Locking down laptops from the TSACustoms
- May 5th, 2008
- Read 931 times
- 77 Comments
Thanks to the wisdom of Homeland Security and customs, travellers may now be asked to allow screeners access to your laptops when you fly. While this is pretty shitty for obvious reasons, CNET is offering some advice on how to stop the lads from finding all your homemade tentacle anime.
1. Before going on any international trip, back up all of your important and potentially embarrassing, incriminating, or troubling data. This includes any copyrighted content which you may not be able to prove you own.
2. Create an encrypted disk image/encrypted folder of that data. This can be done with Pretty Good Privacy, Truecrypt, or software built into many operating systems.
3. Remember the password. This is very important, as if you forget it, you lose all your data.
4. Upload the encrypted data to a reliable place on the Internet (or two). Personally, I use Amazon S3, which charges 15 cents per GB-month of storage plus 17 cents per GB of data transfer.
5. Wipe your laptop clean (do this properly, or the data may be accessible after the fact with forensics software), and install a fresh copy of your OS onto it.
6. Travel. You should have no problem at U.S. Customs (or in any other country) as you won’t have anything problematic on your computer.
7. At your hotel/office, fire up your Web browser and download the encrypted data file from Amazon’s servers.
8. Decrypt the data.
I’ve actually gotten to the point where most of my in-progress work is sitting in the cloud somewhere, but if that’s not the case uploading and encryption could be the answer.
OS X users can also add a little security through obscurity by hiding their user names at login:
1. Open System Preferences -> Accounts
2. Create a dummy user to populate the screen. Put up a picture of a kitten as the desktop and some photos in iPhone.
3. Click on the lock and click on Login Options.
4. Click “Display login window as: Name and password.”
5. Login as the dummy user when asked. The rest of your accounts should be nicely hidden and inaccessible except by customs agents with a background in OS X.
UPDATED - Fixed to reflect customs doing this, not TSA screeners.
Freedom in America is now a worldwide joke.
That’s pretty elaborate for protection against the TSA. My guess is that it’s overkill. http://www.truecrypt.org/ seems to be a sufficiently secure and flexible solution to avoid the prying eyes of TSA laborers. Just don’t give ‘em the password for your encrypted section.
I think this whole idea of peering into the contents of someone’s laptop is hogwash. And I’d guess that the Supreme Court will agree sometime in the not-too-distant future. The only question is who will be willing to go to jail (or worse, immigration detention) to challenge these blatant violations of our rights.
I do believe the Court has already said that it is okay, and there is nothing to stop the TSA from confiscating your laptop, or the drive, or simply not letting you in the country until you give them the password. There is also the RAM-crack that can get around even truecrypt unless you are careful. Don’t underestimate the government’s desire to leave you with no privacy.
ram crack… as long as it’s removed from your running system while being dosed with liquid nitrogen. Check out the security now episode about the environmental conditions required for that “crack”
also, for the ram crack to work the encrypted store must already be open and decrypted. that’s not happening unless you enter your password infront of them.
An easier way to do this, at least for PC’s (and intel based macs i think), is to run everything on Virtual PC. have a regular OS running on your laptop which does nothing beyond running virtual PC, this way you only have one file to deal with, it keeps you from having to reload all your apps and reconfig every time you travel.
I flew to vegas this weekend and noone hassled me with my laptop. Good thing to it was full of Tera Patricks home videos if you know what I mean hahahahahaha.
I haven’t been asked to open or turn on my laptop since October 2001. And I don’t think I’ve been on a plane since before then WITHOUT a laptop. I travel a few times a month. I’m curious where you got the information that the TSA has started to look through the files on people’s laptops. Please post a link.
Also, what’s wrong with just setting up a dummy account and opening that? You could populate it with some dummy files so it looks like you actually use it.
And third, I wonder which is more awkward, having someone see what “movies” you like, or having to know what that creepy guy that just walked through your security checkpoint likes. Again. And again.
On the other hand, I worked in a video store while I was in high school and college, and it took about three porn rentals before I totally stopped caring or even paying attention to what they were renting besides making sure I got them the right movie. So really, who cares. How detailed of a search can they possibly do in the thirty seconds they have to search your laptop? Does everyone really just leave porn files all over their desktop?
I wonder about secure information in the first place, I work for a company that frankly the information I deal with is not public knowledge, so what they are saying is that TSA’s security clearance is higher than mine? Frankly, this just is one more show of what the airplane companies are going to flounder they treat their customers as wanted criminals instead of customers.
Wow that is a LOT of work if you actually have any programs installed on your machine. It’s not going to do you an y good when you get to Paris and download your stuff from the net when you go to try and open a spread sheet and realize Excel is sitting on the book shelf.
Better idea…Keep your funky stuff in an external disk. Hack, make it a boot disk and mail it to your hotel so it is waiting for you. IF you trust the mail that is…
who needs excel? openoffice.org
since when was porn illegal?
hostmonster.com comes out to be cheaper than amazon cloud
$6-7 for 10gigs+ a month. virtually unlimited transfer
no, amazon is $.15 a gig, which means 10 gigs would be $1.50
Plus the transfer for the data, which is $1.00 for up, then $1.70 for down, which comes out to $4.20
If you get much higher than 10 gigs, other services do come out cheaper.
The TSA is not looking through anyone’s laptop. Use common sense and it will be easy to figure out why. Don’t you think this fact would be newsworthy beyond crunchgear.com?
Guess you’re out of the loop just a little.
http://www.news.com/Police-blotter-Laptop-border-searches-OKd/2100-1030_3-6098939.html
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2007/06/laptopsearches
http://weblog.infoworld.com/gripeline/archives/2008/02/laptop_searches.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060727-7367.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/10/25/laptops-please-us-la.html
After reading through the CNET article it isn’t saying TSA is going to start doing this, it talks about customs agents in foreign countries doing this.
@ J: in response to your comment, don’t take classified documents on your next trip to Tehran, because customs agents do have the authority to check all your sh*t.
@ Dana: External disks are slow, unless you have an external SATA or SAS controller (which I haven’t seen on any laptop, but doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist).
Virtual Machine, Virtual Machine, Virtual Machine!
Actually you’re wrong. On my return flight from overseas I had 1TB of documents that were classified for one reason or another. They asked to see the hard drives, where they quickly learned I wouldn’t even take them out of the bag due to a set or Courier Orders and a Courier Card. This wasn’t a one time thing either, on following trips to various countries, they would attempt to scare me into giving up either my laptop or any external media I have, same thing applied. If you truly have sensitive info you’re authorized to transport, you’ll have the appropriate paperwork to protect it. My 2 cents
Special cases my friend. I’m sure the Pope doesn’t get frisked at customs either.
being associated with DSS or having a diplomatic passport changes how a person is treated and what their customs experience will be.
I’m just an average joe like everyone else, but if you have legitimate information that needs to be protected, then you will have access to the proper paperwork. My response is not aimed at someone who just doesn’t want someone to peek at their stuff, its aimed at the person who flat out cannot let someone look at their data. While this is a complete invasion of privacy, no argument can mask that truth, if you have nothing to hide and your life isn’t based entirely on principle, this is just another minor inconvenience
What about draining the battery or taking the battery out and carring it in a another piece of luggage?
Then they’ll probably go through your bags and find your AC adapter.
Are you suggesting that people paid to look for data can’t travel to /Users/ in Finder? Also, rebooting the Mac in Target Disk Mode sets up the unit as a FireWire hard drive. It only takes one checkbox for OS X to ignore permissions.
The correct course of action would be a hidden account and FileVault.
I think someone is confusing the TSA with Customs.
I just won’t go to naziusa.
This is a bunch of BULLSHIT. No matter what information is on my computer, i.e. anarchy, anti-establesment, blah blah. It will not kill someone. This is clearly an invasion of privacy and my rights.
For more government BS check this out. http://perfspo.com
Rick Rolling is getting old fast
@Rick: Read the related article, it’s not TSA it’s customs. when entering another country or returning to the US you pretty much have no rights until they grant you entry.
dump the rick roll, it was funny the first 500 times but now it is getting really old really fast
WTF. Upload your hdd online then redownload everything again.
Total f-ing waste of time.
Who has a connection to upload and download 100gb every time they fly. Useless.
I’ve heard that customs and TSA are both interested in your laptop. I’ve heard firsthand confirmation of customs, for example.
Goodness some of you people are tards. Its not TSA doing this. Its Dept of Homeland Security doing this at Customs inspections when you re-enter the country from abroad.
If you don’t leave the country, you dont have to worry about this.
Yet.