This happened to me driving from the US into Canada with my significant other on a short vacation. After some routine questioning, the agent asked for our phones and passwords. Naturally, I hesitated and wanted to know why he needed to go through our phones. He didn't give a reason, but said if I refuse they'd hold us until their forensics team cracks the phone password anyway. I wanted to make a bigger deal about it…
If you watch the show "Border Security: Canada's Front Line" you will see how often this is the norm. It's on Netflix as well. I really think these are dangerous times and for some reason I only ever expected this from the US but never from Canada or New Zealand.
New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine
441–450 of 647 posts
Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
that mode should be almost always on - the CBP in US can do all that fun stuff to you at any time as long as you're closer than 100 miles to any US border - including ocean. So, for example, CBP can do anything they want to anybody in San Francisco. Granted, for now they do that mostly to "brown" people - well they need to start somewhere to get us into that shiny totalitarian future and of course the start is always…
Perhaps that mode could be called full disk encryption? All humans inside the US border have the fifth amendment right to remain silent, so handing over encryption passwords to the CBP is a choice. Unfortunately, the 5th amendment doesn't apply in New Zealand - if you remain silent at a NZ airport while customs ask for your password, they will impose a $5000 fine on you. The only viable solution I see is to only trav…
iOS 12 was a painful upgrade for me but the 4th erasure of the phone seems to have worked.
What this means is that I am now confident that I don’t lose anything when I erase.
So if you have good backups, just erase before the border and walk though with a fresh phone, possibly with some dummy data in there.
Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
very clever and it would almost certainly work. But what do you do for your phone?
Backup your phone to the cloud, factory reset. Restore when you get to the destination. A bit of a hassle, and after you restore to factory reset you will need to add the basic contacts, info if you need for travelling. And any messages/updates on the phone in the meantime will be lost when you restore from backup. Will need to download the backup so most likely need a good wifi connection. Or you could save it to yo…
> A bit of a hassle
Something went wrong with iOS12 for me, and so I reinstalled several times. It isn’t that bad. The only niggles for me were re entering a couple of wifi networks and making the damn thing silent and blank again (why are keyboard clicks on by default?).
Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say "don't go to Canada", but I'm not sure how common this is across the world. Does anyone have a sense of how common this draconian approach is? I have a US passport and have been to about 25 countries on six continents and have never experienced this, but borders see such mind bogglingly high numbers pass through that I wouldn't say I have a robust set of data points.
Your home country is pretty good at this stuff too. Had this happen to me in 2016 on a business trip, but I just had my work phone and laptop with me and didn't care too much. What was annoying were the comments I got when stating I'm a software dev and visiting for work (along the lines of "we have our own capable people so we don't need you taking our jobs"). I was at that time working for a US company's branch in…
> Your home country is pretty good at this stuff too.
Oh yea, I have no illusions about this, and I met more than a few people during my travels who deprioritize going to the US for tourism because of this, in the same way I'm discussing Canada here.
I didn't imagine that Canada was the _only_ country that did stuff like this, since I assumed we (and a couple other famous outliers like Israel) had similar stories. I was just wondering how common it was overall.
Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine
#445Earlier 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?
Your thought experiment raises a good point, but I think your conclusions are still wrong.
The boundary between what should be allowed and what should not be allowed has nothing whatsoever to do with the state of technology.
Freedom is not possible without privacy. As soon as you are in danger of privacy violation, you change your behavior. This is also known as self-censoring. You can already see it here in the forum: people report that they have nothing to hide, but they still reset their phones and use fake accounts when crossing the border.
What is particularly insidious about border control is that there is no legal checks-and-balances system behind it. Police cannot search your home without a warrant issued by a judge. Border control can search everything without any warrant.
In the past, you could yourself 'balance' this by not taking very personal things (e.g., a diary) with you when traveling abroad. But with our digital lifes, this is not possible anymore. You cannot leave your photo album at home anymore.
What makes it so much worse is that criminals can so easily circumvent this issue. They anyway use throw-away phones. They don't need to carry notebooks with them, they can just buy a new one on arrival - if needed at all - and download encrypted files from the Cloud.
So we now have established that border control has an unprecedented and uncontrolled access to our privacy. Shouldn't they be forced to prove that this pays off for our society? Please show me the cases of successful prosecution after digital search of a phone. To me, there seem extremely few of them. So it seems a high price for a marginal benefit.
Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's impossible for any court forensic team, let alone an airport goon, to prove there is actually another partition inside the outer encrypted partition, unless you mount common volumes and cross-contaminate. An important caveat is to properly defragment the outer partition and fiddle with the offset and the size of the inner partition to avoid any conflicts, then avoid writing in the outer partition. Customs staf…
You are correct. I've simplified a bit: I boot from a 50GB decoy root partition that also has a 450GB decoy data partition along side it, both encrypted with the same weak password. This is a standard configuration and the machine works perfectly fine, you can write inside the decoy root as much as you want, as Linux would do when it boots. The data partition is largely empty and you haven't written large files there…
There is a risk of them looking at the raw data of the drive and asking what all the random data at the end of it is.
The beatings will continue until you decrypt it. Hopefully you can and it's not actually just random data...
Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
>And in doing so created a huge push by the New Zealand immigration peeps to incentivize other tech workers to come in How so? He never even revealed the citizenship - it was discovered by NZ based investigative journalists.
Vaguely recalling an article about how he created a push in new Zealand to bring in more techn workers, leveraging his wealth to pressure/incentivize the government, etc. Regardless, to your original point - a billionaire doing as he pleases does not affect my perception of a country.
>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 your perceptions in facts and logic, not feelings.
Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine
#448I have been thinking of going back to live in NZ to be a software engineer there, but now... uh, no . Such a shame, as it's a really nice country with very smart people. Granted, it's been very "totalitarian" when it comes to immigration for a long time. Not that I don't think they have the right to do this, but when I went to live there with my kiwi girlfriend, I had to give them actual copies of letters she and I s…
Granted, it's been very "totalitarian" when it comes to immigration for a long time.
> We have a huge housing shortage
> get a chest X-ray to prove that I'm not just taking advantage of their socialized medicine.
We have a problem with TB. We have issues with other disease coming in too and don’t seem to screen for them, which we should.
> If NZ wants to innovate on anything or to have more movies filmed there, they'll have to do it mostly by themselves, or pay ass-loads to import skilled workers.
We do pay assloads. For some reason we subsidise the films that come here while they exploit their workers and get exemption from NZ laws. Our homegrown hero Peter Jackson had a role in that.
Your level of skepticism about NZ clearly indicates you belong here. Come back!
Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
Find me a member of the TSA who can explain the significance of that sentence let alone catch it in practice then we can discus the viability of it. It seems to me this would fix the larger problem most the time.
as someone else mentioned, the only reason it works now is that very few people does this. if this starts getting popular, i guarentee that TSA is going to check for hidden partitions, patched kernels, suspiciously clean OS, etc.
i guarentee that TSA is going to check for hidden partitions, patched kernels, suspiciously clean OS, etc.
How would they hire enough manpower smart enough to do that?
Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say "don't go to Canada", but I'm not sure how common this is across the world. Does anyone have a sense of how common this draconian approach is? I have a US passport and have been to about 25 countries on six continents and have never experienced this, but borders see such mind bogglingly high numbers pass through that I wouldn't say I have a robust set of data points.
I would say "don't go to Canada", but I'm not sure how common this is across the world. The more you travel, the more common it is. The phone thing is somewhat new, ever since certain companies started selling devices to governments that let them crack, examine, and archive your phone. But being hassled at the border has always been a risk. Before it was terrorism, it was drugs, or just the change in culture. I've ha…
> being hassled at the border has always been a risk. Before it was terrorism, it was drugs, or just the change in culture.
Right, I'm aware of this, and borders in general suck. I've had a fair few bizarre experiences at borders, some of them funny (like the Lebanese border guard who insisted on speaking Spanish to me) and some quite shitty (lookin at you, Israel). But to me, the above story is quite the outlier in terms of sheer hostility, from a country that I didn't think of as being particularly draconian at the border.