> 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.
> "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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes