Has anyone else had this happen to them? I'd love to have two independent corroborations of this, instead of hearing it third-hand... Cheers, Bob Hettinga --- begin forwarded text From: "Sidney Markowitz" <sidney@communities.com> To: <cryptography@c2.net> Subject: US Secret Service checking laptops at airports Date: Sat, 3 Oct 1998 18:26:52 -0700 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3155.0 Sender: owner-cryptography@c2.net A friend of mine recently traveled from one of the Washington DC area airports to Ireland and reports that US Secret Service agents checked her laptop for the domestic 128-bit crypto versions of Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer at the metal detector station. She said she saw about six other people who were checked as she was going through. As is now common, anyone carrying a laptop computer was asked to boot it up, presumably to demonstrate that if the case hid a bomb at least it was programmable with a reasonable looking user interface. But in her instance, people who identified themselves as Secret Service agents had her start up her web browser so they could check the encryption level, and made her uninstall her 128-bit Navigator. It didn't seem to matter to them that there are exemptions for devices that are for personal use as long as they are kept with the person while out of the country, or that she is an international banker who was going to conduct business with an overseas office. They didn't bother to determine whether she had a copy of the Navigator install file in a backup directory and could simply reinstall on the airplane. And of course it made no difference that she was going to Ireland where she picked up a locally produced 128-bit crypto plugin for Navigator that she says works just as well if not better than the version from Netscape. (I don't know if her "plugin" is simply one of the scripts that enable the Netscape strong crypto in the export version.) -- Sidney Markowitz <sidney@communities.com> --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'