to power the thing.
It doesn't matter whether or not it is. While you are there they are your gods and after you leave they're untouchable. If the border security is rude or downright abusive your only recourse is just not going to the country in question.
this comment made me sad. i am a south asian national, i do have a canadian tourist visa and was hoping to go watch F1 in 2019 in Montreal. reading all of this is probably going to change that plan :/
I'm a Canadian permanent resident and the dozen or so times I've crossed the border into Canada I've never had a negative experience. I've always found the Canadian border agents to be polite and courteous. I cannot say the same for their US counterparts. Not doubting the negative experiences described above just that my personal random sample has been different.
Ditto. The Canadians were pretty easy to deal with.
The US is always a PITA, esp. after long international flights. One time they flagged me for "smuggling halogen headlights" or something and searched ALL of my stuff. Missed my LA-DC flight because of it. And I'm a white, clean-cut US citizen.
Keep in mind that people who cross the border without any incidents don't usually bother posting about it. I wouldn't alter your plans just based on a few comments here at least.
This is terrifying, I had no idea this kind of practice is already in place! In Asia, so far I never got asked for my phone and equipment, but now I wonder what the best way is to handle this. Killing my phone and restoring after entering is one way, but for a laptop that's more annoying unless you live in the cloud. Might still be a good practice to have your devices in a state where you could easily wipe and restore them in no time.
If I randomly got asked to do that, to be honest, I would rather turn around and go back instead of taking the risk that they maybe find something out of my past that can get me intro troubles.
Don't travel with your primary devices or any devices with sensitive or even personal information on them - to any country ruled by totalitarian regimes, like China, Iran, Turkey, New Zealand, Canada, or the US...
Five eyes, nine eyes, fourteen eyes. Most probably 195 eyes, although perhaps they'll be split 3 or 4 ways instead of one unilateral bloc of pervasive government overreach consisting of every country on earth...
Exactly. Why do you think Canada is exempt from a number of US border requirements (e.g. ETSA). It’s not out of the US goodness of their heart. It’s because the US and Canada freely share information.
This happened to my friend in Canada (who was born in and retains citizenship in Canada). They also told use they would use a spectrogram to determine if we had cannabis with us. I think it was an attempt to scare us, assuming we had very little knowledge. Turns out, their definition of spectrogram is tearing our entire car apart. Mostly the interior panels. Thought that was pretty interesting :-)
You have no right to privacy when crossing an international border. The solution is simple - don't carry any data you don't want to give to the country you're entering.
There should be for citizens of the United States re-entering the United States.
It says so in the Constitution. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
That is not how it is in practice, but the Constitution is quite clear on the subject.
The power to conduct border searches, even without probable cause, is considered well-settled under the law as not contravening the Constitution. See, e.g., U.S. v. Ramsey, 431 U.S. 606 (1977).
Entirely agreed that precedent accords Customs their present powers.
From the case's dissent: "If the Government is allowed to exercise he power it claims, the door will be open to the wholesale, secret examination of all incoming international letter mail. No notice would be necessary either before or after the search."
Viewed from a post-Snowden perspective, it sounds predictive.
Segregation, too, was once considered well-settled. That didn't make it right nor consistent with the Constitution, which has not changed its language on the subject since 1868.
Do note that restoring your phone can be a massive pain, even on a fast network it took me a couple of hours to fully restore it. There's also certain things you'll need to set up again; Apple Pay, mail passwords, ... So it's really not as simple as you make it out to be.
I'm genuinely curious; why is cloud storage considered to be a solution here?
When I put my 'megalomania cap' on, one of the first things I do is figure that people will use the cloud, which actually makes me happy. I won't have to worry about notifications, in-person confrontations and/or low-level employee error.
Same for people opting to ship their devices abroad via FedEx and the like to avoid the hassle of wiping and/or being searched.
As far as I can tell (from reading history and living), companies, no matter how beneficent they claim to be, acquiesce to "gov't" demands because the penalty of not doing so is death. Recent case in point, Google in the PRC.
But again, I fully admit that I may be wrong here. So, if I am, I hope someone will take the time to explain why. Thanks.
I'm sure you won't get any extra attention if you show them a freshly wiped phone, totally normal.
Unfortunately I think you'd have to have the phone activated with a different Apple account. But if they ask you questions (like "do you have any other icloud accounts") don't lie, it never makes it better. Just say that this is your travel account. This is now quite standard practice for execs when travelling to e.g. China.
This is good advice but practitioners should be advised that iOS data backed up to iCloud can be decrypted by Apple and, as a result, is subject to subpoena by the authorities.
The good news is that, at least in the U.S., a warrant (not a subpoena, that’s for civil matters) needs to be issued by a judge and can issue only if probable cause is provided. That’s a much higher standard than a border search, where no such limitations apply.
Let’s be real. The law allows them sufficient room to detain people that they’ll just threaten to make life hard for you if you don’t do things the easy way.
The law is a post-facto thing which you can use to sue if you want to lose some years of your life. It never actually helps prevent a bad situation. And to make it worse you’ll probably effectively be banned from traveling for being a troublemaker.
This can be made easier with a secondary discardable-grade phone with the same O/S as your primary phone.
Do factory reset and cross the border. Then just sign in to your travel phone just like you did when you bought it and switched on for the first time, and it pulls all apps/messages/passwords from the cloud. You'll get at least 95% of your real phone synced to the travel phone.
Back at home, your real phone is untouched and you can just switch back to it without having to set up anything, or losing any local settings. Then stash the travel phone until the next trip.
I've got an old iPhone 5 burner I use for international travel. It's a slight hassle but I'd rather that than someone going through all my texts, emails and pics etc.
I too am incredulous of that claim. Most likely it was meant to scare the uninformed (and also the informed, since they do not want to waste the time).
Depends on when it happened. There have been times when there have been workable exploits that have been used by law enforcement agencies.
There's a fairly high-profile Israeli company that specializes in finding or buying zero-day exploits and reselling them in script-kiddie form to law enforcement agencies at high prices.
The exploits come in a nice box (physical box with phone connectors), and sadly, the answer could be yes at the bigger checkpoints (depends on whether they shelled out $$$ for the box).
Odays often have a finite lifetime. Once you have bought an exploit you may as well use it. Cellebrite and Greycode produce reliable and surprisingly functional gear. Apple and other vendors obviously try to discover what exploit is being used, and exploit vendors try to hide the technique. I suspect this is why sometimes the device is never returned.
Generally I wouldn't characterise the customs people as goons. Like most LE jobs they see some nasty stuff. I'm talking paedophilia and violent pornography. They also deal with some really sketchy characters and if you trigger that detection you are definitely getting extra scrutiny.
I would say "don't go to Canada", but I'm not sure how common this is across the world. Does anyone have a sense of how common this draconian approach is? I have a US passport and have been to about 25 countries on six continents and have never experienced this, but borders see such mind bogglingly high numbers pass through that I wouldn't say I have a robust set of data points.
I would say "don't go to Canada", but I'm not sure how common this is across the world.
The more you travel, the more common it is.
The phone thing is somewhat new, ever since certain companies started selling devices to governments that let them crack, examine, and archive your phone.
But being hassled at the border has always been a risk. Before it was terrorism, it was drugs, or just the change in culture.
I've had problems getting into Japan because of my heart medication.
I've read that if you have stamps in your passport from certain Middle Eastern countries, you can't get into some other Middle Eastern countries.
I've also read quite extensively recently that it's become very difficult for Indians to get into Georgia. Entire families, and even planeloads of people have been turned away, if you believe what you read on TripAdvisor.
> being hassled at the border has always been a risk. Before it was terrorism, it was drugs, or just the change in culture.
Right, I'm aware of this, and borders in general suck. I've had a fair few bizarre experiences at borders, some of them funny (like the Lebanese border guard who insisted on speaking Spanish to me) and some quite shitty (lookin at you, Israel). But to me, the above story is quite the outlier in terms of sheer hostility, from a country that I didn't think of as being particularly draconian at the border.
Really? I've not heard of countries issuing multiple simultaneous passports unless you have official or diplomatic status.
Previously the Israelis stapled a piece of paper with a stamp on it, you take it out before you go to the GCC. Now its not even stapled. (They photograph your passport & stamp pages though...) https://www.touristisrael.com/the-israeli-passport-stamp/974...
Several of my colleagues have multiple passports, simply because they travel often. They can travel with one passport, while the other is sent to the embassy for the next trip's visa.
Two of them are British, as am I. I looked into the process, but then changed the focus of my work and didn't need to travel so intensely. Essentially, I would have sent in a normal passport renewal form, and attached a letter saying "I'm going to X countries in the last Y months, so need a second passport". "I'm going to X as well as Y" is an equally valid reason.
What a practical solution. Deeper googling shows that this is possible for many countries (DE, AU, US, UK, FR at least), often called a concurrent or second passport. I wish I had known about this when various countries had been taking their sweet time about getting me a visa.
Your home country is pretty good at this stuff too. Had this happen to me in 2016 on a business trip, but I just had my work phone and laptop with me and didn't care too much. What was annoying were the comments I got when stating I'm a software dev and visiting for work (along the lines of "we have our own capable people so we don't need you taking our jobs"). I was at that time working for a US company's branch in Switzerland. Not too fond of visiting again. Luckily I'm not working there anymore.
> Your home country is pretty good at this stuff too.
Oh yea, I have no illusions about this, and I met more than a few people during my travels who deprioritize going to the US for tourism because of this, in the same way I'm discussing Canada here.
I didn't imagine that Canada was the _only_ country that did stuff like this, since I assumed we (and a couple other famous outliers like Israel) had similar stories. I was just wondering how common it was overall.
I've been to probably 60-70 countries on a UK passport. The only unpleasant border experiences I recall were in Israel, UK, France, and the USA. (Rude and intrusive).
> Or wipe your phone, restore backup from cloud on arrival.
I'd wager the agents could legitimately (for some deranged, modern usage of that word) require that you either surrender your phone anyway or restore it immediately so they can review what you're clearly planning on bringing into the country.
By that logic they could demand live access to your bank/social/email account as well. It's one thing to search things that you physically bring into the country - this article was talking about NZ only search the phones in "Airplane" mode.
True, the way this law is apparently defined I think you could get away with it, but the distinction between what's on the device and what's in the cloud is getting fuzzier all the time, and I'm not sure other countries would feel so constrained.
Android supports multiple user profiles on the same device. Maybe being logged in to a stripped down dummy account when crossing the border would be enough? I'm guessing the storage is encrypted on a per user basis, so as long as the customs officer isn't aware of it it even a device clone should leave your actual data safe.
If it's a random officer on the side of the road, then this might work.
If it's at a border crossing, assume that they're using forensic tools to dump your entire phone, which will bypass any user-profile shenanigans you might try to do.
This would cause me to turn around at the border and cancel my reservations. I won’t be going to New Zealand either. And yes, I am aware the USA treats incoming visitors just as badly.
It's border patrol speak for "keep your device indefinitely while refusing you entry and/or detaining you indefinitely". By attempting to cross the border you give them the right to do any of that.
There are bad agents everywhere. Just a numbers game after a while. I've done that border tons of times with no issue. Though, I will say that I take protective measures before I travel anyway. It's pretty easy to log out of an iCloud account and there is nothing on my computer that I care about that isn't backed up somewhere.
This is an important issue cryptographers and security minded people often overlook: the strongest cryptography is irrelevant if it opens you to such social harassment. What we need is practical cryptography.
I have found practical success by booting from an encrypted Linux partition that has absolutely nothing relevant on it, with a weak password I can always enter when requested by big guys with guns. Unbeknown to them on the same partition there sits another encrypted volume, at some offset from the outer's partition start. If I fail to enter the correct password for the outer partition, Ubuntu drops into the command line of the initrd, that is equiped with all the tools you need to mount the real, offset partition:
cryptsetup -o 100000000 create boot /dev/sdc3
So instead of having a nice GUI into which you directly enter the uber-secret password, you press enter a few times in the GUI, drop to command line, issue a single command and only then enter the uber-secret password. A mild nuisance in your bootup process, once you get the hang of it.
It's impossible for any court forensic team, let alone an airport goon, to prove there is actually another partition inside the outer encrypted partition, unless you mount common volumes and cross-contaminate. An important caveat is to properly defragment the outer partition and fiddle with the offset and the size of the inner partition to prevent any conflicts, then avoid writing in the outer partition.
> It's impossible for any court forensic team, let alone an airport goon, to prove there is actually another partition inside the outer encrypted partition, unless you mount common volumes and cross-contaminate. An important caveat is to properly defragment the outer partition and fiddle with the offset and the size of the inner partition to avoid any conflicts, then avoid writing in the outer partition.
Customs staff typically don't know to prove there is, they just need reasonable suspicion to seize goods for further investigation. The fact you've booted into a 50GB partition on a 500GB disk may well be considered reasonable suspicion to seize the goods for the sake of further investigation.
You are correct. I've simplified a bit: I boot from a 50GB decoy root partition that also has a 450GB decoy data partition along side it, both encrypted with the same weak password. This is a standard configuration and the machine works perfectly fine, you can write inside the decoy root as much as you want, as Linux would do when it boots. The data partition is largely empty and you haven't written large files there for some time, but that should not be suspicious by itself.
In the free space of the large data partition there lives the sensitive hidden root. It's maybe 250GB, with a 100GB offset from the start of the decoy data, and 50GB guard space at the back, where ext4 writes all sorts of crap. So you get to use about 50% of your raw disk capacity inside the sensitive environment, as a single encrypted root.
The outer volume is itself encrypted so if you correctly initialized it as recommended, the raw disk should be full of random bits. When read from within the encrypted outer volume, these decrypt to random data as well, so there should be no way to detect the inner volume, either by looking at the raw disk sectors or at the decrypted outer volume sectors. Most importantly, you have the plausible deniability that the disk looks exactly as it should per recommendations of security experts, that the boot-loader and initrd are the stock versions that exist on any other Ubuntu machine with encrypted volumes etc.
Another caveat here is that the inner volume must use the implicit encryption parameters of cryptsetup, or that the correct parameters are supplied in the command line. A LUKS header should absolutely not be used, as it will be plainly visible inside the partition, and would indicate, at the very least, that some other encrypted data was stored in the past on the disk leading to new questions about its password etc., killing plausible deniability.
"This means that if you have a large set of random-looking data, they can already lock you up."
In the UK, with RIPA legislation, there is a real risk of someone dropping a USB key full of random data on you, telling the cops there's child porn in it, then you get locked up for 5 years for failing to decrypt it.
I've read the FAQ item and I'm sorry to say that it seems written by somebody talking out of their behind, giving legal advice to boot.
Sure, once in the hands of the Russian FSB, Italian Mafia or Nicolas Maduro, any detectable amount of random data could result in torture - just to be on the safe side, maybe there is a hidden volume there after all.
But in any state where rule of law is observed, the prosecution must establish probable cause and, once in court, prove beyond reasonable doubt that the illegal act was indeed committed - in this case, failure to disclose the encryption key of a locked volume. So there must exist corroborating evidence that should exclude any reasonable accidental or normal situation that could produce the random data. For example, a border agent could testify that he saw illegal material on your device's screen and a random file could be found in your home directory. In your device history, traces to a missing volume or partition could remain etc. The defense can easily explain away a partition initialized to random, if that's what standard system tools produce in their normal configuration and no other corroborating evidence exits.
A LUKS header is a clear indication that another encryption configuration was/is used on the computer, so you would then be compelled to give explanation about it's presence, it's password, the provenance of the laptop etc. The explanations given in the FAQ (experiment, random swap) are unconvincing if they are not corroborated by other patterns, for example modification timestamps on /etc/fstab and /etc/crypttab and so on.
So the absence of the LUKS header really does fill a practical gap, and it happens that most legal systems today are squeezing harder and harder into that gap. Unlike the dubious claims in that FAQ entry, Truecrypt hidden volumes actually have established legal precedent.
TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt can do this for you with the intention that the existence of a hidden partition is plausibly deniable unless the correct key is provided. The only downside to this is gross inefficiency, you may only be able to get 20GB useful space out of a 500GB disc.
I think the parent comment is describing a scheme where the outer partition contains the inner one, so both are large. As the parent notes, this is dangerous, and you have to be careful not to overwrite inner data if you boot the outer os.
It is also Linux, so there are probably three different ways to make partitions appear to be a different size or reserve certain blocks in the partition.
Love this. Isn't there also something for Android that presents a "safe" account when you type in a particular passcode?
This regulation is clearly made by people who don't understand the technology and capabilities of these devices. A waste of time and money; who is going to train customs officials to search through phones?
As cheap as burner phones are these days, it seems the easiest route is to buy a decoy Android and fill it with plausible-looking innocent data, and leave your real phone home when going on vacation.
> This regulation is clearly made by people who don't understand the technology and capabilities...
Staying ahead of them with a technological trick is only a partial, temporary solution, though. Eventually you can expect that there will be an attack, whether purchased (see GreyKey) or legislated, on the workaround. What should happen is that the whole arms race should be nipped in the bud by outlawing this kind of data collection coercion. But I don't have a lot of hope about getting that genie back into the bottle.
the end result will be any system which is not familiar to the officials who are doing the checks or compatible with their scanning technology will simply be confiscated upon entry.
the only safe harbor will be one you don't carry with you except as a device which can guarantee secure access to that remote information.
I recall a story from long ago: user is requested to boot their laptop by airline security.
They boot, which drops to a linux (bsd?) command line. Agent is not pleased. User sets PS1 so the prompt now looks like DOS. Agent is satisfied (they may just have been satisfied that the device worked, but this story dates from when a DOS prompt was a believable thing for someone to recognize as "computer" )
But they saw it was a working computer. Airline security don't care what operating system your computer runs, they care if the laptop has been hollowed out and filled with C4.
Of course these days you could have a Raspberry Pi in a corner of the laptop case and the rest of it filled with whatever contraband, and still present a "working" computer to the security screener.
Nobody would seriously claim that airport security is an effective way of stopping determined people. It is a deterrent that works to catch thoroughly stupid people and to make smart people dwell on the anxiety of getting caught.
Yep. I've never had to demonstrate that my devices are real at the security checkpoints getting into airports, I just put them in the trays and the X-ray scanners tell the agents that they're safe.
Now, dealing with the customs/pre-clearance checkpoints, that's another matter.
To be very honest, I find the methodology very similar to what drug trafficker would do to hide their drugs. And I don't think this method will end well for all parties either way.
If it works, customs officers cannot find actual illegal contents, and criminals walk free through customs.
If customs officers somehow detects you are doing this, you risk obstructing security measures.
But that's true for all encryption and privacy technology, it has dual use. We as a society must find the right balance and say, ok, there's no reasonable justification for owning 1 pound of plutonium, but there is a legitimate case for high encryption and privacy.
This forum largely believes that the balance struck by New Zealand - that you don't have the right to data privacy when traveling - is completely unacceptable, and as technologists we try to find technical countermeasures.
Let me ask you this hypothetical question instead:
What if we have a "physical encryption" technology that allows encrypting physical objects so that X-ray scanners, drug detecting methods or metal detectors cannot see through them?
Would customs be allowed to ask for the decryption key? Or should the customs just ignore whatever encrypted inside?
Physically, there's constraint on what I am exposing. Digitally, it's my entire life. The bar for a search must be much higher to reflect that. Most people here are not used to dealing with a corrupt officer. Imagine a scenario where you own a property and the police officer next door desperately wants it and he finds a loop hole to block your access to the street (and does more horrible things to get you to vacate your house). Now imagine what he'll do if he had your phone and work backwards from there - even innocent things like a flirty message with someone can potentially ruin someone's life - it doesn't have to be illegal.
The justice system and separation of powers acts as checks and balances from anyone (good or bad) being harassed unless there's a strong reason why. Get a warrant with a limited scope and then do the search.
No need to imagine. There are innumerable cases over the years where cops have turned into stalkers backed by the power of the government when their girlfriends dump them. It happened to one of my ex-es, but I've seen it in newspapers dozens of times over the years.
The problem is that cops are still people. And people are often messy, emotional, irregular, obsessive, mean, or just have a bad day and need someone to take it out on.
Wetware will be wetware. All we can do is advocate for better training and smarter policies.
There's no need to go to such wild hypotheticals if what you want to say is that you support border data searches - it's your right to have that political position. I simply have the opposite position.
Given some hypothetical new technology with vast societal implications, I would be forced to carefully reconsider that position, but in this case I believe privacy is a basic human right that does not simply disappear at the borders.
Let me ask you this hypothetical question instead:
What if we have a "brain encryption" technology that allows encrypting your brain so that brain scanners, thought detecting methods or emotion detectors cannot see through it?
Would customs be allowed to ask for the decryption key? Or should the customs just ignore whatever is encrypted inside?
Actually, it would simply make terrorists avoid official border crossings. They could, for example, pay a human trafficker $2000 to get them over the border with Mexico.
Of course, you would then request for brain scanning technology to be more widely employed and that brain scanners be installed in the subway, on buses, gas stations and any other place drug dealers and terrorists could happen to go by. I think we all know what is the end for this line of reasoning.
You know I used to question why on earth would Trump want to "build a wall". But I think your comment (along with the previous comments) somehow made a good justification for it.
Anyway, it is quite apparent that we have fundamentally different views on these issues, so let's agree to disagree and call it a day.
Only if you don't mind the downvotes. For some odd reason, these 'imaginary points' end up causing me to self-censor anyways.
On further-thought, it makes me think it's just something built into us. We seek social/group approval, and it makes us regress to the mean when it comes to thought/opinion. However, I don't think it's the right way for our brains to be wired, especially with social media exposing us to the entire world.
And now with this border-search thing. If it means that the state end up having access to all your social media accounts, that now span decade+ timeframes, not even time and personal growth/regret can protect us.
Yeah, it would be preferable if your comments weren't voted down here because of disagreement with the view you express, as long as it's expressed clearly and constructively (which it is).
> That would eradicate drug trafficking and cross-border terrorism.
No, it wouldn't. One key weakness of totalitarian systems (and that is what you are advocating for) is always that the massive power of the system attracts criminals and corruption into the system and has a major risk of the criminals ending up using the totalitarian power for themselves. If you think there is some sort of absolute solution to a social problem, you are ignoring that implementing the solution does itself build on society. If society isn't free of crime, your solution won't be free of crime either, and if society if free of crime, you don't need the solution. And if your solution isn't free of crime (so, you have corrupt police officers or judges or whatever), then you have thus given criminals the option to use a massively powerful weapon for themselves in some ways.
It wouldn't stop those things though, there will always be a weak point. What it would do is erode the rights and freedoms of law abiding citizens (something that terrorists seem to want).
Furthermore, if you want to stop drug trafficking, legalize them.
> It wouldn't stop those things though, there will always be a weak point.
If that is your argument, then I don't think anyone can convince you.
> What it would do is erode the rights and freedoms of law abiding citizens (something that terrorists seem to want).
That's not how Wikipedia (and I myself) define terrorism:
> Terrorism is, in the broadest sense, the use of intentionally indiscriminate violence as a means to create terror among masses of people; or fear to achieve a financial, political, religious or ideological aim.
I can be convinced when the argument is good. I don't think a nebulous, "give up your privacy for some possible safety gains" is such an argument. I equate privacy with freedom, and I don't want to give up my freedom.
Digital objects are different in that they usually contain your private memories, pictures etc. and it's entirely possible to reconstruct a complete network of your friends, family, history, affairs, trade secrets etc. from a single phone search.
Physical objects usually don't reveal this much at once and require a warrant. With a border phone search, there's no due process at all. If you're so afraid of bad actors that you're willing to subject yourself to this, you're free, but the bad actors have won.
So what happens if you move from country A to country B and bring all your personal papers, address books, photo albums, diaries, business records, etc. across the border (in a moving van, for example)? I really don't know but I suspect that no one takes the takes the time to read all those documents or to copy them for later study at least at most borders. I don't even know what the applicable law is for someone moving to/from US/Canada, for example.
What happens if you use the postal service to deliver your phone across a border? Are the same authorities who claim the right to search your phone if it is on your person at the border also claiming the authority to confiscate and duplicate your phone if it shipped/mailed? Do you have to put your password on a sticky note on the the front of the phone? And if you ship the physical device but transfer the data separately does that change the expectations?
It is interesting that condensing information into a digital format that can be easily duplicated and searched (before or after duplication) seems to change the expectations for the authorities and I think for individuals.
I think this is another example of the modern digital world/economy has left the legal system in the dust.
Your thought experiment raises a good point, but I think your conclusions are still wrong.
The boundary between what should be allowed and what should not be allowed has nothing whatsoever to do with the state of technology.
Freedom is not possible without privacy. As soon as you are in danger of privacy violation, you change your behavior. This is also known as self-censoring. You can already see it here in the forum: people report that they have nothing to hide, but they still reset their phones and use fake accounts when crossing the border.
What is particularly insidious about border control is that there is no legal checks-and-balances system behind it. Police cannot search your home without a warrant issued by a judge. Border control can search everything without any warrant.
In the past, you could yourself 'balance' this by not taking very personal things (e.g., a diary) with you when traveling abroad. But with our digital lifes, this is not possible anymore. You cannot leave your photo album at home anymore.
What makes it so much worse is that criminals can so easily circumvent this issue. They anyway use throw-away phones. They don't need to carry notebooks with them, they can just buy a new one on arrival - if needed at all - and download encrypted files from the Cloud.
So we now have established that border control has an unprecedented and uncontrolled access to our privacy. Shouldn't they be forced to prove that this pays off for our society? Please show me the cases of successful prosecution after digital search of a phone. To me, there seem extremely few of them. So it seems a high price for a marginal benefit.
To make the analogy complete, it needs to include a global mail network that accepts these magic boxes and transports them almost instantaneously at almost no charge, so that you could trivially avoid any requirement to show customs what's inside by mailing your stuff to yourself after you get through.
You can "download" crappy, not very effective guns. And you still need to obtain the ammo (the actually lethal part) the old-fashioned way.
I would very much be surprised if it becomes possible for drugs or explosives any time within my lifetime. Chemistry and physics just don't work that way.
Still, you do need very specific input materials for both processes.
In the case of the latter, you basically need a spool of explosive string. You're not so much printing an explosive as you are shaping an explosive into a desired form. I'm sure it's still very useful, but I don't think it's a particularly big game changer in the "smuggling things into a country" field.
I have a hypothetical question for you. Lets say we develop brain scanning tech. Should it be mandatory to perform a brain download to cross the border?
If it works, customs officers cannot find actual illegal contents, and criminals walk free through customs.
"Illegal contents", as in what? Unflattering cartoons of the president? A spreadsheet marked "cocaine delivery schedule"? Why is this on the alleged criminal's phone while she's crossing the border? Has she never heard of the internet? No real criminal could be caught by any of this buffoonery. Lots of normal people whom the state would like to harass will be harassed, while wasting a great deal of money, which is the point.
Haha yeah Beard Man should have left his laptop at home. Still, they must have been pretty confident in the evidence they already had when they issued that arrest warrant.
Real criminals are caught by this all the time. A lot of these guys are scaping the bottom of the IQ barrel.
But a lot of the agents will have MAGA hats in their car, so I probably wouldn't have unflattering Trump cartoons on my phone. Though I would love it if EVERYONE had 'fuck trump' as their phone background.
As technically exciting as this is, i would probably just bring a burner laptop, installed with a a default Debian install on a properly initialized LUKS partition, and a weak password, and a USB drive with a Debian install.
Once inside customs, i'd verify the SHA1 sum of the USB drive image vs. the one on the Debian site, and reinstall the machine, setup a VPN back home, and pull the data i need onto the machine.
Repeat the "dummy" install when leaving the country.
Note that this requires using dm-crypt in plain mode, which allows only one passphrase, doesn't perform any passphrase mangling or salting, and performs no passphrase checking on decryption. It requires one to re-enter exact parameters, and an improper passphrase will happily give bunk data.
Secondly, high-entropy data is evident at even a courtesy glance - normal computer and filesystem operations do not produce high-entropy data on disk, therefore a large portion of high-entropy disk data is highly suspect. The author discusses this in detail in sections 2.4 and 5.2 of https://gitlab.com/cryptsetup/cryptsetup/wikis/FrequentlyAsk...
True, but the default parameters of cryptsetup are quite secure with a high entropy password and they are seldom changed. A volume opened with the wrong password will fail to mount with no ill effects, you would just crypysetup delete and then re-create it again with the right password. I've addressed at length the other issues above, initializing an encrypted drive with random data is a widely recommended countermeasure against attacks that exploit the way the filesystem allocates sectors, VeraCrypt does it by default and many graphical setups for Linux offer the option for encrypted drives.
>It's impossible for any court forensic team, let alone an airport goon, to prove there is actually another partition inside the outer encrypted partition
booting into a 50 GB partition on a 512GB SSD isn't suspicious?
how do you ensure this? afaik ext4 scatters its allocations across the partition, so it's only a matter of time before an allocation for a syslog entry wipes your .ssh/id_rsa
Colocating both roots on the same partition spells disaster, you will absolutely clobber data when the outer system boots. I have detailed in another post that the correct way is to put the sensitive root inside a largely empty decoy data partition, and no longer write there (but you can update timestamps in place).
Needless to say, using these schemes for SSD drives requires special consideration in regard to trimming.
as someone else mentioned, the only reason it works now is that very few people does this. if this starts getting popular, i guarentee that TSA is going to check for hidden partitions, patched kernels, suspiciously clean OS, etc.
The outer partition fills the entire SSD. It just happens to use a filesystem that packs its data from the beginning of the partition. So long as you don't ever use more than 50GB at a time, the inner partition is safe.
Like we've asked before, could you please start commenting in the spirit of this site, which is to gratify our intellectual curiosity? Gratuitous inflammation doesn't belong and will get your account banned.
We don't see nearly all comments, even if we post in a thread. If you notice such things the best thing to do is email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we'll be sure to see it.
"One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." - some U.S. citizen. (MLK, Jr.)
> If you pull this stunt in the USA, I hope you enjoy your five-year sentence in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison and the effect that the permanent felony conviction on your record will have on your employment prospects and the exercise of your civil rights. Misleading, or concealing information from, a federal agent is a felony.
If this is the line of the argument, then why is the search done at all? I am perfectly fine telling an agent of the state "No sir, I do not have any illegal data on this device" - fully knowing that a lie is conducive to imprisonment. What I object to is the search itself, which by the way, is unlawful under the US constitution.
It's troubling to watch one of the most amazing places on earth transform itself into a totalitarian purgatory.
Access to physical phone/laptop is only the first step -- mark my words. Big Brother's bureaucrats are never satiated. Next, we will have demands for passwords and unrestricted access to : email, facebook, photo sharing, hacker news posts, social media, etc.
I see sudden spike in the market for burner phones. ANd a long-term opportunity for a company that can create a "burner" social media profile.
Nitpick: in Catholic dogma purgatory is a place of purification, those in purgatory know that they are there for a reason and only for a certain time, afterwards they enter heaven. Hell on the other hand, is for eternity and ugly. That's why the two are easily distinguished in their iconography, both involve imagery of flames, but souls in purgatory look joyful and those in hell look despondent.
For others saying something to the effect of "we let them search our X already, so the phone is a logical step and not a big deal," you've already given up your expectation of privacy, so you can't understand why others would want to keep it. This is the slow creep of the state with concomitant erosion of liberty.
In a few short years, you are the ones who will be justifying any of the following on grounds that "they already do the less-invasive thing, why not one step more?"
- Mandatory fingerprinting (USA does this for foreigners in some airports)
- Declare all cash, declare all crypto (with addresses / xpubs)
The Feds will already have most of this information now.
They've long had your bank account information (thanks to the PATRIOT Act). They probably have trackers installed on the chipsets of devices, but ignoring that, we know they are capable of intercepting most internet traffic.
Most people have their fingerprints taken, either as the result of a run-in with the law, legitimate or otherwise (clerical error). Or because they were incentivized in some manner (TSA Precheck). Federal IDs are rolling out now too.
> I see sudden spike in the market for burner phones. ANd a long-term opportunity for a company that can create a "burner" social media profile.
I am sure that some folks will try those things and it may work for a while, but the way things are going, it's not going to matter whether you bring your device, a burner, or nothing at all. All it will take is one more 911-like crisis and inevitable fear-mongering.
Then, your online profile is going to get mined along with everyone else's, continuously, by multiple state-level organizations who cooperate with each other-- whether you've booked travel or not.
By the time folks get to a border it will just matter of diverting anyone with a "red X" next to their name.
I was in Wellington during the GDPR protests. Instead of arrested and fining those who illegally searched and handed over Kim Dotcom's servers, they just changed the law to make it all retroactively legal; making spying legal on all citizens.
Lets not get too excited. There were about 40 million passengers transiting NZ airports last year, according to Wikipedia.[0] The article says roughly 540 devices were searched in the same time period. That's 0.00135% or basically a dozen people per million being searched.
That hardly seems like totalitarian overreach. In fact it seems quite restrained and pretty reasonable - and presumably must be intelligence led, since I rather doubt they are doing this at random...!
This only applies to those passing through international customs, under 4 million arrivals last year, half of them Australian, who bypass customs anyway.
Searching for the 540 figure it appears to be mobile phones only, there was another 300 computers. So ~840 searches for 2 million people.
I agree; your 1 in 2500 figure gives a slightly different picture of things... About 30x as many travelers being searched.
/* I guess adding mobile and computer searches is wrong though, since some sizable fraction of computer owners have a mobile and would thus have had both searched. So maybe 650-700 searches? Doesn't change the magnitude of the resulting figures much, I suppose. */
Wait until they get more efficient at it. This kind of thing can be highly automated with software that only has to within a tuned degree of certainty determine who else needs additional screening. You can tune this precisely on how many humans you have around at a given time and can facilitate the "Enhanced search" of the devices.
Has anyone taken a steganographic approach to this? Just have a bunch of pictures of cats (or something more believable, like porn) in a partition, then you overlay sensitive data (encrypted). So you don't have a mysterious partition that is easily found. Obviously you can't store a ton of data that way though. You could even take the same approach with the program itself, hide it inside something else. (I imagine it would still be detectable by someone sophisticated enough, but might make it more difficult)
As a "stupid thought experiment" that's a fun thing to consider. (Somewhere I've got a proof-of-concept perl script that steganographically embeds PGP encrypted messages into an image of the FBI logo and posts them to Twitter. I would not ever actually use it in anger... I still have the private key for all my test/gag posts, just in case I ever need them...)
But if you're _actually_ crossing a border into a country where there's internet access, why would you risk carrying any data that you wouldn't put on a postcard across that border? If you need it, download it after you've got there.
Right but there will be just be a law that specifies anyone trying to purposely circumvent the search will be accused of a felony. Of course the vast majority will agree because of "safety" and "if you have nothing to hide...".
The next step here is to ask Google to have an API that, when plugged in and password is entered - just downloads and "verifies" your data for compliance. Bit by bit all the freedoms will be eroded.
The step after is an "express pass" that has you download software that constantly monitors your usage and uploads it to TSA and related. Helpful widgets and dashboards will be available to see at what level of compliance you're at and used like a credit rating for participating in society.
They are clearly clutching at straws using the story about the rapist as a reason to want no judicial oversight for the ability to spy on all citizens. Why can't they get the messages from the teenagers phones, if they know they were sent?
Factory reset and wipe your device before travel, and restore when you get to your hotel. I’m a privacy nut and while this is a disturbing trend there exist straightforward work arounds.
EDIT: I do this all the time and it’s not even remotely difficult or a big deal.
>there exist straightforward workarounds
Exactly and that’s why this a problem. This law will never catch anyone that actually is troubling for NZ because anyone who is shady, already uses some workaround.
Now it will only bother and waste time of people who are serious about their privacy to apply this workaround as well.
Nail on head! This does not increase real security and it is a real privacy violation. Dumb lose lose authoritarianism. Disappointed that smart Kiwis do something so dumb
While I don’t agree with this law, it’s not dumb. Security is about defence in depth. A determined attacker might have a way around this law, but perhaps not every criminal would know about this method, or think to use it.
It’s easy to scoff at blunt-tool laws because you can think of a way to undermine them. But law and society are built on a patchwork of imperfect systems which can individually be broken, undermined, manipulated or worked around. In aggregate, they do achieve some semblance of a result, because they are layered together - even if each one alone provides only a marginal element of security.
This will probably be another tool to catch unaware (and generally desperate and uneducated) drug mules. The ones some gang managed to convince to swallow a couple hundred baggies of cocaine.
I guess that helps the country's well being but hardly a violent target.
As long as you don't let them plug it into anything and it doesn't leave your sight, that should be fine. As soon as it leaves your sight or they plug in a hack-yo-phone box, you might as well throw the phone away. Who knows what zero-days they can stash on there.
iPhone + Chromebook / other laptop, wipe everything to factory defaults before encountering customs. Use full disk encryption.
Login to a cloud server that has your backups / restores / setup scripts / data. Preferably encrypt those backups before you upload them to the cloud server.
Only reason why I don't do it more frequently is it's a pain in the ass. I've been fairly impressed with iOS's backup restoration system recently.
Only had to log in to a specific set of services for everything to be back to normal.
This system is definitely a great way to test your backup restores!
Also: Don't use email for any semblance of secure communications.
>Login to a cloud server that has your backups / restores / setup scripts / data. Preferably encrypt those backups before you upload them to the cloud server.
>Only reason why I don't do it more frequently is it's a pain in the ass. I've been fairly impressed with iOS's backup restoration system recently.
Interesting! My gripe is I haven't found a way to do a cloud backup of an iPhone w/o putting the data in iCloud, which I do not trust.
I'd prefer to make my own backup which I store/pull down manually... is that possible?
My assumption is that if a country is nosy enough to want access to a device, encryption is irrelevant since they'll just demand a PW, so ideally I'd like to wipe the device then pull a backup down later.
You can do an encrypted backup of your iPhone via iTunes, archive it and then move it to whatever you want to. You can also put that backup inside some sort of encrypted container before you upload. You might feel like its redundant to 'double encrypt' your backup, but iOS wont back up a bunch of stuff if you don't encrypt the backup, so you should still do it.
You can also use some sort of E2E backup software like arq or restic, dig through it's archives and download your iphone backup that way.
No I don't, so I might be not doing a full restore. If I'm on vacation, I might only install a few apps and risk my vacation photos being snooped on by customs coming back. Or I might pre-download installer packages and if I'm very paranoid verify their hash values online later.
Happened to my friend when we were crossing, freaked me out. He's actually a dual citizen of U.S. & Canada! I am an iOS user. My thought was to just buy an older iPhone with a cracked screen (anything that uses the same SIM style), use it with no data, and put the SIM back in your stowed-away primary phone after crossing.
The only thing I can think of is to make a full backup of /system, /data (and /sdcard) with something like TWRP, move it to a small, encrypted usb drive (bonus points if the partition on the drive is hidden and there's a legit partition as a decoy). Then you just have to restore from your backup, which you would already have locally. Save the backup elsewhere before you leave home if you don't want to lose everything if the usb drive is lost.
That is all a major pain in the ass and, as others have pointed out here, those that want to do harm are likely already doing this. I wouldn't expect normal folks to be able to do this, nor should they have to in order to preserve privacy.
I consider a few hours restoring from a backup while I sleep to be a pretty small price. To some people this might be a huge inconvenience, I suppose. I mean, think about it: Hours without access to Instagram. HOURS!!
When I arrive at the airport I use my phone for maps, my travel info, my contacts, my reservations, busses, trains, taxis, uber, messages with people I'm coordinating with, my travel notes, etc...
Or are you suggesting I should camp out in the airport for a few hours to restore my phone before I can figure out where I'm going and get ahold of my contacts?
Oh let me guess. Your solution so to print those contacts and maps (oh, no GPS to figure out where I am on that map) and use a pay phone (because I still need to re-install the apps I'd normally be using to contact people). Heck, I don't actually have phone numbers for > 90% of my friends. I just have them on Facebook, Line, WhatsApp. The only people I have phone numbers for are for people who've been friends longer than about 15 years, in other words before messaging
Maybe I’m just too old or unimaginative, but none of these objections seem like serious showstoppers to me. This is straying far from the original topic but now I’m curious: How would you survive if you were to accidentally lose your phone while traveling, or if it got stolen? One can (and should) be capable of being a functioning adult without a cell phone.
Why is this about survival? My commute to work is 20 miles. I drive because it's convenient, quick, and practical. I would survive without a car. I could walk for 6+ hours, work for 8 hours (snacking while I work), and then walk another 6+ hours back home. Or I could pitch a tent in my office parking lot and just live out of it during the week. It would be shitty survival, but doable, right?
It's absolutely possible traveling without a smartphone. I've done it plenty of times before smartphones became a thing. But smartphones make it so much easier.
This discussion is about taking a phone with you while travelling and be secure from border searches. Sure, you can leave the home but this is not the point of the discussion.
These are all problems you have created by over-dependance on a single point of failure.
It's honestly kind of lazy not to take precautions, particularly when it's that easy - you've already listed out exactly what I'd suggest, and it's how people muddled along for decades in the before-times, more or less successfully.
I would suggest learning how to read maps. It's really easy, especially in urban areas. Find the nearest intersection, and look where it is on the map. There you are.
Restoring an Android phone from N or later is very fast, if you've taken a moment to enable auto-fill. You still have to sign in to apps with the auto-filled credentials, but I prefer that to synced access tokens.
> How do you do this with an Android device without spending hours restoring it?
There are plenty of backup tools available on the internet, this isn't really a problem with Android. Personally that's what I do each time I travel abroad. Both because I might loose my phone/laptop and because on can never be sure what software/content is legal(or not) in this or that country.
Some people got jailed abroad for content/software that would be deemed legal in my home country, on their computer.
"There are plenty of backup tools available on the internet, this isn't really a problem with Android"
Name one and describe the process. So far everything I have tried takes hours and often loses a bunch of settings that need to be restored manually. It requires significant amounts of work. Also it seems most tools need a rooted phone
A simple search on Google will yield plenty of results, if you are not willing to do that or even explain which solution you tried yourself and what failed, I'm not going to waste my time recommending an alternative solution to your problem either. In fact I just provided you with another solution which you didn't bother acknowledging.
I have done plenty of research and I couldn't find a solution to backup and restore an Android phone quickly without losing all kinds of data and settings.
I have used the built in backup to Google and noticed that restore takes many hours and a lot of apps lost data and settings. It took considerable effort to get back to normal. Definitely too much work to spend on my first day of vacation.
A burner phone may work but then you don't have access to all your data.
`adb backup`. All you have to do is turn on developer mode to enable adb, root is entirely unrequired. You might need to log into accounts again, I'm not sure. Do note that this can take a while, depending on whether you back up your sdcard and how much storage is in use. You can choose to backup individual apps, or everything, to use encryption, etc.
If you install TWRP recovery (root is only required for the installation, not the maintenance), you can do a full-phone backup.
The problem is that a full backup on Android requires root, which breaks a lot of security guarantees and isn't even always possible. As far as I'm aware, there is no possible way for me to backup my non-rooted phone, wipe it and restore is as if nothing happened.
In Australia they have to record the details of the person buying the phone, but suffice it to say that relying on someone making minimum wage at a supermarket to enforce national security isn't particularly effective.
Just buying a phone at the supermarket doesn't make the SIM work.
When I registered my last SIM, I did it online and they wanted Drivers Licence number and a lot of other info that I felt was quite a lot just so I could use a phone.
Yeah they try to track when people have lots of phones registered to them. But last time I did it they were not able to correctly validate international passport numbers. Or you could just buy validated sim cards from poor people or international travellers.
Which provider? I noticed (too late) that the airport SIMs have special overpriced plans. I'm used to paying ~$10/GB for data in Australia, it seems to be about double that in NZ without going on a plan.
I bought a 2 degrees one, but I'm pretty sure they had Skinny and Spark as well at the local New World. Easy to setup with just a credit card, or could've used one of the voucher cards which I'm pretty sure can be bought with cash.
Both here and in the US, I've found that airports usually are not good places to get SIMs - there seems to be some agreement whereby the expensive ones aimed at tourists are all that's available. Supermarkets or department stores tend to be my go-to.
I think you should read that as: "Which countries have laws which allow border inspectors to demand usernames/passwords to online services?" Those which do demand it are a subset of those which can demand it.
Your sovereignty argument is such an extreme interpretation of the question that it's almost certainly not what plg had in mind - if plg did have it in mind, then I find it hard to believe that question would have been asked in the first place.
Consider the question "what countries on border entry can draw and quarter entering citizens?" Your viewpoint seems to be that the correct answer is "all of them", yes?
What are you, the individual, going to do when a border agent takes your device and demands your password? “We’re just going to take this for a few minutes, what’s your password? Oh you won’t tell us? Sit in this room for 400hrs. Ok, thank you, you’re free to go, enjoy your stay.”
Nothing. There’s nothing you can do.
Lodging complaints after the fact doesn’t unviolate you.
You can be a renown children’s author and the best you can hope for is an apology.
Yes I was asking which countries are known to routinely demand login credentials for online services, and I don't mean who does it for a small number of persons-of-interest but I mean who does it routinely?
Or in the case of a citizen of said country it’s, “you want to return home, play by our border rules, and btw you have no citizen rights because the border isn’t the country.”
Twenty years ago, Nicholas Negroponte pointed out the irony that when he passed through Singapore customs, they searched his atoms but not his bits.
Is being searched before you get on a plane or enter a customs checkpoint some kind of hideous infringement of your civil liberties? No!
There’s no problem with this in principle. The problem is that it’s silly, and it causes a privacy and security violation while not accomplishing anything.
Hey Tloewald, please don't pretend to speak for everyone when you say "being searched" isn't a problem in the first place.
It's not a problem for you, fine. I'd ask you to let me search you but that'd only be to prove a point, so by all means keep accepting it. But when you say it's not a problem, you do not speak for me.
It's pointless, degrading, and above all it's sad that you and many others accept it without questioning it.
The principle here is people can agree to surrender some of their privacy for safety. The problem isn’t that searching my bits is a greater violation than searching my atoms, but that it’s not useful. Right now there’s no pattern of bits I can carry with me to blow up a plane and in any event I could easily bypass the search.
I’m not thrilled by the social contract, but it’s a good deal more convenient than driving across country.
I'll sometimes surrender some privacy for some form of safety or convenience, but that safety/convenience has to exist, not be theoretical.
Positive example: I use Google Drive. I know full well Google could read and analyze all my shit if they wanted to. I surrender to that possibility in exchange for the very cheap and convenient online storage I get.
Negative example: Fuck the TSA and all its theatrics. Those aren't useful. Please do convince me they are; I don't see anyone even trying to pretend they are.
> Is being searched before you get on a plane or enter a customs checkpoint some kind of hideous infringement of your civil liberties? No!
Of course it is. We're simply used to it, because we're sheep and cowards. But it is. Searching everyone, without probable cause or reasonable suspicion of anything, is a violation of civil liberties, and of basic human decency. It's also pure theater and useless.
And because we have accepted this, other privacy agressions seem justified.
It is an infringement. I certainly don't think I should have to explain everything in my bag to little hitlers.
I'm willing to entertain arguments that it is a worthwhile trade-off, but we must acknowledge that it is an infringement on everyone's rights.
Every additional infringement should come with a justification, an analysis considering whether it will be effective, and a harm minimisation strategy.
Riddle me this - what is the alternative? Don't look at a phone? Why do we look inside suitcases? Why have the concept of customs?
We search things across borders for things our country does not want. We don't want drugs. We don't want fresh fruit (which will trip up more people than drugs).
We don't want child porn. And if a phone is a container for that content, we want to be able to explore the container.
Of course, there's a million different ways around this. Get burner phones. Store content in the cloud. Have seven firewalls. Whatever. But that doesn't change the concept of inspecting things across a border to make sure things we don't want, don't come in.
And if that's a totalitarian purgatory, then name a country (or external border for the EU) that isn't a totalitarian purgatory.
I get your point....but a similar and more worrying thing is happening at the Canadian/US border right now.
Entry to the US can be denied (for life even) if the customs agent suspects the traveler has involvement with Cannabis.
That includes having investments in Cannabis companies.
So if the take my phone and find any information on it connected to Cannabis I could be barred FOR LIFE from entry into the US.
That means that I am leaving a country where that is legal, and entering into a state that it is also legal some border gaourd can ban me for life - even if all I did was search for "Cannibis legal in Canada".
That objection seems orthogonal to the point though. The US could make it so that owning a blue shirt means you are barred from the US for life. They open up your suitcase and find a blue thread.
Ultimately it's the law itself rather than the enforcement of it that you're objecting to.
Cannabis use is considered a “crime of moral turpitude”. So it’s legality elsewhere is irrelevant to the US.
However your scenario is inaccurate. Just as having a google search about murder weapons won’t bar you for life neither will search history about cannabis. They may ask why your interested in it... But learning about a crime is not equivalent to commiting the crime.
>Even though Znaimer didn’t admit to personally using pot,
he was given a lifetime ban anyway because of his
investments in U.S. marijuana companies, he said.
>In one case, Saunders said an Edmonton man received a
lifetime ban from entering the U.S. simply because he was a
part-owner in a Colorado building that leases space to a
pot dispensary.
So what is stopping them from denying entry due to search history?
The rationale in the US law is that the crime is an equal moral failing to murder. That may be irrational to you and I, but that is the law.
Just as being an accessory to murder would be considered "very bad" so too would supporting cannabis use in any way. According to US law he is investing in a criminal enterprise, similar to funding a cartel in Mexico. The law doesn't match the common person's perception of severity, but the US border guards will enforce the law as written.
Again, none of this prevents you from merely learning about cannabis. It requires action of some sort to further the use of it.
Its more like leasing a room knowing it was Dexters kill room. That said I'll go no further justifying US pot laws. But the failure is in the severity assigned to the "crime", everything that follows is rational if you accept the premise that it truly is akin to murder.
This is kind of thing is not new. Canada doesn't let people with DUIs enter the country. They also inspect electronics and have for a number of years.
And marijuana is not legal anywhere in the US at the moment. There are simply some states that don't have state level criminal laws associated with marijuana.
> We don't want child porn. And if a phone is a container for that content, we want to be able to explore the container.
I could be 100% wrong, but I feel like you could check every digital device entering the country all day with 100% accuracy and have less than a 1% impact on the amount of child porn (or any other digital contraband) being trafficked.
Given the content of most people's phones, a file by file phone search should be considered at least equivalent to a strip search, maybe even a cavity search depending on how freaky the person gets with their selfies.
Worse still is it's a nonconsensual, uninformed strip search of any sexual partners that person has...
But I wonder why. If I am a resident of a country, why is that my rights suddenly go away at the border? Why is it that I have rights when I step out of the airport but when I am in it, I have no rights.
Because they can. Civilisation spent centuries building up rights and due process, and then the authorities suddenly decided none of it mattered in this specific context because we let them. We should be livid. It's an absolute disgrace and an embarrassment to post-enlightenment humanity.
I can't use the visa waiver program to travel to the US because I was arrested once. Not convicted of any crime, mind you, just arrested. In the rest of society it's a pretty strong principle that guilt is decided in courts, not by police officers. No matter: anything that makes you seem less than the lowest possible risk is enough to deny you something. No presumption of innocence, no visa waiver program for me.
My girlfriend's mother has applied for a family visa that would allow her to immigrate to my country (where her daughter lives) permanently. The application takes several years. In the meantime she applied for a tourist visa to visit us for Christmas later this year. It was denied. We can only speculate why, but of course I suspect that since she has demonstrated a desire to immigrate permanently, the authorities consider her at risk of overstaying the visa. A mother who has done nothing wrong can't visit her daughter for Christmas because of this, and it makes me furious. She has no intention of overstaying: if this is why they rejected the visa it is again an assumption of guilt instead of one of innocence.
I wonder if there is any way to make it an election issue in any country. Parties seem to be unanimous on the topic, and most people don't travel, so it's probably not much of a pull for votes. Influential people travel more though.
And probably have sufficient influence to sidestep most such problems.
Clearly the U.S. political system isn't interested in anything that sounds like weakening border security. I think we're all going to be suffering indefinitely.
One of the problems with this is that it is trivial to evade for someone intent on serious wrongdoing. A person who manufactures child porn for money, for example probably won't use their phone to transport it across a border. They'll transfer it over the internet, most likely in a surveillance-resistant manner.
Instead, these kinds of searches catch people who don't know they're doing something illegal, or who the government finds undesirable due to their associations or business activities that are legal in their home jurisdiction. They may also be used to map out networks of contacts.
I do not want governments doing the things in the second paragraph.
> "A lot of the organised crime groups are becoming a lot more sophisticated in the ways they're trying to get things across the border.
Is this the new "think of the children"? The reasoning seems to be, criminals would rather carry their "digital crime-thingys" across the border saved on their phones, than upload it (encrypted) somewhere on the internet... Or is NZ planning to build a Firewall as well (better than China's)?
There’s a border patrol show on Netflix and they show a few phones being searched. It’s pretty clear it’s not about terrorists and bad people having bad files in the cloud. It’s about people coming on a tourists visa and working. They’d find all sorts of emails talking a out a job.
I don’t think that’s a valid excuse to search devices though. If anything I think it proves work visas need to be more accessible so people don’t have to lie their way in for a job.
>There’s a border patrol show on Netflix and they show a few phones being searched. It’s pretty clear it’s not about terrorists and bad people having bad files in the cloud. It’s about people coming on a tourists visa and working. They’d find all sorts of emails talking a out a job.
Yes, those are non-citizens requesting entry. This sounds like it applies to everyone - including NZ citizens.
And regardless, searches need to be proportional.
Full blown cavity/strip searches at random could cut down on the importation of illegal drugs, but civilized countries require a reasonable suspicion for invasive searches.
They did, at least according to the article. But it's a low hurdle, and cops quickly figure out the script to bypass restrictions like that.
It's no different than the mishandling of trained drug sniffing dogs so that they alert at the handler's command, rather than at drugs/bombs/money/whatever. Countless cars are stripped at border crossing and the side of the road because a cop didn't like someone's attitude.
Freedom isn't free! Have to keep fighting for it. Or figure out / be lucky enough to become part of the ruling group.
Edit: I also find it funny when people get passionate about their "free" country's national anthems when they're one bad underpaid, undereducated border patrol agent away from not having any rights.
The ruling group includes some members of Congress and the executive branch. Current and former presidents and vice-presidents are not screened, nor are cabinet secretaries or members of Congress with security details at US airports. Not sure how the US president is treated when passing through other nations' borders but I'm guessing it is not the same border experience that everyone else goes through.
According to the "Port Courtesy Handbook" it sounds like many foreign dignitaries go through a modified and expedited border check at the US border that the rest of us do not use. "A Port Courtesy or “Courtesy of the Port” provides Foreign Government Officials and their traveling parties expedited processing and clearance upon arrival into the United States. Requests for Port Courtesies are managed by the Office of the Chief of Protocol in coordination with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)." https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/170352.pdf
I really want phone makers to allow me to unlock into separate enclaves on my phone. I.e. If I use 1234 as my unlock pin, it goes to my normal phone. If I use 5678 instead, it unlocks to a separate user account with its own notifications, pictures, apps, etc., similar to a truecrypt hidden partition.
"It's a work phone. There's an administrative account I don't have access to."
This is already true of laptops, and with some simple setup beforehand that wouldn't be a lie. I highly doubt any customs officer would press further than that.
I'm not sure about verbally lying to customs officers, but in my country (Australia) I know that lying on your customs declaration is an offence (making a false statement on an official document or something like that). The flight attendants have to read out a little script including that after they hand out the declaration/entry cards. I expect NZ is similar.
I have been thinking of going back to live in NZ to be a software engineer there, but now... uh, no. Such a shame, as it's a really nice country with very smart people.
Granted, it's been very "totalitarian" when it comes to immigration for a long time. Not that I don't think they have the right to do this, but when I went to live there with my kiwi girlfriend, I had to give them actual copies of letters she and I sent each other and get a chest X-ray to prove that I'm not just taking advantage of their socialized medicine. So this sort of scrutiny isn't totally out of character for NZ, but the digital search is where it gets intolerable.
If NZ wants to innovate on anything or to have more movies filmed there, they'll have to do it mostly by themselves, or pay ass-loads to import skilled workers.
EDIT: I made a correction to a part that probably gave people the wrong impression. This was not meant to claim wrong of NZ. I love NZ, and they have every right. I only take issue with the digital search.
As a New Zealander, I'd say we're unashamed in trying to balance the welfare of our citizens with growth opportunities from new immigrants.
If you're likely to be a drain on the public healthcare system, then you're not likely to get permission to live here. Why? It's not fair to those people who have already paid into the system, to subsidise someone who hasn't.
And we are picky. There's no visa lottery here. A points-based system with high thresholds. And that's OK. Same as Australia. Same as Canada.
You are picky because NZ is likely the trendiest place to immigrate to in the last 30-40 years. It would be silly + unfair to current NZ citizens if you guys weren't picky.
> And we are picky. There's no visa lottery here. A points-based system with high thresholds.
As a practical matter, it seems that the immigration officer you wind up with does have an impact on your application's success. I was initially turned down for a Skilled Migrant visa (which I believe is what you're referring to) because I had work experience in IT, but a degree in electrical and computer engineering, and though the points from those combined were well over the higher threshold (and both on the skills shortage lists at the time, ~2010), they weren't in the same enough field according to my assigned officer. That meant that I had to pick which one I wanted to use, but neither by itself put me over the line... An expat friend of mine had a similar experience.
I don't mean this to be a slight on Immigration NZ, just that the process can feel a bit arbitrary and bureaucratic - like a lottery. It creates a chicken-and-egg problem too: in order to get a skilled migrant visa, you really want a job offer, but you're only going to get a job offer by coming here and looking around in person...
In France we have a special health insurance policy dedicated for treating illegal immigrants ("AME: Aide Médicale d'État"). Yup...
Too bad that many people will call you a racist if you ever start to say it is unfair for people who already paid into the system.
I've thought about getting another visa too. I thought the x-ray and blood tests were pretty normal, until I talked to a friend with a German work visa, and she didn't have any type of medical exam to get her permit.
You've described pretty much every country's immigration requirements, not just NZ.
I've lived in NZ, the UK, and the US. Every one will ask for proof of health (TB, HIV, etc) and if you're attempting to gain a Visa attached to a GF then you have to prove it is bonafide, often with letters, shared bills/expenses, etc.
That's nothing to get upset about.
Oh, I was not upset about it. Yes, I am not that experienced immigrating, so thanks for your insight. My impression of immigration to the US was that the process is really slow and inefficient but isn't as meticulous as other countries, but perhaps I'm mistaken.
I actually don't think there's anything wrong with NZ or any country doing those things. My point is that rooting through my computer, requiring me to hand over my credentials, is where I say no. Maybe they'll end up paying the price if enough educated people decide not to bother. I don't really know.
Granted, it's been very "totalitarian" when it comes to immigration for a long time.
> We have a huge housing shortage
> get a chest X-ray to prove that I'm not just taking advantage of their socialized medicine.
We have a problem with TB. We have issues with other disease coming in too and don’t seem to screen for them, which we should.
> If NZ wants to innovate on anything or to have more movies filmed there, they'll have to do it mostly by themselves, or pay ass-loads to import skilled workers.
We do pay assloads. For some reason we subsidise the films that come here while they exploit their workers and get exemption from NZ laws. Our homegrown hero Peter Jackson had a role in that.
Your level of skepticism about NZ clearly indicates you belong here. Come back!
I don't know how others feel, but if I kept control of the device I would feel much more comfortable with this process. The fact that they can make me unlock the device then take it out of my sight and do unknown things to it means I can no longer trust the device or any of its files (eg private keys, access tokens, etc that may be stored on it).
If they sit down with me and allow me to maintain control of the device while they ask to see recent chats and emails etc I would feel much more comfortable (though don't get me wrong, I still see the whole process as a huge overstep and invasion of privacy).
Oh yeah, being forced to knowingly show my privates to a stranger is slightly better than the stranger taking that look on their own without my knowledge and consent. Both are still bad.
The difference is that, if they take your phone away, there is nothing stopping them from putting child pornography (or terrorism plans, or a keylogger) on it without your knowledge.
I think this analogy is wrong. It is more like the difference between showing a stranger a picture of yourself naked vs handing the stranger a hard drive with naked pictures of yourself. In both cases, you know they are doing it but it is only in the former case where you can be slightly more informed of exactly what they are doing with that information.
But then it doesn't make any difference -- they'll tell you to do what they'll do anyway. And if you refuse -- the same punishment applies (fee, prison, etc...)
It does make a difference, though, in that at least you would know what was done with your device. (especially if you are the one actually handling the device)
I can see plenty of those inspection scenarios where I would not want to crush my device into pieces afterwards. And plenty of others where I would. There lies the difference.
I recently had to go to America for a wedding, due to these types of policies I always go through my phone and clean almost everything out of there.
Photos, logout of Google, clean up downloads, etc.
I don't have anything to hide, however having some random customs dude go into Google Photos which has over a decade of my life documented doesn't seem exactly ideal.
"I have nothing to hide" is just another way of saying "My friends and family are stupid for trusting me." Your devices don't just contain information that's sensitive to you.
I was simply saying, I don't have photos of me doing lines of Cocaine off strippers. However I'm still concerned about the boarder patrol looking through my shit.
While I generally agree with some of the sentiments expressed here -- such as "People who have nothing to hide still shut their bathroom door." -- maybe we could lighten up and not pile onto this comment, given that it is on the side of not really wanting to give over this info and having cleaned out the phone recently, etc.
Focusing entirely on that one phrase -- I have nothing to hide -- twists the meaning intended, I think, especially given the manner in which it is being done here.
It is possible to attack the idea without inadvertently attacking the person. All it would take is acknowledgement that he didn't intend it that way before noting "But it can go thus and such bad places."
You can espouse a zero tolerance policy for the idea of "I have nothing to hide" without making it a dreadful experience for the person who made the mistake of using that particular phrase while explaining why you think it is critical to try to kill off the phrase for all eternity.
> We're not going into 'the cloud'. We'll examine your phone while it's on flight mode
This law isn't too bad as far as a compromise bill goes. The problem is a lack of accountability. Three fixes and I'd be okay with it:
1) Officials must document their reasons for finding a "reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing";
2) Travellers should be able to challenge the search in a court proceeding to occur no later than close of business the next day (traveller must surrender their phone to the court in the interim, but is free to leave the airport after that); and
3) Searchers cannot (a) copy data from the phone while searching, (b) turn off airplane mode or (c) take more than [2] hours to conduct their search.
It's a huge security concern. You should give your passwords to no one: zero/no people. I wouldn't do it just out of personal security. It's not a matter of just changing it either. Your can't put a device password in a password manager,, so that's going to usually be one of your highly secure passwords. It shouldn't be used many places, but you still need to change it everywhere afterwards.
Just from a basic security perspective, this is teaching citizens it's okay to give your password out to authorities, and that's just fucking terrible.
Not saying I agree with your "not too bad" assessment. But your list is incomplete without considering the violations of third parties who have shared items in confidence that are now on the local device.
So:
4) All third parties (meaning people other than the traveler) who have their privacy violated in the process must be informed immediately of the full details of the privacy violation. Which communications, pictures, etc. were viewed and or copied and by whom, and how to follow up on these violations.
> All third parties (meaning people other than the traveler) who have their privacy violated in the process must be informed immediately of the full details of the privacy violation
This isn't a requirement when e.g. police search an office and so wouldn't seem appropriate in this case. NDAs, explicitly or implicitly (through statute), tend to exempt courts, regulators and law enforcement.
Many (most?) NDAs between companies represented by competent counsel do have notification provisions (if Company A is compelled to disclose information covered under the A/B NDA, Company A is required to inform Company B of the fact [unless legally prohibited from doing so.])
I think you're thinking of cases where there is a search warrant and the potential harm to third parties has been weighed against the needs of the investigation, which should be predicated on a robust assessment that determines that this particular case justifies the harm.
I don't think leaving the decision up to the agent at the point of entry, or basing it on some kind of random selection, is as robust as a good quality court issuing warrants. Though I'm contradicting my point elsewhere in this discussion about being generally skeptical of such courts.
Historically, I'm unaware of any country where you're entitled to require a court order before they can inspect your belongings when passing through a customs inspection at the border (and almost everywhere they don't need any suspicion of wrongdoing—they could, if they wanted, go through every paper everyone carried in, with the more or less sole limit of diplomatic bags).
> I'm unaware of any country where you're entitled to require a court order before they can inspect your belongings when passing through a customs inspection
I agree, but I think historical precedent with books and papers is different from our phones. Note that my process still defaults to allowing the agent a casual search. The traveller simply has the right to call foul and require the agent to produce their reasons in front of a judge.
The key difference between searching someones suitcase and their phone is that people don't generally carry their medical and financial records in paper form when they travel.
Medical and financial records have always been legitimate things to search by customs. You may in fact be denied entry if you don't have them in paper form, in some cases.
To some extent yes - I have experienced the financial side of this - but those are generally just statements to prove you have enough money to stay in the country until you leave. Just the same with medical records stating that you don't have an infectious disease.
It doesn't include your entire history of financial transactions and investments, nor does it include a history of all operations and procedures that you had done.
A lot of people here are saying you should just put your data online and then download it later. But should you do this you probably will be using a third party as your host (most people don't host from home even if they should).
In the USA at least under third party doctorine that means none of that data is 'private' anymore and can be accessed without a warrant.
We immediately need a phone and laptop feature called "Border crossing mode". Once you can perhaps active anytime but only gets deactivated once you're physically in a predefined location.
that mode should be almost always on - the CBP in US can do all that fun stuff to you at any time as long as you're closer than 100 miles to any US border - including ocean. So, for example, CBP can do anything they want to anybody in San Francisco. Granted, for now they do that mostly to "brown" people - well they need to start somewhere to get us into that shiny totalitarian future and of course the start is always with the most vulnerable.
Perhaps that mode could be called full disk encryption?
All humans inside the US border have the fifth amendment right to remain silent, so handing over encryption passwords to the CBP is a choice.
Unfortunately, the 5th amendment doesn't apply in New Zealand - if you remain silent at a NZ airport while customs ask for your password, they will impose a $5000 fine on you. The only viable solution I see is to only travel to places that do have 5th amendment protection or similar (which would immediately rule out Britain, Ireland, Australia, and now NZ as well).
iOS 12 was a painful upgrade for me but the 4th erasure of the phone seems to have worked.
What this means is that I am now confident that I don’t lose anything when I erase.
So if you have good backups, just erase before the border and walk though with a fresh phone, possibly with some dummy data in there.
If you use this strategy, you may want to make sure that you securely erase your data. Secure erasure is rather difficult on SSD, unlike on HDD where one simply overwrites the bytes.
I worked in a role that had rather strict rules about our devices and data. We were given a different phone and laptop to take when traveling, and VPN'd back to the office once there to access our files. The devices were just entry level Blackberry/iPhones and Thinkpads (this was a decade or so ago) with nothing on them except a local copy of the corporate contact list. No email accounts set up, no calendar set up, etc. We were to VPN in for all that stuff when not local (tether laptop to phone if not on wifi and needed email).
If we were questioned at all about it (I never was, but others were), we were told to give them a business card from our direct Manager, and contact them with any questions. I have no idea what the Managers were trained to say or how they dealt with it as I was pretty low in the totem pole, but I assume there's standard practices out there for this.
Not criticizing you but that's terrible advice. Not only is it pointless, it exposes the traveller to criminal prosecution. Why would a customs officer acquiesce?
I have the same issue. I believe that technically my employer could be in violation with some of the contracts we have with some of our government customers.
I had a clause be put in my contract that government orders overrule NDAs. Not gonna stick my head into that wasp's nest where I have obligations both ways. Didn't even think of traveling, rather some court order or request to provide evidence or something; but yeah, this is the kind of logic I had that be put in for.
Not that I'll give it up without question, especially for something pointless and overreaching like a border search of digital devices, but still.
> The new requirement for reasonable suspicion did not rein in the law at all, Mr Beagle said.
>
> "They don't have to tell you what the cause of that suspicion is, there's no way to challenge it."
This makes me particularly uncomfortable. There should be reasonable grounds.
> Border officials searched roughly 540 electronic devices at New Zealand airports in 2017.
That does seem low, out of what I assume is hundreds of thousands of travelers. With that said, it still doesn't sound reasonable.
> "It is a file-by-file [search] on your phone. We're not going into 'the cloud'. We'll examine your phone while it's on flight mode," Customs spokesperson Terry Brown said.
What files are they looking for on the device?
I mean, it's not like a terrorist will have a plan_to_place_bomb.doc file on their device, so what's the point? What file could there possibly be on any device that will threaten the security? And how is scanning devices going to prevent you from downloading that file after you go through customs?
As others have noted this is easy enough to thwart if you prepare, it will only catch the unsophisticated. So they aren't going to catch terrorists with this, but it probably will catch a few people intending to work while on a holiday visa.
But it would be nice if the phone manufacturers made it easier to side step.
Android is close already: it has multiple users. If it allowed you to hide a user (so you had to type in a name, for example), it would be mostly there.
One thing I really wish they would provide is a decent backup service, ie something that allowed you to backup everything on the phone, to an encrypted binary blob. Mainly I want this because having a backup that allows me to restore my data if the phone gets destroyed would help sleep easier at night, but of course it also solves this problem too: backup the phone to a hidden cloud account, factory reset it, restore it on arrival.
This sounds troubling and it's a little disappointing to see comments suggesting "factory resets before travel" or "dual booting". These are not things anyone really wants to have to do.
Also, this issue raises some more questions:
1) It sounds like they might use a device to scan your hardware automatically, potentially opening the door to copying files for permanent record
2) It is a small step from here to install tracking software on your device (as China is doing in some places)
Other than fixing the actual problem (the overreaching legislation/government), the only other solution seems to be using a burner phone when traveling. I would absolutely not trust any device handed to an official, even if it was factory reset and I had a backup.
How do we know that they aren't installing software? It may just be a matter of time before someone reports an incident in which another one of these nations do install something.
I wish them much good luck with my elderly dumbphone, it has extremely little on it that wasn't there when it rolled out of the factory. Besides that, way to go to ruin your international reputation (not that anybody cares). Paying $5000 to be allowed to break the law is interesting too: so it's about the money? Or do you get fined and then you still have to cough up the contents of your devices?
Wouldn't it be possible to conveniently hide your usual filesystem from the border officers by using the new APFS shared-filesystems-in-single-container feature, without having to pre-allocate and waste space for an additional hidden data partition?
Just install macOS like you normally do, set it up with a user and some basic data. Then create a new partition in the same container and install what you normally use (or even clone the first one, if that's possible).
Then set the basic one as default boot source, and hold alt on boot to select the other one to get work done.
A light version of the "hidden encrypted volume" solution, without any risk of overwriting your files.
You’re not required to do their job for them, so just entering the password when they ask you to and don’t mention that there are multiple partitions in there and you’re good to go. If they look carefully and notice the other partition (which you’re not even hiding) you’re back to the original problem of course.
Maybe I used the wrong words. I am not a lawyer, so I don't know the exact name of it. But I know using special configs to hide stuff from a federal agent is the same as lying to them which is a felony, I think. Not sure if it is the same in Canada though.
Backup your phone to the cloud, factory reset. Restore when you get to the destination.
A bit of a hassle, and after you restore to factory reset you will need to add the basic contacts, info if you need for travelling. And any messages/updates on the phone in the meantime will be lost when you restore from backup.
Will need to download the backup so most likely need a good wifi connection. Or you could save it to your laptop in that aforementioned hidden partition. You could do it on the plane so the window of using factory reset would be short. And restore just after customs.
Something went wrong with iOS12 for me, and so I reinstalled several times. It isn’t that bad. The only niggles for me were re entering a couple of wifi networks and making the damn thing silent and blank again (why are keyboard clicks on by default?).
"A lot of the organised crime groups are becoming a lot more sophisticated in the ways they're trying to get things across the border.
So they've realised they can bring data into a country on a smart phone with a password. Law enforcement will really be screwed once organised crime figures out the other options.
>"It is a file-by-file [search] on your phone. We're not going into 'the cloud'. We'll examine your phone while it's on flight mode," Customs spokesperson Terry Brown said.
They will see my genitals and the genitals of many other people. Not sure how not going accessing my off-phone backups is supposed to be better.
This is a shame, my partner and I have been spending the last couple months seriously considering new Zealand as a new home, after we tire of SF, specifically because we felt that legally it was going down a better path than the USA.
>This is a shame, my partner and I have been spending the last couple months seriously considering new Zealand as a new home, after we tire of SF, specifically because we felt that legally it was going down a better path than the USA.
What made you think this? Have you been keeping an eye on the news regarding NZ?
For example, they allowed American billionaire Peter Thiel to obtain citizenship despite not meeting the residency requirements:
And in doing so created a huge push by the New Zealand immigration peeps to incentivize other tech workers to come in. They even put up stalls at tech conferences, which was where this idea came from at all for us. Way they told us is there's even specialized visas.
The fact that billionaires do as they please is a global fact I have long gotten used to.
Vaguely recalling an article about how he created a push in new Zealand to bring in more techn workers, leveraging his wealth to pressure/incentivize the government, etc.
Regardless, to your original point - a billionaire doing as he pleases does not affect my perception of a country.
>Vaguely recalling an article about how he created a push in new Zealand to bring in more techn workers
Cool, well I've provided a source earlier showing it leaked due to investigative journalism.
>to your original point - a billionaire doing as he pleases does not affect my perception of a country.
You are free to perceive things however you want, but you may find it beneficial when interacting with others to ground your perceptions in facts and logic, not feelings.
? I fail to see the relationship between a billionaire getting away with something, and my sense of rule of law. It simply means new Zealand has equal rule of law power to every other first world country...
> I fail to see the relationship between a billionaire getting away with something, and my sense of rule of law. It simply means new Zealand has equal rule of law power to every other first world country
Uh, no. Other 1st world countries enforce their laws. For example, Iceland locked up bankers who broke financial laws leading to a crisis:
Kia Ora. I hope you still consider New Zealand. We have an island mentality, which means we treat borders pretty seriously. We don't have a wall, we have the Pacific ocean as our border, and Australia (known as the West Island).
If the idea that 540 people out of 3.7M international visitors get their phones inspected worries you, then that's a valid concern.
For perspective, we issued over 9000 biosecurity infringements for people bringing in fresh fruit, meat, honey, etc.
> For perspective, we issued over 9000 biosecurity infringements for people bringing in fresh fruit, meat, honey, etc.
Which is fine, completely reasonable, and unrelated. This isn't necessarily about the number of people getting their phones inspected. A huge problem is with there being no oversight or accountability, which can be abused at several levels.
Going through your personal papers is totalitarian and the definition of a police state. The fact that this is being openly done in 'democracies' with no shame makes the word meaningless.
Where are the protests, free press in arms, academics, ngos and call for sanctions by the 'international community'?
Is anyone going to bomb New Zealand and the US for violation of human rights and restore democracy? So much for 'our values' and the western tradition of 'enlightenment, freedom and democracy'.
> The updated law makes clear that travellers must provide access - whether that be a password, pin-code or fingerprint - but officials would need to have a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.
Does the Law in NZ have any provisions against self-incrimination? The US has the 5th Amendment, some countries in the Americas signed the American Convention on Human Rights. How does NZ deal with this issue?
Can't it be considered that providing a password to a safe or personal device is akin to being a witness against oneself?
I might be wrong on this but according to this updated video[0] by James Duane, things have changed considerably due to Obama and a recent Supreme Court decision and even using the 5th improperly can be used against you.
The 5th amendment doesn't apply to non-citizens and doesn't mean as a US citizen that your device can't be confiscated on potentially frivolous suspicions.
The 5th amendment doesn't apply to citizens, either. It applies to the government.
And the instructions to the government make no mention of citizenship status. "...nor shall [any person] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..."
The 4th amendment likewise applies to the government, and makes no mention of citizenship.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The 14th amendment: "nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
The government, of course, holds that physical searches at border crossings are reasonable searches, and therefore do not require warrants. Since Riley v. California (2014), SCotUS established that searching the data contents of electronic devices is unreasonable to do after an arrest, and therefore requires probable cause and warrant. They still have not applied that to searches of border-crossers' electronics, and different federal appeals circuits currently hold different positions on it. Hopefully, SCotUS will soon rule that forensic analysis of electronics at border crossings requires individualized suspicion, but the current nominee debacle does not give me much confidence.
In America the Bill of Rights applies to all people, irrespective of immigration status when dealing with criminal law. Immigration law is administrative, not criminal, which is why this behavior is allowed to occur in the States.
I wonder sometimes if policies like these are monumental cases of the XY Problem in action.
For example, the government/border agency decides that travellers must give up their phones and account passwords. In fact, other governments/agencies see this as leading by example and tag along for the ride.
The justification we hear is 'national security' and, since the first thing we were aware of was the solution itself, we treat it as viable without much scrutiny and proceed to fill in the blanks about what 'national security' means to us: is it terrorism? drug trafficking? illegal immigration? some other hot button topic?
It begs the question and the frustrating thing is; we know the real answer: governments just love authority and surveillance. Yet still, how about some other questions...
What is a better solution to preventing terrorists from hijacking your plane? It would make sense to address the circumstances that actively encourage terrorism, no? That's foreign policy.
Drugs crossing the border? How about checking for the physical presence of them as opposed to forcing people to incriminate themselves for recreational drug usage?
Illegal immigration? That means a lot of things to a lot of people and, if my experience in Canada is anywhere near representative, it might actually be more successful if it wasn't so strict.
In no case does getting unrestricted access to your social media accounts, your collection of nude selfies, entire history of messages going back years, etc. actually aim to tackle the real problems. All the reasoning does is save the government the job of justifying its pathological obsession with your private life.
> But Mr Beagle said "serious criminals" would simply store incriminating material online.
> "You'd be mad to carry stuff over on your phone.
Of course, intelligent criminals would never have incriminating communications or evidence carried on a device across international borders. What's more, they would know that there is such a law and hence have their devices wiped clean or get devices with minimal information to support whatever cover they're using. Lawmakers and law enforcement must be idiots to imagine that serious crime could be prevented or caught by this measure.
> Privacy Commissioner John Edwards had some influence over the drafting of the legislation and said he was "pretty comfortable" with where the law stood.
This just shows how government appointed officers behave like puppets of the government, and rarely side with common people on big issues (such as mass surveillance).
Similar to DRM, these measures inconvenience the innocent while doing nothing to prevent the bad people from doing bad things. The balance is tilted heavily towards abuse and harassment of the innocent. Being one of the Five Eyes [1] countries, I'm not surprised that New Zealand does this kind of thing.
The lesson is loud and clear: if you're traveling, backup your phone online, wipe it, and then carry it with minimal personal information. Otherwise all your personal communications, including sensitive/intimate photos and private messages, will be taken by border patrol for their personal use.
>if you're traveling, backup your phone online, wipe it, and then carry it with minimal personal information
It would be nice if phone vendors provided a mechanism to backup my phone, wipe it, then some time later merge the backup with the contents of the phone. Would be nice to be able to leave the primary contents of my phone at home while a travel and then merge my travel photos and messages and such back in when I restore my original contents after returning home.
That was on my mind when I wrote that — it's not possible to merge data, and there's no point in not using the device while traveling and avoiding taking photos or sending messages (that aren't saved on some cloud platforms).
One alternate solution, if you feel safer after the border crossing event, could be to use the native cloud backup feature of the phone maker. Backup the phone on the cloud, wipe it, set it up with a new email address, and then once you cross the border safely, restore from the cloud and start using it. You wouldn't have to worry about merging data then. But the issue here, at least for me, is that I don't want to backup my data on the phone maker's cloud.
As a Kiwi I've had some horrific experiences at the mercy of NZ customs. Aside from the usual drug swabs of phones and cameras they on one occasion managed to delete all the images I had stored on an SD card which they decided to search - they of course denied all responsibility. I would advise anyone traveling to New Zealand to leave their electronic devices at home.
"New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5000 Customs fine"
That headline reads as if it is from some dystopian cyberpunk novel. We've reached the age where governments are conducting "digital searches" at whim without just cause, gaining access to everything that makes you "you", and claiming it's for your own safety.
So, it might basically be ”worth” it to just smash your device(s) instead of refusing and paying the fee. Im not gonna do that, just raising an interesting point.
It's probably more worth it to turn around and not enter the country; unless it's your country .. in which case if you have the money, it's probably better to refuse and see if you can get a court case started to challenge it.
If this becomes the norm, then I can see a startup offering "convincing" email, browser history, social media profiles, photos and telephone call lists to present to customs.
Give those pesky 5 eyes poison data of a fictional life via a 2nd phone.
one case I know about: tatoo artists travel the world for work as guests in different studios. most do so under tourism visa sice its only a couple months each place. their managers (and online forums) already have a list of things that can be in the luggage and in their phones and instagram feeds so that they really do look like tourists.
The problem with this approach is that just like a cover used by a spy, you'd have to memorize all the details. One slip would blow this phony profile, then you'd be in jail for making false statements to a govt. agent...
I have my travel phone which I pop a SIM card into when I land, and I have my normal phone which I leave at home. I don't do it for privacy reasons, but just in case I lose a phone, I'd rather lose my crappy Motorola with a few contacts in it and a few chat apps, than my iPhone X with my entire life in it...
That ultimately doesn't matter. You tell them it's a travel phone, because you fear losing your expensive regular phone. Your social media accounts have elaborate, long passwords that would be impossible for a person to remember and are stored in a password manager at home (countless formulations you can go with in this story).
At that point there's nothing else they can get from you, the odds are overwhelming that'll be the end of the discussion. There's probably a one in a million chance that eg the TSA might detain you for a few hours out of spite if they think you're screwing with them.
Presumably,refusing to submit my phone to search is an criminal offence, the mind bending part is that I can get out of this by paying money to the government. I can see how a terrorist or drug dealer could be happy with this.
They were caught by a normal homicide investigation, as almost all murders in New Zealand are. No special terrorism laws, border searches or secret warrants.
This is not just a pointless invasion of privacy in the name of security theatre, it’s a needless waste of time and money.
I wonder ho such policies work when you're hauling a device for somebody else. "Oh sorry this is my husbands's phone. And that laptop? It's my daughter's." Or simply: "Oh my, I just got a new PIN and now I forgot it."
Is it permissible to punish somebody for not knowing or for forgetting? And if not, who has the burden of proof? I find that these questions have no good answer. For this reason alone I regard laws that take away the right to remain silent as flawed in principle.
Under US law you can be compelled by a court to unlock (provide passwords / decrypt) a device if the contents of the device are known (the helpful search term for this is forgone conclusion). Otherwise it should be covered under the 5th. As for "forgetting" a password in this case, you will be held in contempt of court if they don't believe you, which can mean indefinite detention.
IIRC there are some historic high court rulings setting a precedent that detaining a defendant for not furnishing some information (combination to a lock) violates their protection against compelled self incrimination / right to remain silent but if it was a physical object (key to a lock) that did not necessarily voilate same rights. This has now led to digital age cases where the prosecution suggests a password should be analogous to a key, not an idea. On a quick search, I couldn't find the relevant cases or discussion...
I think this regulation applies to citizens as well. The article said there could be a fine too. So citizens could get punished for not knowing a password. As far as I understood.
All these laws should come with a stipulation that, if nothing is actually found on a device that actually helps law enforcement protect the civilians, after say about 5 years the law is rescinded. Really, such laws should have to come up for re-approval at an interval anyway.
Anyone who has something to hide will either be smart enough to hide it or not bring the device altogether. Really all they're doing is annoying those who are not a threat.
As if criminals as a class are smarter than the average. Oh they will be caught by this! Example: The amount of people that have felt the urge to show me pictures of their baby marijuana plants is scary. They carry those pics everywhere on their phone! And it's not even like they need those for work.
Don't go around saying how it doesn't work. It makes the life of criminals harder. So it absolutely works. People will be caught by this. The question is: Is it worth it to lose the right to remain silent over it? In my view: Never.
What if most of your information is online, in some cloud platform and you don't have the app installed on your phone?
My iPhone isn't logged into any cloud services and the only apps I have installed are Google Maps and Gmail. I don't log into my Apple account and don't have the Dropbox app installed. Much of my data is stored in an S3 bucket. Simply giving an officer my phone means I'm surrendering my Gmail account and local phone data i.e. contacts and reminders. Not terribly worried about that.
To really investigate my digital presence they'd need access to my Dropbox, AWS account, personal email etc. Can they request that information despite not having any trace of it on my phone.
I expect a new feature of phones to include plausible deniability mode pins soon, where you type in a certain pin and it unlocks to a faux account that shows you texting your mom about broccoli recipes.
I don't think you need a special provider... at least on an iPhone, it only takes a few taps to wipe it, and then when you restart it, it immediately gives you the option of logging in with your Apple ID and restoring from your last backup (which is automatically made nightly, and reportedly encrypted).
I use the iCloud Backup feature on my iPhone. It does not back up every night. It seems to be every other day or so. Right now, it reports that my phone was last successfully backed up 26.5 hours ago.
That was also my expectation. I leave my phone plugged into the charger and on Wi-Fi every night while I sleep. Nevertheless, the iCloud Backup status usually shows that the last successful backup was more than 24 hours ago.
I'm not so sure it's that clear. (I'm not a lawyer)
If you can lawfully download a phone image over the internet while in the country and you can lawfully enter the country with no or limited digital information on your person then I don't see how backing up your phone in a different country (where New Zealand has no jurisdiction) and legally downloading the backup in New Zealand is evading customs.
Another (presumably) legal scenarios would include backing up all of your data, carrying no phone into the country, and then purchasing one while there. Is that "evading customs"?
Neither am I a lawyer, but the key part is if you're (a) doing this as a regular security precaution or (b) doing it specifically to evade customs. If it's the latter, it's probably illegal. If it's being done for legal reasons, it's legal.
Something I've noticed those of us who work with computers having difficult with when it comes to the law is the way intent changes the legality of an action. Wiring money to person X is generally legal, unless done so for the purpose of acquiring illegal contraband. At that point, both the illegal acquisition and the wire become illegal.
Neither am I a lawyer, but the key part is if you're (a) doing this as a regular security precaution or (b) doing it specifically to evade customs. If it's the latter, it's probably illegal. If it's being done for legal reasons, it's legal.
Twice now you've expressed this belief. Please share some primary sources that inform your beliefs.
>That sounds like willfully evading customs, which is a serious crime.
Do you have any citations or evidence that choosing to back up this line of thinking? I'd love to read more about the specifics of how downloading legal data from the internet suddenly becomes illegal if you could have carried it across the border.
For example, if once in NZ I pull down new music onto my device from my iTunes cloud library to replace what I listened to on the plane, is this "evading customs"?
Please provide citations to the specific law(s) I'm breaking by doing so, and how downloading the legally purchased music would be any different from a PC image.
> I wipe some of my phones on regular basis and sometimes restore their data from backups
I do too. But if you systematically do that before going through customs, with the intention of denying a customs agent the data, that's a different intent. Intent matters when it comes to the law.
Last time I traveled internationally (~10 years ago), I had to buy a separate international cell phone.
Not for privacy reasons -- but instead because my US-based phone wouldn't work in some of the other countries I'd be in. (At the protocol level, I suppose.)
Assuming it's not prohibitively expensive, why not do the same thing, now?
I agree that this is a troubling policy. But it seems simple to get around, if you were interested in doing so. It's also possible that this suggestion is naive, and feel free to let me know why, if so. =)
Serious question- has there been a string of incidents in NZ that prompted this legislation? I certainly try to stay current with world news, but I definitely could have missed something. I think my follow up question is what exactly are the authorities thinking they will find here? Ive yet to see any sort of organized crime/terror organization leave detailed roadmap of their nefarious plans in the notes app of their phone. I mean, maybe in the next Austin Powers movie that will be the case...
Oh, you feel how does time really fly reading that. How can so many changes happen in such a short amount of time ??
I traveled all around Europe, South East Asia and US/Canada only ~5 years ago with all my hard drives (and as such, a copy of all my pictures, documents, but some movies and music too), and most of the time, the fact that I carried 4 or 5 2.5"hard drives on me was just considered funny, once I explained that it was hard drives with work & personal stuff on it.
If you are carrying a phone and laptop out of the country in this day and age with all of the contents of your digital life on it then you're an idiot. Last couple of trips I used a postpaid phone and a cheap chromebook. They want the phone keep it. They want the laptop keep it. I sure as hell dont want it back after they've planted who knows what on it after their "investigation".
So, if you have lastpass app on your device (or, for the example sake, some other password manager that allows local access to passwords) can they ask you for the password to lastpass?
Also, the device is in "plane mode", but they will read your facebook password from lastpass and off they go on _their_ desktop computer -- looking at your FB profile, history, etc...
Some of the arguments I’m reading in defense of digital search point out that the things luggage search was originally supposed to find would now be stored on your phone.
I accept that argument in principle, but practically, since it’s so easy to keep any illegal materials on the internet and retrieve them post-security, how does digital search still make sense?
Damn it's hard advocating others HOW IMPORTANT digital privacy is even if you have nothing to fear nothing to hide because it sets the standard so low to anyone to be vulnerable to be molested.
Bad people are going to find ways to find ways to take advantage of a system in place, but at least we can try to make it a safe for those innocent.
Seems the new normal is to wipe your devices of anything you don’t want made public regardless of country.
I give pause when pondering international business travel. I can’t very well wipe my laptop, nor could I hand it over given what’s on it. Put everything on a VM and move it off the device for border crossings?
Probably a naive question: The whole point of this kind of search is to find something. But what is that "something"? What do they expect to find? Anyone even remotely serious of doing something bad is not going to have it on their phone just like that. What do they even expect to find?
“Excuse me sir but I believe your wife is quite hot and you maybe in possession of some personal photos me and the boys would like to have a good look at.”
Of course they don’t have to tell you why they want to look at your phone or what they’re doing with the stuff they’ve copied off it.
This is very stupid, imho, because it works just as long as people don't know about it. If I'm a "digital criminal", tomorrow I'll simply bring an empty laptop or phone and have my backup sent to my destination (or directly from the network). Pointless and annoying.
This is so easy to get around that it's only going to persecute regular people.
As the comments above can attest to, there's multiple ways of circumventing these searches. And we've given it what, 5 minutes of thought? Imagine what you could come up with if you actually had something to hide.
During my layover in Germany, after scanning my bag the security agents wanted to see if my DSLR was actually a camera. They did this by requesting to see live image through the LCD screen. Thankfully it was charged but I wonder how things would have gone if I ran out of battery.
For anyone who goes back and forth between the US and Canada -- get a Nexus card. It is the best 80 bucks you will ever spend.
You fly through security, both on land and in airports, and you even get expedited through domestic security screening. It has made flying 10x better for me.
Is there no legal recourse for us? I understand one can travel with a burner phone or backup, wipe, restore etc but if one wants to travel without doing something a drug dealer would do, is there anything else that can be done?
I'm curious - this is hypothetical. What if you were a millitary contractor and had work on your laptop. And they asked to search it and hand over password. What would happen then? Assuming they would need clearance to view certain files.
The fine seems a very odd way to enforce it. If my phone had the details of the people I've been assigned to assassinate and calendar invites from the chaps I'm going to buy cocaine off, I'd probably just pay the fine.
Taking a laptop means running tails or having a second partition, something simple/windows to boot up. Customs just wants to see a desktop im guessing.
as for file searches on the phone, its a bit more complicated...
1. run syncthing on your phone, send your data to the cloud.
2. wipe/factory reset the phone. now you're ready for that inspection.
3. restore/load once on the ground and in your hotel.
I hope the spread of this sort of thing helps push forward general implementations of owner customizable Views and associated triggers of our systems and data rather then the long standing default of binary access/no access. All the technical foundations for this exist right now, and in the case of Apple in particularly they've already got it all together in every modern iDevice. They've got a well hardened and integrated HSM, data siloing and per-file class based hierarchal encryption ("Data Protection"), large amounts of sensors, biometric readers capable of discerning multiple inputs, and an interface amenable to adaption so that even regular users could intuitively understand a View system. Plus for mobile there is an entirely non-security related aspect which is growing in the public consciousness: our limited attention and mental focus budget.
With all that what I'd like to see is a simple interface to create arbitrary numbers of custom Views with associated triggers. The default one would be as we have it now: everything you load is visible at all times after unlock. But then you could create a new one, and select which apps (and in turn associated data in that app silo) appear and which preferences are accessible, then have a "This view will be made active when..." with nice UI for various key conditionals (time, geography, speed, network connection, biometrics, and/or password). It'd then be easy to ensure that while traveling between locations only maps, ride hailing and airline apps would be available for example. If anyone stole the device, or for that matter compelled it in any other way, none of my financials or private info would be available. I couldn't even be compelled to do it at that location, it'd be genuinely out of my control, backed by the same hardware crypto system providing standard FDE. This isn't even about government fully or even in large part, in dangerous parts of the world just as modern device net locks reduced the value of stealing a device a spread of "tourists and the like literally cannot be made to transfer money or the like on the street" could reduce the incentives for certain crime.
And again it'd be a very grokable common sense feature for the attention issue too. These days information overload and things trying to grab for some of our mindshare is a huge source of stress. I'd love if my devices, rather then always being a matter of adding on, started being able to actively help me subtract instead. I could compartmentalize work apps to only even "exist" away from home, no temptation or notifications even show up. And vice versa, entertainment distractions vanish as I enter certain locations. "Willpower" is something of a limited resource too and in practice often comes down to essentially planning ahead to avoid temptations in the first place, not going to the grocery store when starving for example. Our digital devices should be, at our individual direction, automatically helping us as humans. I think that'd be a valuable next step anyway, but the fact that vastly more powerful and user friendly coercion code type systems could be made widespread too would also be helpful in taking back some of the privacy digital can also take away.
QubesOS enables some of this today, at high setup cost.
iOS12 Shortcuts may enable this in the future, if apps can be tagged by users with custom metadata, which then drives a OS-wide policy engine.
iOS "Screen Time" has arbitrary categories of apps, some of which incorrectly classify social apps (like Flipboard) as "Reading". This need to be customizable based on user priorities.
>QubesOS enables some of this today, at high setup cost.
While I think that it can't really work as I envision without hardware integration, in addition user friendliness is in fact a key part because this is another case where widespread adoption would have a kind of emergent "herd immunity" effect. The effect of introducing kill switches ("Activation Lock" in Apple terms) for phones is a good example. From an NYT article from that era [0] following Apple's general push of the feature:
>"Comparing data in the six months before and after Apple released its anti-theft feature, police said iPhone robberies in San Francisco dropped 38 percent. In London, they fell 24 percent."
>"In New York City, robberies (which typically involve a threat of violence) of Apple products dropped 19 percent and grand larcenies of Apple products dropped 29 percent in the first five months of 2014, compared with the same time period from 2013, according to a report from the New York attorney general’s office, which included data from the New York City Police Department. By comparison, thefts of Samsung products increased 51 percent in the first five months of 2014, compared with the same period a year ago, the report said."
Now, with jailbreaking before that it was already possible to have a relatively effective remote kill switch type of feature, and there were even commercial jailbreak products to that effect (or to try to track it down and find it). But when only one in thousands or tens to hundreds of thousands of phones might have something like that, it wouldn't have any larger effect beyond the specific feature working as intended and rendering the phone unusable (or letting it be recovered maybe). For criminals playing the odds it made no material difference overall, if they occasionally got a phone that "broke" after stealing it they'd just toss it. But once it was universal it changed the math on even trying in the first place and became not just a response but a deterrent.
By the same token if everyone had an easy level of adaptive viewing, it'd change the math for everyone else as well. And as a very compelling response to an entirely separate popular demand, if it was everywhere and normal it'd be a lot harder for even governments to single anyone out over it. Even government resources are not in fact infinite, and it's an important check on power as to whether they can engage in mass sweeps or must devote significant individualized attention to each case.
>iOS12 Shortcuts may enable this in the future, if apps can be tagged by users with custom metadata, which then drives a OS-wide policy engine.
I don't think Shortcuts can really handle this, at least not on a stock device.
>iOS "Screen Time" has arbitrary categories of apps, some of which incorrectly classify social apps (like Flipboard) as "Reading". This need to be customizable based on user priorities.
Screen Time on the other hand might represent a small step in this direction. I'd be excited if it was!
Privacy Commissioner John Edwards had some influence over the drafting of the legislation and said he was "pretty comfortable" with where the law stood...
"You know when you come into the country that you can be asked to open your suitcase and that a Customs officer can look at everything in there."
Evidently, severe brain damage is no hindrance to securing a commissioner's appointment in New Zealand.
Please don't post personal attacks to HN. If you don't owe better to the Privacy Commissioner of New Zealand, you at least owe it to this community not to degrade it like that.
Also, in the case that your view is correct, stooping that low discredits the truth. That's bad for everybody.
You're quite right. I had regrets after posting that knee-jerk comment. Oddly, my dissatisfaction is heightened by the ridiculous number of upvotes I received from that post. I shall strive to improve.
Devil’s advocate: what _is_ wrong with that logic? If we accept that customs can search our persons or luggage as a condition of our entering a given country, what is it about digital materials that makes them off limits?
I store information on my phone like my private thoughts, because I know that it’s an encrypted, secured device I always have with me. I wouldn’t store that information on paper — the best analogy is that it’s a backup of parts of my brain.
When you go through customs, they can’t just search your brain. They can search your possessions, but they can’t mind dump you.
That’s the critical distinction. It’s not my property that’s the problem. It’s that it’s an extension of my brain.
Because there is a HUGE difference between the contents of your luggage (some clothes, maybe some souvenirs, etc.) and all of your digital accounts (personal pictures, credit card numbers, access to banking, home address, etc.) I don't really care if the TSA look at my underwear, but I don't want anyone, especially low level employees, having access to every single aspect of my life.
Historically, your luggage would contain personal pictures, credit card numbers, general banking statements, generally personal information, etc. The medium in which this information is stored and carried around has changed.
The need to inspect what you're bringing into the country has not.
These processes didn't originally come about because people wanted to inspect your 5 different pairs of underwear or what personal devices are exploring where the sun don't shine. The people decrying this as some sort of over reach are basically just admitting ignorance to the fact that these processes are just lagging behind how people actually carry and transmit the same information they've been inspecting for nearly a century. It's just a small update to continue doing what border patrol has always been doing.
What's actually problematic is the there's so much information housed together on one device. In border patrol/guard/police in customs/etc attempt to, again, continue doing what they've always been doing that particular advance in policy and process has incidentally lead them at the forefront of a lot of information people used to either keep in their homes or just in their head.
Personally I think this more of a data organization problem than it is a government over reach one. It definitely needs to be discussed. It doesn't need to include tired cries of a 1984-esque future.
I don’t think that’s true, people weren’t carrying around every photo they ever took, and even then they took a lot less photos. People did not carry around all their banking statements all the time, etc. It’s an order of magnitude problem; yes, sometimes, people carried around those things and their diaries or whatnot, but this is more akin to giving the people the keys to your house, so they can make a perfect copy of to rummage through at their hearts content and find everything in it, and then wiretap your house.
This process came about because the public hasn’t demanded privacy protections as much as it has demanded safety, not out of any logical extension for existing policies.
Basically I don’t think that this logically extends from suitcases to full phone access in the same way I don’t think that the right to bear arms allows you to train and arm a private army with tanks and fighter jets. At some point, it stops being a logical extension of a rule and starts being of a different kind due to changes in magnitude.
Here, a country may be concerned about objects being physically brought into their country, but to be concerned about a persons digital life is a concern of a different kind, because of the scope of that search. It’s not a logical extension in the minds of most people who understand that magnitude of difference. I really hope I can convince you too!
I don’t think that border patrol was (in any meaningful numbers) catching financial crimes because people brought their bank accounts or private letters across borders. I really do not buy that this is a necessary step to fight crime at all (if it were, where are the unsolved crimes? What tragedies would have been prevented?) I think this was catching people moving cash/drugs/weapons off the grid and it can still function in that capacity without forcing digital searches.
Instead, this just grossly invades the privacy of tourists who don’t think to bring a burner phone.
>Basically I don’t think that this logically extends from suitcases to full phone access
I get that you don't think that is the case, but you're not really explaining why you believe so.
> but to be concerned about a persons digital life is a concern of a different kind
But as I said, they're just inspecting the same thing they've always been inspecting. The medium is different and it incidentally happens to be housed with a bunch of different data that historically was kept separate, purely for technological reasons.
You're implying that the cause here is "concern over a person's digital life" but you present no statement or proof that's what these policies are actually aimed at. I think it's fairly obvious that it's a simple reconfiguration of a policy to adapt to changing habits. And if it's not obvious I think the statements from government agencies explaining these policy changes shed further light on why it's being done. But you need to have a reason you believe this to not be the case. It can't just be.
Let's review some statements that hit on some of the above points:
>Individuals entering Canada who are concerned about how this policy might be applied may wish to exercise caution by either limiting the devices they travel with or removing sensitive personal information from devices that could be searched. Another potential measure is to store it on a secure device in Canada or in a secure cloud which would allow you to retrieve it securely once you arrive at your destination.
>Customs’ interest in relation to digital files is in the following enforcement areas:
> * Intercepting prohibited or restricted items
> * Identifying infringements of intellectual property rights
From page 64:
>Our Act does enable us to enforce the law in relation to the following prohibited goods when
they are in a digital format:
> * Objectionable material and images – “objectionable” has a very broad definition under
the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993, and can capture material
ranging from violent or degrading sexual images to material that encourages criminal
acts or terrorism
> * Designs for weapons or for other items of potential military use
> * Designs and blueprints for making nuclear, biological, chemical or radiological
weapons.
Pretty far away from "concerns about a person's digital life."
>in the same way I don’t think that the right to bear arms allows you to train and arm a private army with tanks and fighter jets.
This analogy in no way is relevant to data organization and transmission. It's pretty hyperbolic and distracts from any point you are trying to make.
Let’s for the sake of argument assume that the governments stated reasons are what they are going after.
Is the off chance that someone carries objectionable pornography, designs for nuclear or chemical weapons on their personal phone (instead of emailing them encrypted, or following the state’s own guidelines on how to avoid being searched) worth the ability to search everyone’s personal phone without some kind of judicial oversight? How many people are estimated to be doing so? How many people did they used to catch via the old papers method but cannot anymore? The burden of proof should be on the state who wants to infringe on the privacy of travelers.
I mean, to me the fact that they acknowledge that anyone serious about privacy can take measures to circumvent it pretty much blows the story that this will be effective at catching people smuggling weapons designs or other serious crimes out of the water.
>This analogy in no way is relevant to data organization and transmission. It's pretty hyperbolic and distracts from any point you are trying to make.
I’m trying to make the case that clearly magnitude affects whether or not something is a reasonable extension, perhaps poorly. But you’ll surely concede that doing something at increased scale often changes the nature of that thing? And that’s what I’m saying here, you aren’t just giving away what would have been in your suitcase, you are giving away the keys to your house, car, mailbox, safety deposit box, diary and family photo album. That means it changes the nature of the request, and can’t be considered along the same lines as a suitcase.
>Let’s for the sake of argument assume that the governments stated reasons are what they are going after.
Okay but there's no "sake" about, that's literally what we are trying to establish. If you don't believe that a logical progression of existing laws and processes into new mediums is there reason why these policy changes are taking place, contrary to basic reasoning and explicit statements from these governments while pushing for these changes, you have to have an actual reason why you believe this not to be the case.
>I mean, to me the fact that they acknowledge that anyone serious about privacy can take measures to circumvent it pretty much blows the story that this will be effective at catching people smuggling weapons designs or other serious crimes out of the water.
There are plenty of ways to get away with murder but that doesn't mean we take it off the law books because of its efficacy. That's a really silly view point.
>But you’ll surely concede that doing something at increased scale often changes the nature of that thing?
As I said in my original post, it's worth discussing and certainly worth finding a solution too. But the particular governments we're talking about have well stated reasons for their policy changes, they aren't doing it to be draconian. We all started clumping our data together. Governments didn't increase the scope of what they were looking for.
>That means it changes the nature of the request, and can’t be considered along the same lines as a suitcase.
But that's exactly what it is. There's a reason we have have "files" and "folders" as basic user data organization schemes. Border policies haven't actually changed in any of dramatic fashion. Again we just started storing more data by other data, data they were already inspecting. You might argue that this little fact is the basis for why the policy should be changed, but you have to actually argue it.
If you bring a suitcase full of bananas in to Australia, customs will take them and detroy them, and probably prosecute you.
If you bring an electronic device in to Australia full of 0s and 1s that can be decoded to display as pictures of bananas, customs will just think your a bananaphile and shuffle you along.
Digital goods are fundamentally different.
You can’t cross the border, buy a suitcase, then download a bunch of bananas to fill it.
You can cross the border, buy a phone, then download instructions from your terrorist boss.
Whatever else these digital searches are I don’t know, but they’re certainly ham fisted to the point of embarrassment for the agents and agencies.
This is a classic case of a law that will only effect your average (law-abiding) citizen.
If you have something to hide, it would be trivial to store it on a web storage service that those searching you would have no way of knowing you possess (how would they know you have an account on some obscure storage platform that you paid for with monero? Or even just information stored in S3, they would need a list of all users linked to passport numbers for every service available around the world, since if they don't block VPNs you'll just use a service not available in NZ). So you wouldn't have it physically on your device, but you would be able to access it just as easily in 2018.
Or a free solution would be a noise.raw file that is actually an encrypted volume (many encryption formats are indistinguishable from random data).
they would need a list of all users linked to passport numbers for every service available around the world
At this rate, I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years, a person needs to punch in their SSN (or the equivalent in whichever country we are talking about) simply to access the internet and any service on the internet.
But for today's case - this is just security theater. Just a reminder to average Joe that he can be harassed anytime.
I'm pretty sure it's extremely import to inspect what people are bringing into the country. Besides the financial... tools that people can bring into a country there's a whole host of other items that can negatively impact the country, and not just from a social aspect:
* Invasive species. This includes plants, not just animals.
* Drugs
* In times of known or potential epidemics, screening people for obvious sickness.
* Weapons or tools that could be used for the purposes of terrorism.
Why would you say that there's no reason to inspect what people are bringing into your country?
1) All of those also apply to inter-region travel within the same country. Should those have guarded borders too? Shouldn't there be guarded borders between neighborhoods in the same city, just to make sure that nothing bad spreads? Hell, why not run around "inspecting" people's houses at random, just in case?
2) None of those are digital, so your earlier justification is moot anyway.
I'm well aware none of those are digital. That was exactly the point, to provide reasons outside the scope of the current conversation, since it's clearly being debated in this thread. I don't think you can really debate the above reasons therefore there is absolutely a need to search you as a person and your belongings when crossing a border.
As to your first statement, ignoring how disingenuous it is, if those standards did have a reasonable justification for applying them to inter-regional travel the fact that we do not apply those policies to inter-regional travel does not negate the justification for applying those policies on the international border. It's not binary.
> As to your first statement, ignoring how disingenuous it is, if those standards did have a reasonable justification for applying them to inter-regional travel the fact that we do not apply those policies to inter-regional travel does not negate the justification for applying those policies on the international border. It's not binary.
So what is that justifying difference that you seem to think exists?
National sovereignty, which historically simplifies to war-time allegiance. This is a common classification for governments of nation-states imposing travel restrictions. Are you asking if it's justified?
+ My communications with significant others which may be of various degrees of sfw
+ My work files, including proprietary or secret information
Any of those things would absolutely require a warrant, and may even require a specialized warrant in some cases (communications with my lawyer, health information).
This is a nuanced topic (border security), and while I think there's slippery slopes (and their associated fallacies) in both directions, it is true to say that you are very free to share none of those things with border security, and border security is very free to not admit you to the country.
In most countries, border security isn't entirely free to run rampant over your basic freedoms. Privileged communications (eg client/attorney) is an extremely important basic bastion of freedom and law, and violating that (which in this case seems incidental, not intentional) is a mockery.
Sure, any country is welcome to violate that norm, just the same as any country is welcome to force it's people in labor camps for insulting Dearest Leader. The rest of the world is also welcome to respond appropriately.
An equivalent example would be giving customs permission to search something private and located somewhere else, such as your house, simply because you're entering the country. This is an obvious and disgusting overreach of authority.
IMO it's the breadth and depth that is possible with our digital property. It's one thing to search the digital equivalent of some luggage (maybe the contents of a cellphone) and another thing entirely to be able to search through the entirety of one's digital property, which I see as the digital equivalent of authorities searching through your home, your car, and any other property you might own.
Digital Materials are an extension of your brain, a window into your files, a key to your bank account and safe deposit box. The government doesn't get to access those, the shouldn't get to access my phone?
The problem is, `/docs/plan-to-hijack-airnz-plane.txt` can easily be downloaded from the cloud once you're in-country, so you can just not keep it on your phone. This is a significant difference compared to bring in explosives (as an example), where searching your luggage would actually be effective.
Again, this law will primarily inconvenience / harm law-abiding folks, while not preventing the "bad guys" from doing what they want.
Primarily because you are not preinformed for the search. There is an expectation that your luggage may be searched, hence you dont put your favorute fetish items if you are easily embarrased. Most people don’t expect to have their sexting history searched (and possibly easily copied). Even if it has become legal, it is not a widely known practice, which means that in practice it violates human rights. Someone should take this to court, even if the only gain to be expected is Making it widely known, and -hopefully- people will stop voting to enable these authoritarian practices.
difference is that if they keep something from my suitcase, I will know. I have no such guarantees when they access my phone unless I see what they are doing.
That means, that you should expect your device and all access tokens on that device compromised.
I mean, they could cut copies of any keys you have on you, so you don't really have any guarantees there either, and you should therefore expect your locks to be compromised. Or they could photocopy any paper documents, etc.
I find it fine for them to require looking through digital material. The problem they have is that the digital material is complete nonsense without also having a password to decrypt it with. What should be off-limit to law enforcement in general are the secrets we keep in our memory.
Some material that can be stored on your phone is not permitted into New Zealand, like child pornography.
If you had that stored in your suitcase, it can be discovered, and a prosecution started.
If you had that stored in your phone, it can be discovered, and a prosecution started.
Phones aren't magical parts of your brain, that can cross borders without being inspected. There's no digital 'diplomatic pouch'. Just because there's lots of sensitive goodies inside doesn't mean it's immune to inspection. Why would it?
There is a digital diplomatic pouch though, it's called "the cloud". Anyone that wants to smuggle illegal bits and bytes into a country can simply do it over the Internet.
The reality is, nothing on your phone can cause actual danger to anyone in the way that guns or a bomb can.
So you have two ways getting illegal contents into a country. Instead of preventing both measures (which is what governments are trying to do [1]), you are suggesting ignoring one of the ways because the other way currently works?
The whole point of the customs and laws is to prevent any sort of measures to getting illegal contents into the country, either physically or via the cloud. Just because it is currently possible to do it via the cloud, does not mean the customs should give up checking physical devices.
Yes. Because it's too intrusive to search people's phones without probable cause and a warrant. I don't doubt that searching everyone's phone will result in criminal convictions. I do doubt the value to society in doing that.
3d printed guns are a simple bug in US law -- guns are controlled, but ammunition is not. Easy fix, make the ammo require a permit. Homemade guns are no longer a problem.
That argument is silly because all those things could also be stored (encrypted) on cloud servers and downloaded from NZ at any time. Trying to protect the country from CP via border checks is like a comedy skit to me.
Well, for one, it's a gateway into services/data that are not being brought into the country. I don't store a complete directory of all my contacts in my suitcase, why should the government be able to collect that from my phone? My phone can connect to my email and retrieve information, no one would print out their entire inbox and carry it in a suitcase...
Happened to a female friend flying from Toronto to visit me in Mexico. Because she had a connecting flight in US, a US agent went through her phone. (Classic mistake of entering the US unless absolutely neccessary)
Guy was reading her Tinder messages and accusing her of being a prostitute. He brought up some saucy messages and would say things like “girls don’t do this kind of stuff for free...” Finally handed her back her phone with a comment like “well, maybe you are a good girl ;)”
He was fixated on some message where she commented how much a meal might cost at some restaurant and used that as an excuse to ask personal questions about sex and prostitution.
Sadly, the motive there was probably he found her hot, would hit that, was aggravated at reading her Tinder messages and finding her even more hot because of it and was pissed off that there was no way in hell he would ever get a shot at being with her, so he felt some need to piss all over her, blame her for making him hot and bothered with no immediate means to get relief, yadda.
This is an essential element of situational crap that I am referring to when I complain about sexism in the world. Meanwhile, other people seem to think I mean "Men who firmly believe women should be barefoot and pregnant and who have some conscious intent to prevent them from having real careers." or some nonsense along those lines.
That's both disturbing and pretty much the level of professionalism I expect from CBP. I wish someone were to cataloging these sorts of incidents, rather than just reading about them in HN threads.
It's the rule rather than the exception with border guards these days, both US and Canadian. It's a job where bullies get to bully. It attracts a certain kind of person.
This is so disgusting, and is a personal violation! I can't imagine going through such a horrific experience. This is exactly the behavior that such laws bring forth. See an attractive woman and stop her for questioning, knowing fully well that you're in the position of power between the two of you and can get away with almost anything.
It’s grim. For some reason this reminds me of the current Supreme Court hearings, where Ford was referred to as ‘attractive’, as though that had some kind of relevance. It’s right the way though the US system it seems and it appears from this new law that NZ is headed that way too.
Oh come on. I'd call it "Fake news", but the article you posted as proof actually explains things rather than leaving it the way you did: implying that you have Senators running around calling abuse victims "attractive" as if its relevant. Read the rest of your own posted article:
“Hatch uses “attractive” to describe personalities, not appearances,” Matt Whitlock, deputy chief of staff and communications director to Hatch, said in response to reporters tweeting about Hatch’s comments. “If you search his past quotes you’ll see he’s used it consistently for years for men and women he believed has compelling personalities.”
Perhaps on the rise of #metoo it is time to bring up such stories in the media and let these generally unknown bullies at the border face same consequences as famous people as well?
These are the same agents that I watch scream in "special person talk" (think Trump mocking the reporter) at confused Chinese tourists. I see it every time I fly international here. Great first impression our border agents are giving people.
Not that I ever had are reason to go there, but we can officially strike NZ of the list of places I'll be visiting.
I hope this sort of malarkey doesn't become the norm. This seems rife for abuse. If you have good enough information to demand to rifle though someone's phone or computer, you have good enough information for a damn warrant.
Given the abusive way special courts can be set up as rubber stamps that never deny warrants, a warrant would do nothing to make me feel better about this.
A warrant? It's the border. There's no need for a warrant to inspect your suitcase. A sovereign country has the right to inspect things crossing the border.
It was extremely unnerving, they went through all our private pictures, messages, dropbox files, email, notes, dating apps, etc. It ruined the vacation for me, and I've stopped visiting Canada because of how disgusted I felt afterwards. I know Canada is not the only country doing that, so from now on when I cross an international border I wipe my phone (after backing up) and just have a few pictures and messages on there. Incidentally though, that's the only time it's happened to me.