From: Travis Kalanick <travis@redswoosh.net> ... While operating my laptop he said that we was tasked with preventing illegal pornographic material from entering the United States ... He returned my laptop after this warrantless search saying I was free

Dave, And to what end -- other than going through the motions -- is such a search? Given a quick check, the border agent would be unlikely to find a cache of porn photos that was compressed and archived in a single encrypted file named C:\WINDOWS\$NtUninstallKB911567 or some other obscure name -- not a single JPG porn file to be found in a file scan. Perhaps what's really going on in such border cases is some sort of "amateur test" -- since any pro who wanted to bring porn (or any other data) into the U.S. on a laptop would never leave the data in an easily discovered form. But then again, why bother using the laptop? How about putting an innocuous looking file on that cute keychain memory dongle? Or on an iPod? Porn could be easily rigged to look like an mp3 file, that could even play properly. Or why not use some spare cell phone memory area? Or how about that 2 Gig memory stick in the camera, or a miniSD memory card inserted into an electric razor or the binding of a book? To quote the wonderful episode "OBIT" from the original '60s television series "The Outer Limits": "The machines are everywhere!" Anyone with half a brain who wants to bring data into the U.S. can do so without meaningful detection, short of a full body cavity strip search and prolonged forensic analysis -- and even then the true nature of any data might well be undiscovered. All of the rest is for show, and perhaps to cull the low hanging fruit. --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein lauren@vortex.com or lauren@pfir.org Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 http://www.pfir.org/lauren Co-Founder, PFIR - People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org Co-Founder, IOIC - International Open Internet Coalition - http://www.ioic.net Moderator, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com DayThink: http://daythink.vortex.com ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as tfairlie@frontiernet.net To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting- people/ ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen@leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]