http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/05/protecting-yourself-suspicionless-searches-while-t
Posted by Jennifer Granick
May 1st, 2008
The Ninth Circuit's recent ruling [1] (pdf) in United States v. Arnold
[2] allows border patrol agents to search your laptop or other digital
device without limitation when you are entering the country. EFF and
many civil liberties, travelers’ rights, immigration advocacy and
professional organizations are concerned that unfettered laptop searches
endanger trade secrets, attorney-client communications, and other
private information. These groups have signed a letter asking Congress
to hold hearings to find out what protocol, if any, Customs and Border
Protection (CBP) follows in searching digital devices and copying,
storing and using travelers’ data. The letter also asks Congress to pass
legislation protecting travelers’ laptops and smart phones from
unlimited government scrutiny.
If privacy at the border is important to you, contact Congress now and
ask them to take action! [3]
In the meantime, how can international travelers protect themselves at
the U.S. border, short of leaving their laptops and iPhones at home?
Many travelers practice security through obscurity. They simply hope
that no border agent will rummage through their private data. Too many
people enter the country each day for agents to thoroughly search every
device that crosses the border, and there is too much information stored
on most devices for agents to find the most revealing and confidential
tidbits. But for travelers who may be targeted based on their celebrity,
race or other distinguishing factor, obscurity is not an option. As last
week's news that Microsoft is giving away forensic tools that can
quickly search an entire hard drive on a USB “thumb drive” shows, it
won't be long before customs agents can efficiently perform a thorough
search on every machine. So long as there are no protocols or oversight
for these searches, every traveler's personal information is at risk.
Encryption is one (imperfect) answer.
If you encrypt your hard drive with strong crypto, it will be
prohibitively expensive for CBP to access your confidential information.
This answer is imperfect for two reasons—one is practical, the other is
technological.
Practically, the government has not disclosed CBP's laptop search
practices, despite our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for these
documents. We don't know what a border patrol agent will do when
confronted with an encrypted machine. One possibility is that the agent
will simply give up and let the traveler pass with her belongings. Other
possibilities are that the agent will turn the traveler and her machine
away at the border, or that he will seize the laptop and allow the
traveler to continue on. I suspect that on most occasions, CBP agents
confronted with encrypted or password-protected data tell the owner to
enter the password or get turned away, and the owner, eager to continue
her voyage or to return home, simply complies.
If you don't want to comply, CBP cannot force you to decrypt your data
or give over your password. Only a judge can force you to answer
questions, and then only if the Fifth Amendment does not apply. While no
Fifth Amendment right protects the data on your laptop or phone, one
federal court has held that even a judge cannot force you to divulge
your password when the act of revealing the password shows that you are
the person with access to or control over potentially incriminating
files. See In re Boucher, 2007 WL 4246473 (D. Vt. November 29, 2007).
If, however, you don't respond to CBP’s demands, the agency does have
the authority to search, detain, and even prohibit you from entering the
county. CBP has more authority to turn non-citizens away than it does to
exclude U.S. persons from entering the country, but we don't know how
the agents are allowed to use this authority to execute searches or get
access to password protected information. CBP also has the authority to
seize your property at the border. Agents cannot seize anything they
like (for example, your wedding ring), but we do not know what standards
agents are told to follow to determine whether they can and should take
your laptop but let you by.
Technologically, encryption is imperfect because even strong crypto can
be cracked when someone obtains the keys. Border agents can demand the
keys from travelers unwilling to face seizure or detention. Agents may
also be able to extract and use keys that are stored on the machine
itself. Generally, if you keep your keys with the laptop, in your head
or on your disk, then the encryption is easier to socially engineer or
break than if you keep the keys elsewhere. (Discussion of what
encryption techniques to use or avoid is beyond the scope of this post.)
Encryption aside, there may be other ways you can show CBP that your
laptop is indeed a normal computer and that you mean no harm while
keeping confidential information from prying eyes. Most operating
systems let users to create multiple accounts on a single machine. A
traveler could allow CBP to examine his own account, while storing
client data or trade secrets in a separate account “owned” by his law
firm or corporation. Under typical border search circumstances, this
might satisfy CBP concerns. However, simply storing information in a
different account—even one protected by a password—is not the same as
encrypting it. If CBP is interested, the most commonly used forensic
search tools can access and search non-encrypted data in every account
on the machine.
Law firms, corporations and other entities that routinely deal with
confidential information are handing their business travelers
forensically clean laptops loaded with only what the traveler needs for
that particular business trip. Leaving unnecessary data, like five years
of email, behind may be the best thing. Of course, if trade secrets or
client information are the reason for the trip, this plan will not help.
Another option is to bring a clean laptop and get the information you
need over the internet once you arrive at your destination, send your
work product back, and then delete the data before returning to the
United States. Historically, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
(FISA) generally prohibited warrantless interception of this information
exchange. However, the Protect America Act amended FISA so that
surveillance of people reasonably believed to be located outside the
United States no longer requires a warrant. Your email or telnet session
can now be intercepted without a warrant. If all you are concerned about
is keeping border agents from rummaging through your revealing vacation
photos, you may not care. If you are dealing with trade secrets or
confidential client data, an encrypted VPN is a better solution.
Finally, however useful these techniques might be to protect laptops,
travelers do not have this array of options for protecting data stored
on less configurable smart phones. Of course, many phones do have a lock
or password protection option, which travelers might consider enabling
before heading to the airport.
In sum, while you must submit yourself and your electronic devices to
warrantless and suspicionless searches at the border, you are not
legally obligated to decrypt information or reveal passwords. However,
if you fail to do so, the border agents may detain or search you, or
even seize the device. There are no options that provide perfect privacy
protection, but there are some options that reduce the likelihood that a
legitimate international traveler's confidential information will be
subjected to arbitrary and capricious examination.
Example Security Precaution
Attorney Alice needs to have confidential attorney-client privileged
information overseas. Before departure, she removes unnecessary
information, encrypts her hard drive with strong crypto and sets up a
login for a protected account and a travel account on her computer. To
access the confidential data, one would need to first login to the
protected account, and then open the encrypted files. Only Alice’s
employer (The Law Offices of Bob) knows the passwords to the account and
encrypted data, and keeps them secret until Alice arrives at her
destination. Bob then sends the passwords to Alice in an encrypted email
message.
Related Issues: Privacy, Travel Screening
Related Cases: US v. Arnold
[1] http://preview.tinyurl.com/3nsffc
[2] http://www.eff.org/cases/us-v-arnold
[3] http://www.eff.org/action/bordersearch
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