Customs officials forcing you to unlock your phone is not just an invasion of privacy - it's a pointless invasion of privacy. Customs agents don't even know where to start in finding data that a user wants hidden.
Even if allowed access to personal devices, data is slippery enough that it could be stored in almost anything. Here's yet another example of taking away rights in a way that does nothing to deter actual crime. Hopefully the court understands technology enough to make the right call, but I'm not counting on it.
I had this experience. My laptop wasn't locked, but I was asked to let someone look through it. That took about 20 minutes, which caused me to miss my coincidence.
Since I now had time to waste, I asked to see the customs lady's supervisor, and then berated the person who inspected my laptop for not having any idea how to do this sort of search properly. So, I ended up sitting both the customs lady and her supervisor there for another hour or so while I taught them how to use undelete and some basic free forensic tools.
I then handed them a bill for an hour of my time and left to wait for the next plane.
I like to think it took them a while to process just what the hell had happened. Mindless securistas like that need to be humiliated at every turn, or they'll never stop. Society - the segment of society with which they interact - must make it clear that their job is not wanted, not needed, and not welcome.
No. I am fairly sure that it all went in one ear and out the other...
(I do this stuff a little too often, maybe twice a year. This probably makes me an asshole, but it gets the testosterone out in a nonviolent manner, so it's the lesser of two evils ,really).
I suspect that the people they're trying to catch by doing these searches (pedophiles, illegal workers) are generally too stupid or lazy to bother hiding their data. At least, that seems to be the case when watching Border Security. They do actually catch a lot of people this way.
So you would catch the lazy criminals, and maybe even victims of such act, where things were done on their devices without their knowledge... I've read recently about new kind of software, that encrypts your data without your knowledge and then asks you for money to unlock it - wondering how this would play in courts...
It sounds like an encryption suite that had had an included "crytpolocker" gui element would be a hilarious method plausible deniability, and at least make this asinine habit harder. Just randomly generate the BT address so some strangers get paid if the border agents want to try to unlock something they have confiscated.
Now that was a political maneuver. The article about the guy in Canada didn't say what the reason was for searching him.
>"Officers are trained in examination, investigative and questioning techniques. To divulge our approach may render our techniques ineffective. Officers are trained to look for indicators of deception and use a risk management approach in determining which goods may warrant a closer look"
This statement makes it look like they noticed something about him that prompted the search.
That description seems awfully close to saying an officer can selectively interfere with someone's life just because the officer didn't like the look of him.
> Stokes, chairman of the legal-redress committee of the Cleveland NAACP, believed the arrest was dubious.
> Representing Terry in court, Stokes pressed [arresting officer Martin] McFadden on the stand, where he got him to admit that the men weren’t doing anything other than peering into store windows, and that he’d never busted anyone before for seeming to case a business. “What attracted you to them?” Stokes asked.
> “Well, to tell the truth,” McFadden answered, “I didn’t like them.”
Even if allowed access to personal devices, data is slippery enough that it could be stored in almost anything. Here's yet another example of taking away rights in a way that does nothing to deter actual crime. Hopefully the court understands technology enough to make the right call, but I'm not counting on it.