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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

#381

Post by rlue »

fooqux wrote: post #295
Buttons840 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like, leave a private key at home and encrypt your drive with the public key before crossing the border? Yeah, at that point you are powerless to do anything until you are at home.

But what's the difference? The end result is the same: your device(s) are confiscated and they attempt to brute force the password. Telling an officer that you cannot give them the password because you did some techno-mumbo-jumbo is just going to piss them off and make them assume you have "something to hide" because "no honest person would go to those lengths".

Yes. This thread is full of people proposing inventive technical solutions to genuinely prohibit your own access to the device while you're going through customs, as if border patrol a) knows the difference and b) gives a damn. These are all functionally equivalent to "Um, I forgot my password." (Or, if you wish for a more plausible but equally ineffective excuse, "This is actually my mother's laptop; I'm bringing it to her and I don't know the password.")

If an LEO (claims to) need access to something and you give him a dead end, it's his job to assume you're lying and find the next legal option available to him.

The real question you should be asking yourselves isn't "How would you outsmart the caveman cop in this situation?" Rather, it's "What can/will you do, as a citizen, to resist the erosion of our civil liberties?" Sadly, I have no easy answers here.

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

#382

Post by isodude »

vbezhenar wrote: post #180
dontbenebby wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a grad student I worried about this, since I was required to keep study participant data and student data confidential. Sounds like this lawyer arrived at the same plan I did: Refuse the request, file a lawsuit, and contact the media when released to shame the government that saw fit to violate my rights.

Encrypt the data (probably easiest way is to use encrypted 7z archive), memorize the password, upload the encrypted data into any cloud storage (e.g. Google Drive) and don't care about disclosing anything on your devices.

Why not reemove the drive and replace it with something basic with a plain os installed? It's quite simple even with MacBooks.

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

#383

Post by sandworm101 »

bdowling wrote: post #342
eecc wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still a dragnet. They're not SWATing a semiautomatic rifle up your nose - nobody's claiming they're not polite - but the fact remains.

Police generally have access to full-automatic machine guns. They’re not limited to the semi-automatic models sometimes available to civilians (e.g. in the US).

US cops. Canadian cops dont carry full auto often, and when they do it is never used. It goes against rcmp training. I cannot think of any canadian examples of cops using full auto.

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

#384

Post by arnonejoe »

gruez wrote: post #9

>Wright refused, telling the officer both devices contained confidential information protected by solicitor-client privilege. >He said the officer then confiscated his phone and laptop, and told him the items would be sent to a government lab which would try to crack his passwords and search his files. Can this be used to get whatever case(es) he was defending thrown out because solicitor-client privilege was violate…

Maybe set up a VM on AWS and bring a new laptop over the border. Or leave your laptop at home and VM into it. Or ship your laptop to where ever you're staying and bring a burner phone over the border. Doesn't seem like a difficult problem to solve.

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

#385

Post by zzo38computer »

TheDong wrote: post #325
morganvachon wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Craigsli…

> most secure way ... encrypt the laptop and phone and ship to your destination via standard shipping services Absolutely not. Any time your hardware is physically out of your control is a time when someone could install a hardware keylogger or replace your ethernet card with one that exfiltrates data or whatever. The most secure option is to travel with an encrypted hdd/phone on you with no way to decrypt them, and…

Carry a computer with encrypted data but don't use it; remove the hard drive to copy the data to another computer in order to decrypt the data with the separate key. Discard the old hard drive and old computer afterward.

Do not use a single key; require several keys that are with different people, combined only in the way that you know how. Ensure the people are present to notice if the police try to come in.

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

#386

Post by digianarchist »

arnonejoe wrote: post #384
gruez wrote: post #9

>Wright refused, telling the officer both devices contained confidential information protected by solicitor-client privilege. >He said the officer then confiscated his phone and laptop, and told him the items would be sent to a government lab which would try to crack his passwords and search his files. Can this be used to get whatever case(es) he was defending thrown out because solicitor-client privilege was violate…

Maybe set up a VM on AWS and bring a new laptop over the border. Or leave your laptop at home and VM into it. Or ship your laptop to where ever you're staying and bring a burner phone over the border. Doesn't seem like a difficult problem to solve.

Everything you just said is a massive inconvenience.

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

#387

Post by docker_up »

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.…

Because things like SMS history and call history are far more valuable. They can download your entire SMS, call and contacts list, get the text from that, and then create a social graph based on who you know and who you are in contact with. Then it becomes very easy to trace people and who they are affiliated with. Plus going through SMS history is a great way to find reasons to throw someone in jail. My friend coming from Canada to the US was denied entry for 10 years even though she lived in the US most of her life because of jokes she had in her texts about marrying her ex-boyfriend for a green card. It's very real and it happens.

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

#388

Post by abeyer »

rlue wrote: post #381
fooqux wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what's the difference? The end result is the same: your device(s) are confiscated and they attempt to brute force the password. Telling an officer that you cannot give them the password because you did some techno-mumbo-jumbo is just going to piss them off and make them assume you have "something to hide" because "no honest person would go to those lengths".

Yes. This thread is full of people proposing inventive technical solutions to genuinely prohibit your own access to the device while you're going through customs, as if border patrol a) knows the difference and b) gives a damn. These are all functionally equivalent to "Um, I forgot my password." (Or, if you wish for a more plausible but equally ineffective excuse, "This is actually my mother's laptop; I'm bringing it…

> it's his job to assume you're lying and find the next legal option available to him.

Not sure where you live, but in the US it's actually his first and foremost responsibility to uphold a constitution that says that people are free from unreasonable searches and seizures.

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

#389

Post by Johnny555 »

isodude wrote: post #382
vbezhenar wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Encrypt the data (probably easiest way is to use encrypted 7z archive), memorize the password, upload the encrypted data into any cloud storage (e.g. Google Drive) and don't care about disclosing anything on your devices.

Why not reemove the drive and replace it with something basic with a plain os installed? It's quite simple even with MacBooks.

Recent Macbook Pro's (I think all of the touchbar models) have the SSD soldered to the motherboard, so it's not simple to remove the hard drive.

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

#390

Post by baroffoos »

Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #333

It's stuff like this that makes me want to build after-market privacy-oriented Samsung firmware, that at a low level (secondary bootloader) supports dual booting. By default you'd boot into the "non-private" environment. That way if customs asks to see your device, you simply boot it up and hand it over. Could make life a lot easier for lawyers, doctors, C-level executives etc. I should note, dual-booting Android pho…

Thanks for your work on Heimdall btw. It the only reason my samsung s5 is still running fine years after it came out.
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