That is unless you believe that those prying authorities have the will and the way to leave an undetectable backdoor in your laptop. Breaking the chain of custody in any laptop today is akin to destruction of trust in that device. Who is responsible then for paying for this damage?

For most of the rest of us, we really have no data of any interest to the authorities. That doesn't mean we shouldn't care about data security, if that's important to us. But it's not the real problem with border confiscation.

The real problem is not having your hardware or software tools at your destination.

So don't bring any hardware or data that you can't afford to lose. Certainly don't bring anything that you're emotionally attached to, particularly inbound.

Either don't bring anything, and buy it all at the destination, or just bring the cheapest stuff you can use productively, and be prepared to replace it at the destination.

The NSA already has my email. But I'd hate to be without a camera, or phone, or laptop, or data, or whatever other tools I was going to use at the destination. Plan for that, it's the more likely and practical threat.

If anyone builds this app, I'd like a slice of the pie, please :-)

Happily enough, statistical sampling techniques can make that possible [1].

[1] S. Garfinkel. Searching A Terabyte of Data in 10 minutes. http://simson.net/ref/2013/2013-01-07%20Forensics%20Innovati...

It gets broken, searched, x-rayed, fucked up and generally treated like shit.

At Zurich airport, they managed to break my old IBM T42. Had to get my company at the time to courier a new one overnight from the UK by road which cost £1150 just for the courier.

How exactly do they tell the difference, what if I use steganography to hide stuff in my family pictures? They won't flush anything, they will keep everything in case it's relevant.

> During that time authorities searched about 1,000 laptops carried by travellers.

We don't live in the police state that most Snowden and Kim Dotcom supporters here tell us that we do.

I get really tired of seeing anecdotes used to represent the average.

Here was my ad-hoc procedure from traveling internationally a few months ago (tourism), with a prior of not really expecting to be hassled on the way there, but unknown for the way back:

1. Choose the laptop I'm least likely to miss in the case it gets stolen by JBTs, with respect to the functionality I require.

2. Wipe(1) the first 10MB of disk (has only ever been LUKS), then one /dev/urandom pass into the entire thing. (In retrospect, zeros may have been better than random)

3. Reinstall Debian, with a passphrase I don't mind giving up. Sync over only files that I don't mind giving up.

4. Go through Japanese customs - the only question asked was "Are you with him?" (friend in front of me).

5a. At this point, I possess a still uncompromised machine at the destination, with stored ssh host keys, etc. When (last-minute) prepping, this possibility didn't quite occur to me. Not being prepared to take full advantage of this was regrettable.

5b. (If machine had been molested, I would have not logged into my privileged accounts at all. For the most part I didn't have to anyway, but since I wasn't fully prepared it came in handy once or twice)

6. For return, wipe first 10MB of disk again, then one /dev/zero pass to the entire thing (so there was no argument that I had encrypted data). Then mkdosfs on a whole-disk partition for derp-nothingness. (This was done with a Debian install image written to an old flash drive I had with me for the purpose. My only concern at this point is the hardware getting stolen.

7. Take hard drive out of laptop so that it is a separate device. This would most likely increase suspicion, but make them even less justified in stealing the whole machine (not that this would stop them).

8. Get waved through coming back through USG because laptop "searches" aren't actually that common for people not on the primary watchlist (everyone is on the secondary watchlist). Still, I will do the same thing next time, and think it irresponsible to not.

There are of course improvements that could be made to this, including a small default-booting "nothing to see here" install, with file times etc automatically adjusted. Automatic copying of machine credentials etc when you're at your destination. Using a separate partition instead of the flash drive. And of course automation of the process so it's easy for everyone to do :)

As for my phone, if I were in a position to be worried about customs installing backdoors, I'd prepare a recovery zip beforehand with all my data, then download it from my own server or a secure storage, and flash it after passing customs. Or better yet, travel with a SIM and buy a cheap Moto G, the resale value alone once back at home would make up its US price.

Full on encryption, tmp lock and filesystem hashing via tripwire then is mandatory. Fun thing is that you can screw up the malware to send all kinds nasty shit back to them, like trojans and viruses, PIF files and EXE files and whatever might tickle your fancy. Then get your malware do maximum damage on their network.

After all they hacked your laptop, they engaged in illegal activity and it is only fare for you to punish them to the fullest extent of your technical capability.

They cannot acknowledge the fact that they hacked your laptop without a warrant.

etc.etc.

There's tons of fun to have this way. Since people who are doing these things are expecting you to be retarded luser and so you can set a trap and have them fall straight into that.

Make a blog post and example of malware and how to entrap the said trespassers, what does malware do etc.

my 2c.

No clear players in this market for consumers though. Where is the consumer remote desktop via browser+SSL that doesn't rely on a US hosted cloud service?

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006BFCOIE

But really, it's safer to not physically carry data across the border, but to access it over VPN or another secure tunnel while abroad.

Who pays for damages?

If harddrive is separated from laptop, does it get seized as well?

What if I have 100GB of random data on hdd?

Is there obligation to provide technical support to officers? Not everyone knows howto boot FreeBSD without bootloader.

Do I get written certificate of what was seized? There could be some bitcoins on hdd...

2. Wipe your PC.

Optional 2.5. Download a bunch of fake personal files.

3. Pass the border.

4. Access Internet.

5. Download your datas.