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

cbc.ca

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

#411

Post by chupasaurus »

stale2002 wrote: post #227
ineedasername wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but you still get beat with the $5 wrench. And if it was going to work in compelling you to give the password, it will still be pretty effective getting you to provide access to the cloud storage and the encryption password to it.

How does the low paid border security drone even know you have a cloud storage account? What country do you live in that has to worry about people being tortured to death on a frequent basis? This stuff just doesn't happen often, despite what a silly XKCD comic would lead you to believe. Encryption actually works pretty damn well, for basically all usecases that a normal person would come across. The world is not a J…

> The world is not a James Bond spy move.

Yeah, there is no James Bond outside the books and screen. But thermorectal cryptanalysis is out there and still beats most of cyphers with ease. And it's not letal!

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

#412

Post by system2 »

digianarchist wrote: post #386
arnonejoe wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why? I am literally working like that all day long and it is super easy to achieve. Maybe takes 15 minutes to setup everything.

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

#413

Post by ahaferburg »

digianarchist wrote: post #386
arnonejoe wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As opposed to having your laptop seized for multiple weeks?

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

#414

Post by andai »

baroffoos wrote: post #390
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.

Did you put a new Android on it, or just a bloat-free ROM? My devices became noticably slower with (official) major Android version upgrades.

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

#415

Post by andai »

bitcoinmoney wrote: post #372
numakerg wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would this system come with plausible deniability? Also, does anything like this exist for desktop operating systems?

Yeah. You can install GRUB snd default load it to windows 10 fresh install. Put some dummy files in the desktop, make it cluttered with oictures of cats and articles about meditation. This might sound like a great idea maybe i should try it!!

People say they scrape the filesystem (rather than copying everything), maybe they'd detect *nix systems too.

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

#416

Post by andai »

Havoc wrote: post #298
KingMachiavelli wrote: post #181

I've always preferred having a dedicated desktop that acts as a personal server and then a small cheap laptop that I use to remotely access it. While this preference is mostly driven by capitalizing on the performance/price/size difference between desktops and laptops, it has lots of advantages when it comes to these situations. My Dell XPS 13 only has 128GB of storage so none of the data exists solely on that device…

>traveling to countries with weak or no privacy laws. Like Canada?

I'm genuinely curious which countries are not in that list.

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

#417

Post by brigandish »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #363
brigandish wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of percentage are you talking about? "Fairly often" covers a, erm, multitude of sins.

I've gone back and reread my initial comment. It has plenty of qualifiers. I think it is adequately clear and stands on its own just fine, without further clarification. I have no idea why you are nit picking this. I'm not going to discuss it further with you.

It was a sincere question. You say you've read up on this. I haven't, though I have lived in Thailand and travelled around the region, and from my personal experience (not as a consumer, but I don't need to be a smoker to have some idea (anecdotally) of the level of smoking around me) the vast majority of foreign men that were consumers were not involved in anything to do with children or any such thing.

Hence, I was interested in actual data. That's all. Enjoy the rest of your day.

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

#418

Post by DoreenMichele »

brigandish wrote: post #417
DoreenMichele wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gone back and reread my initial comment. It has plenty of qualifiers. I think it is adequately clear and stands on its own just fine, without further clarification. I have no idea why you are nit picking this. I'm not going to discuss it further with you.

It was a sincere question. You say you've read up on this. I haven't, though I have lived in Thailand and travelled around the region, and from my personal experience (not as a consumer, but I don't need to be a smoker to have some idea (anecdotally) of the level of smoking around me) the vast majority of foreign men that were consumers were not involved in anything to do with children or any such thing. Hence, I was…

You may think I mean straight up pedopholia involving elementary school aged children. That can happen certainly.

But a 17 year old is legally still a child in many jurisdictions. A lot of men in their twenties see nothing wrong with getting involved with a 17 year old.

If you are talking a dating situation, my views on that get a lot more complicated. If you are talking prostitution, a 17 year old sex worker is highly unlikely to be there by choice.

At that point, it is, in fact, child rape, even if you aren't comfortable with the terminology and wish nicer language were used to describe it.

I don't feel compelled to try make it sound nicer given how damaging it can be to the child in question.

Statutory rape doesn't have to be violent. The minor may even have nominally agreed. But the law says they can't actually meaningfully consent as a minor.

If they are a minor and a sex worker, they are likely being trafficked. That's where this gets really nasty. The guy paying for the service may be blissfully oblivious to just how much she is being pressured, has no real choice, etc.

I covered that in my original comment. That's a large part of why this is an ugly thing.

You (the general "you", not you in specific) hand wave away that she's 17 instead of 18 because it's only a few months and he may not have actually known her age etc.

It's a slippery slope that basically says if you can fudge on enough "little" details, it's totes fine to rape children. Traveling to a foreign country for your cheap sex is a very handy way to gloss over those details and pretend it was all above board and nice when it probably wasn't.

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

#419

Post by executesorder66 »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #278
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.…

This might partially answer your question... I had my laptop searched at the border once. It was my work laptop. They told me the same thing, if I didn't share the password they would confiscate my computer. It felt wrong that they should be able to search my computer, but I also felt bullied because I was going to need my computer the next day if I wanted to work and I think most people, including my boss at the tim…

So basically, if I ever travel to the US or Canada, I should wipe my device first and then have about 20000 copies of gotse.jpg (but each with a unique name) on the device to force the agent to look at each picture.

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

#420

Post by stale2002 »

Mirioron wrote: post #407
stale2002 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> . Say 5 hour detention then they ask again. Then detention again. Repeat. Ok, and does this happen in real life? The answer is no. It does not. In almost any western country in the world, the low paid border security guards are not detaining people in mass for days on end. This stuff just isn't really happening to any large degree.

You can go to jail for years in the UK for refusing to disclose a password to law enforcement.[0] [0] https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/09/04/how-refusing-to-...

And how often does that happen, in real life?

The answer is "not that often".

The example you gave was of someone who was suspected of murder.

The amount of people who are in the population of "people suspected of murder, and are jailed for not giving up their password", is a very small population size.

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