6 ms·

I have asked this question before, but never really got a satisfiable answer: why do governments (not just USA/canada) spend these resources to check data physi

by LeonM 7y ago

I have asked this question before, but never really got a satisfiable answer: why do governments (not just USA/canada) spend these resources to check data physically at a border? It's not like you need to 'smuggle' any form of data physically. I mean, any data considered to be dangerous (like terrorist attack plans, atomic bomb designs or political inside information) can be accessed across borders via the internet. You don't need to have those on any of your devices. And even if you had the data on a laptop, how does border patrol even know what they are looking at?

saagarjha 7y ago
I think the goal is to get people who have incriminating evidence on their phone, however unlikely that might be for sensitive information.
stjohnswarts 7y ago
It's basically be because the natural tendency of government is acquire and centralize as much power as possible. Now some forms of government take longer but without constant review and concern by citizens in a democracy it will gradually move towards a despotic regime. In some countries like China it has already happened because individual freedom isn't that valuable to the general citizenry, in the USA and Europe it is moving in that direction. Citizens need to become more active and vote for parties that advocate for more freedom rather than less.
sc11 7y ago
It's often just security theatre meant to please the law & order voter base more than anything else. They might catch some minor criminals but as you said, if you really want to "move" data across a border, there are plenty of ways to do so without physically carrying a device. For some goals it can actually be useful, though I'm not sure if this is done during regular border checks or just in the context of asylum requests or similar: Accessing location histories, picture metadata or social media profiles on your device can be a fairly easy way to check that you're not giving them false information about where you're coming from or where you've been. This can be done automatically, so the officer doesn't need to figure out themself what they're looking at.
temac 7y ago
They probably just want to take advantage of old laws and/or not precise enough that allows them to search everything (according to their interpretation, including virtual things) on anybody -- without even any probable cause. Most government can't do that (in theory...) when you are a citizen or maybe even just a resident, except when you cross the border. So if they want to watch you politically, they do that (at least) at the border.
fauigerzigerk 7y ago
>It's not like you need to 'smuggle' any form of data physically. The data may be a by-product of using the device. I suspect they are primarly looking for communications data that is bound to be on every device that is actively used to communicate. The more end-to-end encryption is used the more interesting the ends become. >And even if you had the data on a laptop, how does border patrol even know what they are looking at? Maybe they just copy everything for later analysis in case communications data hints at this being a person of interest.
- jason0597 7y ago
  >The more end-to-end encryption is used the more interesting the ends become. That is such a great line that encompasses about why more and more the ends of the end-to-end encryption are being attacked.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dontbenebby 7y ago
Because they don't have enough evidence for a warrant and it's an easy way to get data
Fogest 7y ago
There is actually a Canadian Border Patrol TV show you can watch, and they don't even try and hide that they do this. They very openly show when they check someones phone and laptop. I have seen it on the show, and they have shown them "catching" people. They'll usually use it to check if people are intending to stay and work in Canada, such as seeing in their texts or emails that they were arranging work and/or places to live. They have shown this very thing on the show where they found on their device that they were making these arrangements. It seemed very invasive and disturbing. They got their password and were looking at their phone and laptop in a backroom. The traveller didn't even get to see what they are doing or anything. I don't have anything to hide, but I would never feel comfortable with ANYONE having free reign over my unlocked devices, especially not a government border agent doing it behind closed doors.
- andrekandre 7y ago
  > I don't have anything to hide that’s not for you to decide (unfortunately)
- throwawaycanuck 7y ago
  The Canadian government is so far beyond a joke at this point. We are increasing the difficulty of foreigners to enter and work but seem to have no issue granting refugee status to more people than we can reasonably accommodate. But at least the ultra-progressive policies are getting through!
- nitemice 7y ago
  Even if I agreed with customs officers rifling through my devices, I would only ever want them to have read-only access. Like, you'd hope they're not malicious, but can you really trust some in-a-hurry agent with little to no training in this area to not accidently wipe half your hard drive?
skywhopper 7y ago
I was coming here to ask this exact question. There's no reason it makes sense to search electronic records at a border crossing. As you point out, the point of the search is to control customs and ensure there's no smuggling going on. But electronic records are not smuggled physically. There is zero reason to do so. So the actual reason customs agencies perform these searches is that they are allowed to do so because of the way the laws are written and precedent is set.
astura 7y ago
If you arrive at the US border and you say you're coming into the country for a short vacation and your text messages/email is full of conversations about employment in Seattle and your browser history is full of apartments for rent in Seattle, then they use that information to deny your entry into the country. It's mostly looking for "story checks out" kinda stuff like that. There's TV shows that follow border agents for various countries during their day-to-day work.
mattnewton 7y ago
The 38% true positive rate makes me think that either border customs violations are incredibly broad and common, or there is some kind of parallel construction happening here where they have a good idea of what they hope to find when they seize these devices from extralegal sources. Edit: given the source, the 38% could also be inflated (perhaps by not counting certain false positives) since it comes from the department looking to justify their work.
yason 7y ago
I have been asking this question myself. To a technologically nerdy person like myself it makes absolutely no sense. There is no reason whatsoever to physically transfer any dangerous or delicate information across a border. Anyone actually with the possession of such information would obviously never bring any of it near the border control. However, I think the answer is that I'm way too optimistic. There must be lots of people who voluntarily do carry incriminating information with them across borders because they either don't care or they're just stupid. Others have mentioned emails or text about a job when you're not travelling with a work visa. If this is true then I think border control is also just being merely pragmatic. With a bit of questioning and informal profiling they can spot people whose story doesn't ring true: next they just need a way to figure out what's false with that one particular person. A success rate of 38% for electronics searches was quoted: that is very high and certainly makes mobile/laptop search to the top of the list of what to look at when you bring the traveller in and start investigating. I think they'd do it even for a 10% success rate: checking a few emails and messages is fast and apparently a low-hanging fruit. That's pretty much what I would do if my job was to figure out what's wrong with a person's story. It's akin to starting debugging by enabling asserts and running the binary in a debugger to catch any obvious issues live with a stacktrace, or something similar. Won't help with most of the trickier bugs but sometimes it points right at the culprit and it's a cheap test to run. They wouldn't find the folder containing your blueprints for that bomb but they'll see you'll be meeting some people next week in a place that is very, very far from where you said you'd be vacationing.
docker_up 7y ago
Because things like SMS history and call history are far more valuable. They can download your entire SMS, call and contacts list, get the text from that, and then create a social graph based on who you know and who you are in contact with. Then it becomes very easy to trace people and who they are affiliated with. Plus going through SMS history is a great way to find reasons to throw someone in jail. My friend coming from Canada to the US was denied entry for 10 years even though she lived in the US most of her life because of jokes she had in her texts about marrying her ex-boyfriend for a green card. It's very real and it happens.
admax88q 7y ago
> It's not like you need to 'smuggle' any form of data physically. Because most people don't have the technical know how, or desire to spend the effort to ensure that the data they _are_ bringing across the border is safe to disclose. Even elsewhere in the comments here is a long debate about the "safe" way to deliver data across borders, some of which are actually terrible ideas. Yes, theoretically, people could avoid bringing any sensitive data physically across the border, but most do anyways and I bet you do too.
- jason0597 7y ago
  >some of which are actually terrible ideas Which ones?
  - michaelt 7y ago
    Assuming the goal is "Get through security without losing your laptop or your data" I would say the following are terrible ideas: "Prank them with an undecryptable random file" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19834934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19834934 and "prank them with 20,000 goatse images" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19837896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19837896 as they can get you back by seizing your electronics. Of course, those sound like jokes not serious suggestions. "Have it remotely locked by an administrator" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19835097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19835097 as they won't understand that technical mumbo-jumbo and will just seize the laptop. "Have a hidden dual-boot system" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19836135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19836135 as if they take a disk image and spot it, they'll be particularly suspicious of you. Some posters also think "Send your encrypted laptop by mail" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19835019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19835019 is not good advice.
gnopgnip 7y ago
Canada is successful 38% of the time when checking electronics. Common scenarios are seeing text messages showing someone has accepted a new job and will be working while on a visa waiver/tourist stay, or planning to get married while on a work visa.
- jpatokal 7y ago
  However, in this case, they're checking the electronics of a Canadian citizen who has every right to be in the country.
  - ddalex 7y ago
    But they don't stop people coming into the country or seizing their property. They are temporarily withholding the devices and copy the data. That's why you use full disk encryption - is they want to copy and store pseudo random data, let them.
bonestamp2 7y ago
This might partially answer your question... I had my laptop searched at the border once. It was my work laptop. They told me the same thing, if I didn't share the password they would confiscate my computer. It felt wrong that they should be able to search my computer, but I also felt bullied because I was going to need my computer the next day if I wanted to work and I think most people, including my boss at the time, would not see a problem with the search, so I let them search. All they did was open up Windows Explorer and do a search for *.jpg. Then she looked up at me and said, "What kind of images am I going to find on your computer today?" I don't remember what I said, but basically it took about 30 minutes for Windows to display all the results. She looked through them all and then I was free to go. I got the impression that they were looking for child pornography, but I don't know that for sure. Either way, it was a pretty innocuous search, but this was also about 10 years ago. From what I understand, they now pull all the files off your computer and index the contents. They likely have a list of keywords that it searches against immediately and then it's indexed for when they add more keywords later.
- ddalex 7y ago
  When I was working for $Big$Corp, I was explicitly instructed to 1) always shut down the devices with full-disk encryption 2) never give up passwords 3) surrender devices without opposition or bargaining (cooperate) and 4) call company lawyers as soon as possible Never have faced any search, but interesting stance there.
- SteveNuts 7y ago
  >it was a pretty innocuous search You and I disagree wholeheartedly there, that's an extremely invasive search.
  - throwawayjava 7y ago
    In particular, a perfectly reasonable answer to the question "what am I going to find on this computer?" might be "Naked pictures of me/my spouse" if it's a non-work laptop. It's extremely invasive for some random civil servant to execute an unexpected search on a device that most reasonable people assume is private.
Nasrudith 7y ago
I would guess part of the reason is because they aren't rational - they are upset that things changed and interfered with their snooping even though it has been irrelevant since radio and code books have existed. If I say "Aunt Bertha had a baby." without context you have no idea if I am being literal or signaling something sinister. A far harsher and less charitable theory is that border control is where paranoids, xenophobes, and authoritarians accumulate and the point is control and punishing "the other" instead of actual effectiveness.
mbesto 7y ago
1) Security theater 2) The people who make these decisions (politicians) don't really understand how any of this works (aka luddites)

by LeonM 7y ago

saagarjha 7y ago

I think the goal is to get people who have incriminating evidence on their phone, however unlikely that might be for sensitive information.

stjohnswarts 7y ago

It's basically be because the natural tendency of government is acquire and centralize as much power as possible. Now some forms of government take longer but without constant review and concern by citizens in a democracy it will gradually move towards a despotic regime. In some countries like China it has already happened because individual freedom isn't that valuable to the general citizenry, in the USA and Europe it is moving in that direction. Citizens need to become more active and vote for parties that advocate for more freedom rather than less.

sc11 7y ago

It's often just security theatre meant to please the law & order voter base more than anything else. They might catch some minor criminals but as you said, if you really want to "move" data across a border, there are plenty of ways to do so without physically carrying a device. For some goals it can actually be useful, though I'm not sure if this is done during regular border checks or just in the context of asylum requests or similar: Accessing location histories, picture metadata or social media profiles on your device can be a fairly easy way to check that you're not giving them false information about where you're coming from or where you've been. This can be done automatically, so the officer doesn't need to figure out themself what they're looking at.

temac 7y ago

They probably just want to take advantage of old laws and/or not precise enough that allows them to search everything (according to their interpretation, including virtual things) on anybody -- without even any probable cause. Most government can't do that (in theory...) when you are a citizen or maybe even just a resident, except when you cross the border. So if they want to watch you politically, they do that (at least) at the border.

fauigerzigerk 7y ago

>It's not like you need to 'smuggle' any form of data physically. The data may be a by-product of using the device. I suspect they are primarly looking for communications data that is bound to be on every device that is actively used to communicate. The more end-to-end encryption is used the more interesting the ends become. >And even if you had the data on a laptop, how does border patrol even know what they are looking at? Maybe they just copy everything for later analysis in case communications data hints at this being a person of interest.

jason0597 7y ago
>The more end-to-end encryption is used the more interesting the ends become. That is such a great line that encompasses about why more and more the ends of the end-to-end encryption are being attacked.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dontbenebby 7y ago

Because they don't have enough evidence for a warrant and it's an easy way to get data

Fogest 7y ago

There is actually a Canadian Border Patrol TV show you can watch, and they don't even try and hide that they do this. They very openly show when they check someones phone and laptop. I have seen it on the show, and they have shown them "catching" people. They'll usually use it to check if people are intending to stay and work in Canada, such as seeing in their texts or emails that they were arranging work and/or places to live. They have shown this very thing on the show where they found on their device that they were making these arrangements. It seemed very invasive and disturbing. They got their password and were looking at their phone and laptop in a backroom. The traveller didn't even get to see what they are doing or anything. I don't have anything to hide, but I would never feel comfortable with ANYONE having free reign over my unlocked devices, especially not a government border agent doing it behind closed doors.

andrekandre 7y ago
> I don't have anything to hide that’s not for you to decide (unfortunately)
throwawaycanuck 7y ago
The Canadian government is so far beyond a joke at this point. We are increasing the difficulty of foreigners to enter and work but seem to have no issue granting refugee status to more people than we can reasonably accommodate. But at least the ultra-progressive policies are getting through!
nitemice 7y ago
Even if I agreed with customs officers rifling through my devices, I would only ever want them to have read-only access. Like, you'd hope they're not malicious, but can you really trust some in-a-hurry agent with little to no training in this area to not accidently wipe half your hard drive?

skywhopper 7y ago

I was coming here to ask this exact question. There's no reason it makes sense to search electronic records at a border crossing. As you point out, the point of the search is to control customs and ensure there's no smuggling going on. But electronic records are not smuggled physically. There is zero reason to do so. So the actual reason customs agencies perform these searches is that they are allowed to do so because of the way the laws are written and precedent is set.

astura 7y ago

If you arrive at the US border and you say you're coming into the country for a short vacation and your text messages/email is full of conversations about employment in Seattle and your browser history is full of apartments for rent in Seattle, then they use that information to deny your entry into the country. It's mostly looking for "story checks out" kinda stuff like that. There's TV shows that follow border agents for various countries during their day-to-day work.

mattnewton 7y ago

The 38% true positive rate makes me think that either border customs violations are incredibly broad and common, or there is some kind of parallel construction happening here where they have a good idea of what they hope to find when they seize these devices from extralegal sources. Edit: given the source, the 38% could also be inflated (perhaps by not counting certain false positives) since it comes from the department looking to justify their work.

yason 7y ago

I have been asking this question myself. To a technologically nerdy person like myself it makes absolutely no sense. There is no reason whatsoever to physically transfer any dangerous or delicate information across a border. Anyone actually with the possession of such information would obviously never bring any of it near the border control. However, I think the answer is that I'm way too optimistic. There must be lots of people who voluntarily do carry incriminating information with them across borders because they either don't care or they're just stupid. Others have mentioned emails or text about a job when you're not travelling with a work visa. If this is true then I think border control is also just being merely pragmatic. With a bit of questioning and informal profiling they can spot people whose story doesn't ring true: next they just need a way to figure out what's false with that one particular person. A success rate of 38% for electronics searches was quoted: that is very high and certainly makes mobile/laptop search to the top of the list of what to look at when you bring the traveller in and start investigating. I think they'd do it even for a 10% success rate: checking a few emails and messages is fast and apparently a low-hanging fruit. That's pretty much what I would do if my job was to figure out what's wrong with a person's story. It's akin to starting debugging by enabling asserts and running the binary in a debugger to catch any obvious issues live with a stacktrace, or something similar. Won't help with most of the trickier bugs but sometimes it points right at the culprit and it's a cheap test to run. They wouldn't find the folder containing your blueprints for that bomb but they'll see you'll be meeting some people next week in a place that is very, very far from where you said you'd be vacationing.

docker_up 7y ago

Because things like SMS history and call history are far more valuable. They can download your entire SMS, call and contacts list, get the text from that, and then create a social graph based on who you know and who you are in contact with. Then it becomes very easy to trace people and who they are affiliated with. Plus going through SMS history is a great way to find reasons to throw someone in jail. My friend coming from Canada to the US was denied entry for 10 years even though she lived in the US most of her life because of jokes she had in her texts about marrying her ex-boyfriend for a green card. It's very real and it happens.

admax88q 7y ago

> It's not like you need to 'smuggle' any form of data physically. Because most people don't have the technical know how, or desire to spend the effort to ensure that the data they _are_ bringing across the border is safe to disclose. Even elsewhere in the comments here is a long debate about the "safe" way to deliver data across borders, some of which are actually terrible ideas. Yes, theoretically, people could avoid bringing any sensitive data physically across the border, but most do anyways and I bet you do too.

jason0597 7y ago
>some of which are actually terrible ideas Which ones?
- michaelt 7y ago
  Assuming the goal is "Get through security without losing your laptop or your data" I would say the following are terrible ideas: "Prank them with an undecryptable random file" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19834934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19834934 and "prank them with 20,000 goatse images" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19837896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19837896 as they can get you back by seizing your electronics. Of course, those sound like jokes not serious suggestions. "Have it remotely locked by an administrator" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19835097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19835097 as they won't understand that technical mumbo-jumbo and will just seize the laptop. "Have a hidden dual-boot system" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19836135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19836135 as if they take a disk image and spot it, they'll be particularly suspicious of you. Some posters also think "Send your encrypted laptop by mail" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19835019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19835019 is not good advice.

gnopgnip 7y ago

Canada is successful 38% of the time when checking electronics. Common scenarios are seeing text messages showing someone has accepted a new job and will be working while on a visa waiver/tourist stay, or planning to get married while on a work visa.

jpatokal 7y ago
However, in this case, they're checking the electronics of a Canadian citizen who has every right to be in the country.
- ddalex 7y ago
  But they don't stop people coming into the country or seizing their property. They are temporarily withholding the devices and copy the data. That's why you use full disk encryption - is they want to copy and store pseudo random data, let them.

bonestamp2 7y ago

This might partially answer your question... I had my laptop searched at the border once. It was my work laptop. They told me the same thing, if I didn't share the password they would confiscate my computer. It felt wrong that they should be able to search my computer, but I also felt bullied because I was going to need my computer the next day if I wanted to work and I think most people, including my boss at the time, would not see a problem with the search, so I let them search. All they did was open up Windows Explorer and do a search for *.jpg. Then she looked up at me and said, "What kind of images am I going to find on your computer today?" I don't remember what I said, but basically it took about 30 minutes for Windows to display all the results. She looked through them all and then I was free to go. I got the impression that they were looking for child pornography, but I don't know that for sure. Either way, it was a pretty innocuous search, but this was also about 10 years ago. From what I understand, they now pull all the files off your computer and index the contents. They likely have a list of keywords that it searches against immediately and then it's indexed for when they add more keywords later.

ddalex 7y ago
When I was working for $Big$Corp, I was explicitly instructed to 1) always shut down the devices with full-disk encryption 2) never give up passwords 3) surrender devices without opposition or bargaining (cooperate) and 4) call company lawyers as soon as possible Never have faced any search, but interesting stance there.
SteveNuts 7y ago
>it was a pretty innocuous search You and I disagree wholeheartedly there, that's an extremely invasive search.
- throwawayjava 7y ago
  In particular, a perfectly reasonable answer to the question "what am I going to find on this computer?" might be "Naked pictures of me/my spouse" if it's a non-work laptop. It's extremely invasive for some random civil servant to execute an unexpected search on a device that most reasonable people assume is private.

Nasrudith 7y ago

I would guess part of the reason is because they aren't rational - they are upset that things changed and interfered with their snooping even though it has been irrelevant since radio and code books have existed. If I say "Aunt Bertha had a baby." without context you have no idea if I am being literal or signaling something sinister. A far harsher and less charitable theory is that border control is where paranoids, xenophobes, and authoritarians accumulate and the point is control and punishing "the other" instead of actual effectiveness.

mbesto 7y ago

1) Security theater 2) The people who make these decisions (politicians) don't really understand how any of this works (aka luddites)