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New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine

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Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine

#471
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me ask you this hypothetical question instead: What if we have a "brain encryption" technology that allows encrypting your brain so that brain scanners, thought detecting methods or emotion detectors cannot see through it? Would customs be allowed to ask for the decryption key? Or should the customs just ignore whatever is encrypted inside?

Of course they should be allowed to do so. That would eradicate drug trafficking and cross-border terrorism. I would say the benefit is too good, weighing against privacy.

> That would eradicate drug trafficking and cross-border terrorism.

No, it wouldn't. One key weakness of totalitarian systems (and that is what you are advocating for) is always that the massive power of the system attracts criminals and corruption into the system and has a major risk of the criminals ending up using the totalitarian power for themselves. If you think there is some sort of absolute solution to a social problem, you are ignoring that implementing the solution does itself build on society. If society isn't free of crime, your solution won't be free of crime either, and if society if free of crime, you don't need the solution. And if your solution isn't free of crime (so, you have corrupt police officers or judges or whatever), then you have thus given criminals the option to use a massively powerful weapon for themselves in some ways.

Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine

#472

I recently had to go to America for a wedding, due to these types of policies I always go through my phone and clean almost everything out of there. Photos, logout of Google, clean up downloads, etc. I don't have anything to hide, however having some random customs dude go into Google Photos which has over a decade of my life documented doesn't seem exactly ideal.

"I have nothing to hide" is just another way of saying "My friends and family are stupid for trusting me." Your devices don't just contain information that's sensitive to you.

Yeah I think you really misunderstood my post.

I was simply saying, I don't have photos of me doing lines of Cocaine off strippers. However I'm still concerned about the boarder patrol looking through my shit.

Holy fuck HN can sometimes go off on a tangent.

Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine

#473

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…

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Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until they get more efficient at it. This kind of thing can be highly automated with software that only has to within a tuned degree of certainty determine who else needs additional screening. You can tune this precisely on how many humans you have around at a given time and can facilitate the "Enhanced search" of the devices.

Has anyone taken a steganographic approach to this? Just have a bunch of pictures of cats (or something more believable, like porn) in a partition, then you overlay sensitive data (encrypted). So you don't have a mysterious partition that is easily found. Obviously you can't store a ton of data that way though. You could even take the same approach with the program itself, hide it inside something else. (I imagine it…

Right but there will be just be a law that specifies anyone trying to purposely circumvent the search will be accused of a felony. Of course the vast majority will agree because of "safety" and "if you have nothing to hide...".

Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine

#475
post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Canadian who has gone both ways dozens of times, I’ve definitely gotten a much tougher treatment by the Canadian side. I had to bite my tongue to not say “I’m a citizen, you have to let me in.”

this comment made me sad. i am a south asian national, i do have a canadian tourist visa and was hoping to go watch F1 in 2019 in Montreal. reading all of this is probably going to change that plan :/

I'm a Canadian permanent resident and the dozen or so times I've crossed the border into Canada I've never had a negative experience. I've always found the Canadian border agents to be polite and courteous. I cannot say the same for their US counterparts. Not doubting the negative experiences described above just that my personal random sample has been different.

Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine

#476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until they get more efficient at it. This kind of thing can be highly automated with software that only has to within a tuned degree of certainty determine who else needs additional screening. You can tune this precisely on how many humans you have around at a given time and can facilitate the "Enhanced search" of the devices.

The next step here is to ask Google to have an API that, when plugged in and password is entered - just downloads and "verifies" your data for compliance. Bit by bit all the freedoms will be eroded.

The step after is an "express pass" that has you download software that constantly monitors your usage and uploads it to TSA and related. Helpful widgets and dashboards will be available to see at what level of compliance you're at and used like a credit rating for participating in society.

Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine

#477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OMG. Just use two SSD's and turn off second in the BIOS. Or use same technique as Chinese fakers are using to create fake flash cards or SSD's: just reduce size of drive directly in the controller.

... if your laptop has space for two SSDs

Hidden partition flag, then. Or just dual boot with a secondary system as default; either a live os image (linux) or installed on a vhd (windows).

Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine

#478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you use this strategy, you may want to make sure that you securely erase your data. Secure erasure is rather difficult on SSD, unlike on HDD where one simply overwrites the bytes.

Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine

#479
post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple search on Google will yield plenty of results, if you are not willing to do that or even explain which solution you tried yourself and what failed, I'm not going to waste my time recommending an alternative solution to your problem either. In fact I just provided you with another solution which you didn't bother acknowledging.

I have done plenty of research and I couldn't find a solution to backup and restore an Android phone quickly without losing all kinds of data and settings. I have used the built in backup to Google and noticed that restore takes many hours and a lot of apps lost data and settings. It took considerable effort to get back to normal. Definitely too much work to spend on my first day of vacation. A burner phone may work…

`adb backup`. All you have to do is turn on developer mode to enable adb, root is entirely unrequired. You might need to log into accounts again, I'm not sure. Do note that this can take a while, depending on whether you back up your sdcard and how much storage is in use. You can choose to backup individual apps, or everything, to use encryption, etc.

If you install TWRP recovery (root is only required for the installation, not the maintenance), you can do a full-phone backup.

Re: New Zealand travellers refusing digital search now face $5k Customs fine

#480
post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, the motive there was probably he found her hot, would hit that, was aggravated at reading her Tinder messages and finding her even more hot because of it and was pissed off that there was no way in hell he would ever get a shot at being with her, so he felt some need to piss all over her, blame her for making him hot and bothered with no immediate means to get relief, yadda. This is an essential element of sit…

That’s sexual harassment. But then who’s gonna police the police?

The courts?

The problem is that she likely has no evidence of this happening.

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