Backpacker stripped of tech gear at Auckland Airport

Not quite so relevant to NZ but since I&#x27;m guessing many HNers are wondering what happens at the US border:<p><a href="https://www.eff.org/wp/defending-privacy-us-border-guide-travelers-carrying-digital-devices" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;wp&#x2F;defending-privacy-us-border-guide-tra...</a><p>I worry about this, since I travel frequently. Then again, I also worry about plane crashes. I think both are probably irrational, but having plans is what keeps the boogeyman away at night, so here&#x27;s mine:<p>1) Remain polite and professional.<p>2) Decline to consent to any search. Comply with officers&#x27; demands that they tell me I&#x27;m legally required to comply with. Ask for that demand to be produced in writing. I&#x27;m willing to wait for a supervisor while they figure out how to do that, even if it means I miss my flight. I will get a receipt and&#x2F;or report number and&#x2F;or some other official written record of the incident if any seizure, including seizure of information, takes place.<p>3) Immediately after reaching my destination, file written grievances with any and all responsible agencies. They must have a spreadsheet tracking passenger complaints somewhere. Let&#x27;s increment that while having someone commit, on paper, to a version of events of what happened and a legal rationale to why that was justified. This will only cost me a bit of time and money, and I have lots of time and money, but it has heavily asymmetric payoff in the event of a lawsuit or PR battle.<p>But honestly? Mathematically, I&#x27;m much, much more at risk of getting mugged in Chicago on my way home from the airport than getting held up by Customs. I don&#x27;t exactly live in fear of muggings but I take sensible precautions like e.g. backing up my data, making sure that I can turn a factory-new laptop into a working dev environment within a day, and carrying insurance. I&#x27;m pretty sure most of these still work even if I happen to lose a laptop to Customs rather than to a mugger.

In the first week of January I&#x27;m leaving a Software Engineering gig for a US defense contractor to move to New Zealand. Due to the expense of shipping, my wife and I are only bringing what we can carry, and we&#x27;ve taken special care to fit as much of our lives as possible into our electronic devices. Search&#x2F;seizure of these devices would be horrible and violating on so many levels.<p>This news is absolutely <i>terrifying</i> to me.<p>Edit: I wrote this as a quick knee-jerk without much thought, and now that I read it again I see the sad irony. This is being done to <i>prevent</i> terror? Someone needs to do a risk&#x2F;reward analysis here...<p>Edit 2: I appreciate everyone offering up solutions here, but really the only solution would be either to not go, or to not carry any devices at all. Encryption can&#x27;t prevent me from being detained and my property from being confiscated. Given that the issue here is a violation of personal space rather than one of having something to hide, encryption will only increase the impact which such an event would have on my wife and me. If such an event were to occur and I was using strong encryption to protect my data, I&#x27;d be asked for any encryption keys, detained for much longer, and if I refused to cooperate in any way I&#x27;d have my things permanently confiscated and face refusal of entry.<p>If I find myself in this situation, I&#x27;ll be looking to minimize impact. I&#x27;ll cooperate while trying as best as I can not to compromise my values, and then raise hell after the fact.

Kiwistan strikes again. He should be grateful they didn&#x27;t send a team of armed police to raid his house.<p>&#x2F;edit:<p>Historically, white New Zealanders thought of New Zealand as &quot;Better Britain&quot;. This basically meant doing anything [1] and everything [2] to please the &quot;Mother Country&quot;. Now that the USA is the dominant superpower, this means things like raiding Kim Dotcom&#x27;s mansion or providing land for a spy base. [3]<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli_Campaign" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gallipoli_Campaign</a> [2] <a href="http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/the-new-zealanders/page-8" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.teara.govt.nz&#x2F;en&#x2F;the-new-zealanders&#x2F;page-8</a> [3] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waihopai_Station" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Waihopai_Station</a>

When an organized group of people uses force to take your belongings, leveraging tactics of fear for political ends, isn&#x27;t that firmly within the definition of terrorism?<p>I don&#x27;t know the facts here so I&#x27;m not implying anything in this specific case, but I like to remember that the terminology we use drastically shapes our thinking.

I&#x27;m not so convinced on the conspiracy theories here. I say that as I had a similar experience in Auckland airport a couple of years ago, when travelling to another destination in the country.<p>The guy who interviewed me was actually very polite and friendly. They said I&#x27;d probably been flagged up as suspicious due to my itinerary. I&#x27;d travelled from China, for a 2 day visit to see a customer, with tickets booked via a US agent (Expedia). Suspect that living in China at the time had quite a bit to do with it.<p>Got asked all kinds of questions, most of which I didn&#x27;t know the answer to. Didn&#x27;t get my laptop searched or asked for any passwords, but they did make a point of asking if I had any porn on my computer. I said no, and they asked no more. They way they asked though did make it sound like it was a bit of an issue to them.<p>Took almost 2 hours in total. I actually didn&#x27;t find it particularly stressful, mostly as I still made my next flight. I&#x27;d had far worse times travelling to the US, and getting some vindictive border agency guard who&#x27;s out to get you by any means possible. Really, I loathe US immigration.

Apparently the New Zealand government is a bitch of the NSA.

This is why professionals operate on &quot;Naked In&#x2F;Naked Out&quot;. Show up with nothing, acquire all your tooling in the country, execute your operational activities, dispose of the tooling, leave the country with nothing.<p>Expensive, but safe.<p>These sorts of harassment measures are only capable of catching amateurs making serious operational mistakes. They will not catch professionals or serious operatives. I can never understand how this passes for counter-terrorism when it is really just &quot;counter-clumsy-terrorists&quot;, at best.

I had an interaction like this in Canada. The options they give you are to give up your passwords, log in to your online banks to show them transactions, etc., or have everything confiscated.<p>The reason they did it to me is because they thought I was a drug smuggler. They got that idea because I was going to China and didn&#x27;t have a fixed itinerary, which they found to be incredibly suspicious.<p>I&#x27;m not sure if the non-techie cop was playing good cop&#x2F;bad cop or not, but he was yelling at me and accusing me of being a liar from the beginning. Because I knew I hadn&#x27;t done anything wrong and wasn&#x27;t lying, it was pretty comical, but it became really upsetting once they started threatening to seize everything if I didn&#x27;t give up my passwords.

&quot;The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?&quot;

Time to switch login prompt to &quot;Logging in with username and password&quot; and have a dummy account that can delete files upon login. Provide the fairly clueless customs official with the loaded login credentials and damage done before they realise.<p>Not that I have anything to hide... that being said they will probably just back door into my laptop next time I&#x27;m on and deactivate any form of tripwire.<p>Curse you NSA, always streets ahead!<p>(Note: If I wasn&#x27;t on their radar, I am now... &#x2F;sigh, it was a joke)

I remember fellow HN&#x27;er Steve Kablink saying on twitter that the only reason he hadn&#x27;t done a FOIA request on himself is because... they probably have a list of people who have done a FOIA request on themselves (but that he&#x27;d be doing one soon out of principle).<p>This kind of heavy handed, precedent setting, dissent-disincentivizing move is just sad to see happen (and perhaps sadder that I feel completely at its mercy and feel it affecting my actions concretely)

So its still news to people that customs agents are all powerful.. :) turns out that if you think police was bad, custom is 1000 worse. They can do literally anything and that&#x27;s not just the USA. It&#x27;s the same everywhere in Europe for example.<p>Also, I would strongly advise giving out your password if you want to be on your way. Refusal to give access is generally a huge issue.

As an NZ citizen who is outraged at this pathetic kowtowing to US interests, anyone have any good ideas about who or what I can direct pissed off emails to? it would be nice to at least feel i&#x27;ve tried to do something

Whenever I read these I always think there is more to the story -- usually I find out later that the &quot;victim&quot; was being a jerk (not that they should hassle jerks -- but that is human nature).

Lets all just remember that he is at this stage the first for this to happen to. I&#x27;m a kiwi and on a New Zealand watch list for other reasons and this has never happened to me. No need to get scared, thousands upon thousands of people fly through nz airports all the time and this never happens. I follow this sort of thing and its the first I&#x27;ve heard.

I have bank code on my (encrypted) laptop (and the code itself is in an encrypted container), I&#x27;d like to see them demand I give up the passwords, then have the US involved in a big corporate espionage lawsuit vs one of the world&#x27;s largest banks.<p>Actually nvm, I don&#x27;t, I wiped my hard drive before bringing it in for repairs.

As Bruce Schneier suggests, when crossing a border, encrypt your drives and change your password to something so long and convoluted you cannot possibly remember it.<p>Give you password to a trusted friend (preferably your lawyer) with instructions not to give you the password until you get home or to your destination.

If you&#x27;re visiting a country you&#x27;re not a citizen of, bring your data in over the Internet. (Yes, there&#x27;s the NSA thing, but it&#x27;s still unclear what they can break. My guess is that they have not broken the crypto itself, only some buggy implementations.) If you&#x27;re a citizen of the country, encrypt your data and let the courts figure out whether or not they can compel you to provide the key. (Or, they can publicly declare that they&#x27;ve broken AES, and get your data anyway. Either way, it&#x27;s a win.)<p>Also strongly agree with patio11 on getting everything in writing. This is now a criminal investigation. Make sure you have what you need to defend yourself in court.

Are things getting worse every day?

Terrorism: Terrorism is the systematic use of violence (terror) as a means of coercion for political purposes.<p>If you define violence as intimidating (of), physical and mental torture then all governments top the list.

Sad. After a long flight one has to go through this. I have gone through my share. I forgot to declare an apple given by Singapore airline. I kept apple in my bag in rush while getting out of aircraft, and was so sleepy to realise I need to declare it. I was held there for sometime. I was fined USD 200. The most expensive fruit of my life. I didn&#x27;t even get to keep it with me.<p>Some of people on airport were like robots, they didn&#x27;t have any reaction (on their faces) for my plea.

<i>However, a Customs official has since told him they were searching everything for objectionable material under the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993.</i><p>Yeah right.

I don&#x27;t really travel internationally, but I decided -- about ten years ago, when people first started talking about the way laptops are searched at borders -- that if I do feel the urge to travel internationally with my laptop, I&#x27;ll dd if=&#x2F;dev&#x2F;zero of=&#x2F;dev&#x2F;sda on all my gadgets before I cross any national border.<p>Of course you want to have VNC &#x2F; ssh set up ahead of time so you can actually do stuff...

I&#x27;ve tweeted and blogged against the surveillance state many times, so I guess I must also be on whatever list this guy is on.

Lots to consider as well - travel to the US can be rather dicey for foreign travelers, so here is what you _can_ do to become better prepared for travel here - <a href="http://www.cba.org/CBa/PracticeLink/tayp/laptopborder.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cba.org&#x2F;CBa&#x2F;PracticeLink&#x2F;tayp&#x2F;laptopborder.aspx</a>

Dear HN -- In the US, please start making a distinction between CPB and DHS. One governs entry into the county the other is responsible for security when boarding a plane.<p>CPB -- <a href="http://www.cbp.gov" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbp.gov</a> DHS -- <a href="http://www.dhs.gov" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dhs.gov</a>

Because children.<p>Because terror.<p>Because politics.<p>I&#x27;m glad I&#x27;ve already been to NZ.

My question - does the local border patrol have the ability to break bitlock encryption on a laptop I bring there? I mean, who from HN travels w&#x2F;o something like this done on your computer in the first place?!

Never declare anything, ever. And if they pull you out for a search anyway, play ignorant.

I routinely carry microSD cards filled with 16GB of random numbers.

A tight slap to our rights and privacy.

surely this...?

this is sad

Yeah maybe it is his last name.