151–160 of 647 posts
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question: what countries on border entry can demand usernames/passwords to online services?
All countries can demand it. They are sovereign. Are you asking which countries do demand it?
> 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…
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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 proper…
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…
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.
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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.
You are classically Missing The Point. 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 diff…
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).
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>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?
Nah both partitions are 500GB... it's just that you avoid writing (or filling up) the "outer" partition so the "inner" partition is never overwritten.
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 phone…
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 ac…
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.
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.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 staf…
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.