Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine

radionz.co.nz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 647 posts

Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine

#161

Post by Ush2iaph »

WaylonKenning wrote: post #109
plink wrote: post #7

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.

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 be…

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.

Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine

#162

Post by jsilence »

grkvlt wrote: post #121
jackhack wrote: post #4

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…

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,…

"At first I did not say anything because they were only after ...."

Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine

#163

Post by throw2016 »

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'.

Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine

#164

Post by mattnewton »

kadendogthing wrote: post #88
landonxjames wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine

#166

Post by yholio »

gsnedders wrote: post #131
yholio wrote: post #85

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…

> 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…

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.

Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine

#167

Post by jsilence »

WaylonKenning wrote: post #122
jackhack wrote: post #4

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…

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 cours…

What about "probable cause" or "innocent until proven guilty"? Why would I have to accept being strip searched without a warrant?

Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine

#169

Post by nemo44x »

grkvlt wrote: post #121
jackhack wrote: post #4

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…

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,…

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.

Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine

#170

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

lolc wrote: post #143

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…

Being that it's a country, I'd guess they'd be fully within their rights to deny entry on the suspicion that you are withholding your password.

It's not really seen as a 'punishment', since no one has the 'right' to visit New Zealand who isn't a citizen.

Post reply on HN