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

The 38% true positive rate makes me think that either border customs violations are incredibly broad and common, or there is some kind of parallel construction happening here where they have a good idea of what they hope to find when they seize these devices from extralegal sources.

Edit: given the source, the 38% could also be inflated (perhaps by not counting certain false positives) since it comes from the department looking to justify their work.

>but it is likely that it does so indirectly by creating demand for actual CP

Until there is evidence of that, it seems strange to say that's a conclusion at all, or that it's likely. In fact, Patrick Galbraith's work on how users of fictional CP actually interact with their materials suggests exactly the opposite: they have developed a form of sexuality for the representations themselves - the more fictional, the more real to them. To add to that, the research I've read shows that pornography is not associated with increased rates of sexual assault or rape. If the link isn't even there for regular porn, what would make you say it's "likely" there for cartoon representations?

Furthermore, do we apply this standard elsewhere in society? If there were no research on the link between video games and violence, would you conclude that it is "likely" it indirectly creates a demand for videos of real violence? Is the fact that someone might be spurred on to do a different act sufficient to illegalize the original act which spurred them? I would say not, unless we were to illegalize drugs (for example) because those who partake are likely to be violent? Should we prosecute cannabis users because they create demand for drug cartel products which finance murder? Apple users because they create demand for the appalling treatment of Chinese workers?

Most researchers on the philosophy of law in this area (e.g Suzanne Ost) while obviously opposed to actual child pornography find no philosophical basis in the harm principle to illegalize fictional representations. As such, it's not reasonable at all. You need to justify why you think it's "likely" and just what that standard means. If it cannot be justified, then we may say that any likelihood is sufficient to illegalize any material, but I doubt that's a conclusion you'd want to follow to its extreme.

Finally there's the issue of penalties - isn't punishing someone for something they might do (access real CP) unjust? This seems shockingly close to the notion of pre-crime. To avoid that, you'd want to look more at punishing the creators of the material rather than those who have consumed it and harmed nobody (other than themselves perhaps).

If there is no cultural understanding of the real people themselves, how they read the text and how they interpret it, any law is based merely on speculation and I must stand firmly against such speculative laws.

I have been asking this question myself. To a technologically nerdy person like myself it makes absolutely no sense. There is no reason whatsoever to physically transfer any dangerous or delicate information across a border. Anyone actually with the possession of such information would obviously never bring any of it near the border control.

However, I think the answer is that I'm way too optimistic. There must be lots of people who voluntarily do carry incriminating information with them across borders because they either don't care or they're just stupid. Others have mentioned emails or text about a job when you're not travelling with a work visa.

If this is true then I think border control is also just being merely pragmatic.

With a bit of questioning and informal profiling they can spot people whose story doesn't ring true: next they just need a way to figure out what's false with that one particular person. A success rate of 38% for electronics searches was quoted: that is very high and certainly makes mobile/laptop search to the top of the list of what to look at when you bring the traveller in and start investigating. I think they'd do it even for a 10% success rate: checking a few emails and messages is fast and apparently a low-hanging fruit.

That's pretty much what I would do if my job was to figure out what's wrong with a person's story.

It's akin to starting debugging by enabling asserts and running the binary in a debugger to catch any obvious issues live with a stacktrace, or something similar. Won't help with most of the trickier bugs but sometimes it points right at the culprit and it's a cheap test to run.

They wouldn't find the folder containing your blueprints for that bomb but they'll see you'll be meeting some people next week in a place that is very, very far from where you said you'd be vacationing.

You're not going to be tortured to death, but there are quite a few things that the government can do to make your life miserable.

The problem here is knowing where all the files are. Are you sure you could list all the places eg ms word stores cached copies of your document? And that you’d be able to overwrite the data from copies that have since been unlinked from the filesystem?