On 12/28/2012 12:46 PM, Maxim Kammerer wrote:

...

I've been extensively questioned at the border on a few occassions over the years /because/ my laptops don't have a Desktop as such, no icons either. Both my arms were grabbed at the Australian border as I reached to type 'firefox' in a terminal, to start the browser in an attempt to show them a normal looking environment. I think that in such a discussion, it is necessary to distinguish between border guards wanting to look at your data, and border guards wanting to make sure that your laptop is not a bomb (given the limited

On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 10:49 AM, Julian Oliver <julian@julianoliver.com> wrote: training they receive on the subject). The situation that you describe looks more like the latter than the former (although clearly there might be omitted details).

For the case of Border guards that want to have a look at your data there's an article from schneier: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/05/crossing_border.html You can also use a normal (fake | Windows) OS on your standart HDD and a hidden OS on a mSATA SSD, you can use a 16 GB disk with a small and encryted Ubuntu distribution. If you set the boot standart to your standart HDD then you have a good chance to get through the control. Another possibility is to combine this with a hidden truecrypt container, no one can force you to write down a password to a container that is probably not even existing. You can't prove that. If this is to complicated for you, you can still install a OS on a small USB stick. Or a SDHC card. It's not that expensive and if you have an USB stick fixed at your keyring I think no one will notice. The most secure thing would be a Live CD and a hidden container on an USB / SDHC device. So they can't infiltrate a system that is not even installed (backtrack and stuff have truecrypt onboard) and they can't force you to open that hidden container (because you only know if there is a container when you hit the right password. When nobody performs a hardware hack on your SATA or something then nothing can happen. If they keep your notebook for some minutes | hours | days then you should examine it before use.. It's also helpful to check the md5 checksum of the boot partition; you can have a virus / keylogger in there. -- Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE