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Canada Border Services seizes lawyer's phone, laptop for not sharing passwords

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Re: Canada Border Services seizes lawyer's phone, laptop for not sharing passwords

#211

Post by cmurf »

stale2002 wrote: post #202
neya wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to break your encryption. Trust me, if you live in a country that has crap laws, they will actually extract the password from you: https://xkcd.com/538/ Edit I'm not saying it's a bad idea to encrypt your drives, just that it doesn't save you from someone determined..

This post is about western countries. The vast majority of western countries will not literally torture you to death, in order to get rando citizen's phone passwords. Encryption works great for this usecase, that almost everyone in this thread will be using it for. People being tortured for their personal phone password by a rando border guard in basically any country, just isn't something that happens, despite what…

How long can you be detained? And under what conditions? More than a few hours will get the vast majority of people cooperating. I suspect they could detain you for 24 hours, or even several days, but I don't know what the legal limit is for detaining a citizen at the border of their own country.

And for quite a lot of other people, even not being personally detained, but having to acquire new devices is inconvenient enough to compel cooperation. Who wants to buy new devices? Who has a need for two sets? It'd only be a cost of business for someone who does a decent amount of traveling and has confidential information to protect.

But then, that's a trap too because why should people need a reason? Why are only people with business/legal confidential information a protected class?

Re: Canada Border Services seizes lawyer's phone, laptop for not sharing passwords

#212

Post by deogeo »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #201
deogeo wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sickening to think that, despite the ban in Canada, countless innocent anime girls are being abused in Japan every day - many of them children! The UN should apply pressure to get Japan to stop this vile abuse, and import of cartoons into Japan should be banned, as their safety cannot be guaranteed there.

Fictional child pornography does not directly harm children, but it is likely that it does so indirectly by creating demand for actual CP. To me, it seems totally reasonable to make all sexualized depictions of children illegal for this reason.

That's one way to look at it. But there's evidence that access to porn reduces the amount of rape [1]. In light of that, it seems reasonable to ask - how many children are we willing to allow to be raped, to protect our precious anime girls?

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/201601...

Re: Canada Border Services seizes lawyer's phone, laptop for not sharing passwords

#213

Post by heraclius »

dghughes wrote: post #144
khazhoux wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

edit: wrote comment about Herring v. United States but this is a Canadian case.

In Canada technically it would be Whoever v. The Crown (Queen Elizabeth).

In British practice my understanding is that it would be A v. R.; the website of the Supreme Court has judgements the form R. v. A and A v. Her Majesty The Queen. Whence your usage?

Re: Canada Border Services seizes lawyer's phone, laptop for not sharing passwords

#214

Post by angott »

vbezhenar wrote: post #198
pmorici wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a great idea. You have no reason to believe deleted and cached copies aren’t lingering on you disk unprotected.

If you're THAT worried, then securely reformat disk and reinstall OS just before travel.

Yes, that’s something we can do as HN readers, but good luck explaining that to the average lawyer or paralegal.

Re: Canada Border Services seizes lawyer's phone, laptop for not sharing passwords

#215

Post by cmurf »

derefr wrote: post #136
jandrewrogers wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This and related edge cases are something that I've always wondered about e.g. where compliance would be illegal. There are a number of scenarios where one can have content on devices that it is expressly illegal to disclose to random border police. Even within a single country, there is a conflict of authority here.

If someone is travelling from country X through country Y with documents destined for country Z, and the government of X wants the documents to reach Z unobserved, this is the usual use-case for a government-of-X diplomatic pouch. (Or, if it’s the Z embassy sending to Z, a government-of-Z diplomatic pouch.) I wonder if you could make the case here that the US government should be ensuring the functioning of its judic…

Lawyers are not diplomats. A diplomat is an official representative of their country.

Re: Canada Border Services seizes lawyer's phone, laptop for not sharing passwords

#216

Post by morganvachon »

vbezhenar wrote: post #198
pmorici wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a great idea. You have no reason to believe deleted and cached copies aren’t lingering on you disk unprotected.

If you're THAT worried, then securely reformat disk and reinstall OS just before travel.

This action can be flagged as suspicious as well, triggering a deeper investigation into the traveler.

It's not always feasible, but the most secure way to protect clients'/employers' data is to encrypt the laptop and phone and ship to your destination via standard shipping services, then ship them back the same way before leaving for home. Carry a well used but non-critical burner laptop ($50 Chromebook off Craigslist) and/or phone ($20 Walmart smartphone) with you that won't wreck your world if it's confiscated and searched. If it is seized, take your receipt and go on about your business. When you get to your destination your actual devices will be waiting for you. You can safely forget about the burner devices.

Re: Canada Border Services seizes lawyer's phone, laptop for not sharing passwords

#217

Post by jrandm »

Why doesn't everyone simply refuse to share passwords, as is mentioned numerous times on various Canadian government websites? Basic search finds tons of pages from all sorts of departments https://www.canada.ca/en/sr/srb.html?q=share+password

A few samples

> 95% [of polled Candians] know not to share their passwords

https://www.getcybersafe.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/vds/nln-sft-stck-p/...

> don’t share your PIN, password or personal security questions and answers with anyone, not even family members

https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...

> If you’ve shared passwords with friends, now would be a good time to change them

https://www.getcybersafe.gc.ca/cnt/blg/pst-20180913-en.aspx

> Protect your password, don’t write it down or share it with anyone and change it often

https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/progr...

A few days of every single traveler saying "no" would force them to either begin seizing all electronic devices or to drop the entire endeavor as untenable. This problem doesn't need a technical solution beyond making sure locked devices are actually secure.

Re: Canada Border Services seizes lawyer's phone, laptop for not sharing passwords

#218

Post by astura »

LeonM wrote: post #99

I have asked this question before, but never really got a satisfiable answer: why do governments (not just USA/canada) spend these resources to check data physically at a border? It's not like you need to 'smuggle' any form of data physically. I mean, any data considered to be dangerous (like terrorist attack plans, atomic bomb designs or political inside information) can be accessed across borders via the internet.…

If you arrive at the US border and you say you're coming into the country for a short vacation and your text messages/email is full of conversations about employment in Seattle and your browser history is full of apartments for rent in Seattle, then they use that information to deny your entry into the country. It's mostly looking for "story checks out" kinda stuff like that.

There's TV shows that follow border agents for various countries during their day-to-day work.

Re: Canada Border Services seizes lawyer's phone, laptop for not sharing passwords

#219

Post by hw »

sandworm101 wrote: post #148
dmix wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guatemala is well known as a drug transport point. Plenty of the politicians there were caught being directly involved. Which, along with other contraband, accounts for the majority of the customs actual work and far more likely to be the concern with any traveller from there: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-guatemala-politics/guatem... https://www.insightcrime.org/investigations/the-zetas-in-gua... http://latinal…

Don't use american definitions of "probably cause". Canada is a different country and defines probably cause very differently. Canada has a different relationship with its boarders than America. The physical scale is are different. Sovereignty is different. Canada's "charter rights" are different than american "constitutional" rights. Canada placed greater trust in individual enforcement officers and, generally, does…

I don't think he was specifically referring to the american or canadian or australian or definition of probable cause, but rather the concept itself.

I don't know why you're trying to make a point about Canada vs US and how one is better than the other. Just because he's free to tell his story and wasn't prosecuted doesn't mean that the CBS is off the hook for seizing upon his electronic devices - without reason - and even threatening that they would be sent to a lab to be cracked.

I'm neither an American or Canadian citizen, but when I do travel to these countries I would expect that my privacy not be breached, especially not without reason and when I've already cooperated and consented to my bags and other personal items to be searched.

Now the next time you travel, and the CBS or US CBP decides to seize your devices, are you going to just surrender your devices, given that they've explained everything nicely and will let you go on your way?

Re: Canada Border Services seizes lawyer's phone, laptop for not sharing passwords

#220

Post by ChrisClark »

derefr wrote: post #155
ChrisClark wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes. In case you're serious, it's the slavery, and children.

I think you’re thinking of sex trafficking . The John being a tourist is orthogonal to the prostitute being a victim of trafficking. Many sex tourists visit Germany, for example, where prostitution is a safe, unionized profession.

Yeah, I'm not talking about Germany. We're talking about why border patrol might investigate something.
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