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

radionz.co.nz

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

#591

Post by nbluth »

paradite wrote: post #234
yholio wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unaccept…

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?

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?

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

#592

Post by ISL »

otterley wrote: post #566
ISL wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 perso…

Attorney here! (Not providing legal advice.) 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.

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

#593

Post by newscracker »

wang_li wrote: post #426
newscracker wrote: post #409

> 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…

>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…

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.

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

#594

Post by clubm8 »

komali2 wrote: post #468
clubm8 wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

? 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:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-03-31/welcome-t...

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

#595

Post by jsoc815 »

strictnein wrote: post #539
edraferi wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is 100% the right solution, and there's a pretty easy way to accomplish this, with iPhones at least: Back up to iCloud Wipe your phone Cross the border Restore from iCloud And yes, this may fail visiting China, because who knows what the Great Firewall will block.

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.

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

#596

Post by plink »

dang wrote: post #555
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.

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. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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.

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

#597

Post by NullPrefix »

ttty wrote: post #581
macintux wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Restore to what account? I have so many, I doubt they are aware of all my accounts

>Please provide a finite list of your accounts. Lying by omission is still lying.

It's easy to come up with new stasi operation techniques if there are no civil liberties.

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

#598

Post by clubm8 »

woolvalley wrote: post #501
clubm8 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how do you restore the phone? I assume you travel with a laptop? What happens when they want access to the laptop?

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 syste…

>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.

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

#599

Post by malnourish »

paradite wrote: post #533
malnourish wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately your views are fundamentally opposed to what most people (at the very least here ) would define as freedom and civil rights.

Judging from the negative scores, you are right. Does that mean I am going to self-sensor my views to avoid losing karma? No. You have your rights to disagree, I have my rights to express my views.

I don't advocate for downvoting those whom I disagree with, if it were up to me you wouldn't be downvoted.

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

#600

Post by dang »

plink wrote: post #596
dang wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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.

Appreciated!

It's an unfortunate weakness of the voting system that knee-jerk comments tend to get highly upvoted. HN can't go by upvotes alone.

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