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.

In another huge victory for paperless enthusiasts everywhere, it appears that using your cell phone as a boarding pass is on the horizon. Since December, Continental has been testing a paperless option for flights out of Houston. The boarding pass “is an image of an encrypted bar code displayed on the phone’s screen, which can be scanned by gate agents and security personnel,” according to the New York Times.

Other airlines are waiting for approval from the Transportation Security Administration before launching similar programs. TSA spokesperson Andrea McCauley said, “We definitely see this as the wave of the future,” which is exactly the type of thing you’d expect to hear from a slow-moving, bureaucratic agency that calls the mundane act of scanning an image of a bar code “the wave of the future.”

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Bob at the TSA Evolution Blog Team (the kindly gnomish face of the TSA that actually makes me think these morons are listening) responded to the intimation that MacBook Airs are weapons of mass destruction. Screeners are trained to look for certain things in laptops and other devices and when they saw an anomaly, they reacted. Good on them. They’ll also be scanning a MacBook Air to show screeners what to look for when they see SSD drives.

Apple MacBook Airs are Cleared for Takeoff [TSA]

Care of the Onion

Here, friends, is the danger of depending too much on X-ray searches — there is a valley between the dangerous and the benign and most items fit in it but if you make something dangerous that looks utterly benign or make something benign that looks, to the trained TSA agent, dangerous, you’re in trouble.

Long story short, Michael Nygard was held up at the airport because TSA agents couldn’t figure out his MacBook Air.

I’m standing, watching my laptop on the table, listening to security clucking just behind me. “There’s no drive,” one says. “And no ports on the back. It has a couple of lines where the drive should be,” she continues.

A younger agent, joins the crew. I must now be occupying ten, perhaps twenty, percent of the security force. At this checkpoint anyway. There are three score more at the other five checkpoints. The new arrival looks at the printouts from x-ray, looks at my laptop sitting small and alone. He tells the others that it is a real laptop, not a “device”. That it has a solid-state drive instead of a hard disc. They don’t know what he means. He tries again, “Instead of a spinning disc, it keeps everything in flash memory.” Still no good. “Like the memory card in a digital camera.” He points to the x-ray, “Here. That’s what it uses instead of a hard drive.”

Security is all well and good and the theatre of security makes us feel great when we roll through the airport. However, the whole mess crashes down when someone tweaks the rules on either side — by removing an instantly recognized hard drive or threatening to blow up planes with liquids. That, sadly, is when things fall into absurdity. Just wait until the MacBook Quantum comes out. It probably won’t even show up on X-rays, replaced instead by a cat.

Steve Jobs Made Me Miss My Flight [MichaelNygard]

So it seems that you can carry batteries, extra batteries, spare batteries, and other, presumably, Leyden jars on flights. The TSA warnings only mention banning “large, palletized shipments” of lithium-ion batteries on flights whereas other batteries are fine. They recommend covering the battery terminals, however.

On the other hand, the Department of Transportation says you are limited to bringing only two extended life batteries, which, according to the image associated with the press release, apparently only fit old Inspirons running Windows 95. The best way to avoid getting picked up for battery thoughtcrime, however, is to pack your batteries in plastic bags so they can’t accidentally brush up against that massive piece of metal in your carry-on luggage and short out. Welcome to 2008!

PHMSA via NY Times