Travel with your laptop?

JohnR

JohnR

Final Approach
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Grrrrrrrr
Plan to cross the border carrying company secrets on your laptop or PDA hard drive? Corporate spying? Credit card numbers? Seemingly innocent information you want kept private? Customs can view it, if they want it. Sure, they seize illegal stuff on your hard drive like kiddie porn, but if your sensitive personal info is there, nothing stops them from seeing it on their way to finding the illegal stuff.

If they can disassemble your airplane to look for drugs, leaving you with a pile of parts on the ramp, your computer is just as vulnerable.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/07/u...14806-NZ2agd4Kikkv8hShxGsvKg&pagewanted=print
 
In the early days of travel to China your laptop would be 'inspected' in the back room. The PLA was making copies of everyone's hard drives. I would travel without a laptop or a clean ones with no data on them and have confidential proprietary files on disks in my luggage elsewhere.
 
JohnR said:
Would it work to FedEx your laptop ahead of your arrival? B)
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probably just give them more time to tinker with it. Plus getting computers cleared through customs can be a royal PIA in some countries. China being one of those the other being Canada. For some reason Canada always gives me the hardest time with computers and cellphones when I fly in. Driving is no big deal but flying always a big deal with the biggest deal at the Vancouver airport.
 
smigaldi said:
probably just give them more time to tinker with it. Plus getting computers cleared through customs can be a royal PIA in some countries. China being one of those the other being Canada. For some reason Canada always gives me the hardest time with computers and cellphones when I fly in. Driving is no big deal but flying always a big deal with the biggest deal at the Vancouver airport.
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Odd, we flew to Toronto a year ago with laptop and cellphone with no questions.
 
Canada used to be a real PIA about laptops (need to turn them on & show them they weren't filled with plastic) but they were like any US airport else last summer when I went to Ottawa. I always checked pleasure.

Common sense stopped me, but I always wanted to run a batch file for them that said "Armed- countdown commencing 5...4...3..."
 
JohnR said:
I never check "business." Even when it's business.
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Why is that?

It actually helped me out once. Coming into Hawaii form Tokyo the customs guys was questioning me as to why I checked $0 in purchases even though I had visited China, Hong Kong (separate country then), Singapore, and Malaysia. I tried to explain to him that there was nothing I wanted to buy there but he was incredulous. He checked the computer and saw how many times i had been there for business and then he told me no problem and let me go. I told I had bought every little souvenir from those places years ago.
 
In the good old days bringing tapes to and from Toronto, the duty was based on how much of the tape had data. Like they could tell. Many times I only had 6 inches of data on a 2400 foot reel.

I've never had a hassle in Toronto with a laptop.
 
Dunno, but I have never had Canada Customs (or US Customs for that matter) ask either me or our passengers about computers. I'll bet 2/3 of the time we never even see an inspector and clear over the phone with CANPASS. Almost all of our flights to Canada are classified as business for passengers as well as crew. I have occasionally had inspectors get curious about what kind of business but it's never gone any further than that.
 
JohnR said:
Plan to cross the border carrying company secrets on your laptop or PDA hard drive? Corporate spying? Credit card numbers? Seemingly innocent information you want kept private? Customs can view it, if they want it. Sure, they seize illegal stuff on your hard drive like kiddie porn, but if your sensitive personal info is there, nothing stops them from seeing it on their way to finding the illegal stuff.

If they can disassemble your airplane to look for drugs, leaving you with a pile of parts on the ramp, your computer is just as vulnerable.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/07/u...14806-NZ2agd4Kikkv8hShxGsvKg&pagewanted=print
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For the record, also be aware that many computer repair shops make it a habit to look for anything interesting on your computer while it's on the bench. Don't ask how I know, and definitely don't ask me about the guy who had a folder on his desktop titled "Naked!" that was full of pictures of his girlfriend (who coincidentally dropped off and picked up the computer) in... compromising positions.

Yeah, don't ask about that. Just realize that leaving your computer in the hands of anyone is giving them access to all of your files, and make backups/erase as needed.
 
smigaldi said:
Why is that?
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The Toronto trip was to go to a wedding, and I brought my laptop to get some work done that week. Other trips, to Latin America, have been work plus visiting relatives. In 10-15 such trips over the years we've never once raised an eyebrow of customs or immigration. Knock on wood. Must be my honest looking face. :D

I always figure I'll be more closely scrutinized as a "business" traveler. I've almost always mixed business with leisure traveling, visiting relatives and taking the family, so it's not lying to say "pleasure." Ok, visiting relatives isn't always "pleasure" but that's another story . . .

I wonder if computer repair shops look for pirated software?
 
I've never had a hassle going to Canada, Japan has been a breeze, France easy, heck, even India wasn't too bad (and I have a 10 year biz visa - the one that was targeted for fraud!) However, leaving India was entirely different story.

Cheers,

-Andrew
now travels with two laptops, soon back down to 1
 
When I flew to Europe in summer '06 (flew NYC/JFK into Brussels, Belgium) they didn't question my laptop or cell phone at all. I've generally gotten more questions within the US.

I would probably only try to travel with my cell phone, though. That's my MP3 player anyway, and I probably wouldn't be going to Canada overnight. If I went it would be for a quick trip, probably to pick up or drop off some friends.
 
No problem with my laptop or cell phone. Canada, Brazil, Thailand, Vietnam, Australia, Taiwn, the list goes on. Now, I left it at home when I went to Russia in 2000. Entirely too likely to have been stolen from my hotel room there.

And the cell phone is off and buried in the laptop case for the duration of any international trip as it only works in the US (thanks, Verizon).
 
Ghery said:
No problem with my laptop or cell phone. Canada, Brazil, Thailand, Vietnam, Australia, Taiwn, the list goes on. Now, I left it at home when I went to Russia in 2000. Entirely too likely to have been stolen from my hotel room there.

And the cell phone is off and buried in the laptop case for the duration of any international trip as it only works in the US (thanks, Verizon).
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I used my Verizon cell phone from New Zealand with no problem.

I don't travel internationally enough that I've worried about my laptop, though I'll have it with through Canada going to Alaska this year.
 
That seems quite scary to me. Then again, while they're free to search my laptop, I'm also free to encrypt everything with PGP or a similar tool. It's just unfortunate that we have to resort to those methods these days.

-Felix
 
sba55 said:
That seems quite scary to me. Then again, while they're free to search my laptop, I'm also free to encrypt everything with PGP or a similar tool. It's just unfortunate that we have to resort to those methods these days.

-Felix
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In this case they sought a court order to get the PGP key from the guy.
 
mikea said:
In this case they sought a court order to get the PGP key from the guy.
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True. From what I understand, however, the current ruling is that he doesn't have to provide the key because of the 5th amendment. I suppose there's an argument to be made that he waived that right by providing the key in the first place (how stupid do you have to be....not that I'm not glad that this particular guy was caught).

Either way, I don't think they can get a court order without a reason. If I'm just going through customs and I haven't done anything wrong, they won't have a reason to search my laptop. Luckily, OS X makes encrypting your data easy.....

-Felix
 
sba55 said:
True. From what I understand, however, the current ruling is that he doesn't have to provide the key because of the 5th amendment. I suppose there's an argument to be made that he waived that right by providing the key in the first place (how stupid do you have to be....not that I'm not glad that this particular guy was caught).

Either way, I don't think they can get a court order without a reason. If I'm just going through customs and I haven't done anything wrong, they won't have a reason to search my laptop. Luckily, OS X makes encrypting your data easy.....

-Felix
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Woah! You DO NOT want to encrypt the whole file system on the partition on OS X. The common wisdom that all sorts things are guaranteed to go wrong.

You can create a disk image (a file) and make that encrypted and put secret stuff in it.
 
mikea said:
Woah! You DO NOT want to encrypt the whole file system on the partition on OS X. The common wisdom that all sorts things are guaranteed to go wrong.

You can create a disk image (a file) and make that encrypted and put secret stuff in it.
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I was just talking about OS X's built-in encryption for your home directory.

While that's better than encrypting the entire partition, I agree with you that it might not be ideal performance-wise. I'm required to use that on my work laptop, though, and it doesn't seem slower. Might be a different story if you're working with big files....

-Felix
 
sba55 said:
I was just talking about OS X's built-in encryption for your home directory.

While that's better than encrypting the entire partition, I agree with you that it might not be ideal performance-wise. I'm required to use that on my work laptop, though, and it doesn't seem slower. Might be a different story if you're working with big files....

-Felix
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The Mac experts say you dont't want to encrypt your home directory, either. I understand that there's a long history, going back to OS 9, of ending up with unreadable file systems. I can imagine that some programs expect to be able to drop files with quick performance and without interference. There's a lot of potential for bad things to happen. Not the least of which is losing the password key.
 
mikea said:
The Mac experts say you dont't want to encrypt your home directory, either. I understand that there's a long history, going back to OS 9, of ending up with unreadable file systems. I can imagine that some programs expect to be able to drop files with quick performance and without interference. There's a lot of potential for bad things to happen. Not the least of which is losing the password key.
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No doubt that there are drawbacks. I don't think they're quite as significant as they are made out to be, and I don't think data loss is common at all. In any case, it's cost vs. benefit, as always... :)

-Felix
 
mikea said:
The Mac experts say you dont't want to encrypt your home directory, either. I understand that there's a long history, going back to OS 9, of ending up with unreadable file systems.
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Well, if ya forget the password, you're screwed if the system is truly secure.

Other than that, I don't know how any "history going back to OS 9" could possibly be true today, since OS 9 and OS X are completely different operating systems. You might as well say Windows Vista has a history of corrupt file systems going back to OS 9.
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Well, if ya forget the password, you're screwed if the system is truly secure.

Other than that, I don't know how any "history going back to OS 9" could possibly be true today, since OS 9 and OS X are completely different operating systems. You might as well say Windows Vista has a history of corrupt file systems going back to OS 9.
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It's what I heard on some Mac podcast, prolly Mac Notables. "Encryption of the file system is doable. Don't do it."
 
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