I feel a great disturbance in the interwebs
It appears that this news report from a Russian news agency is about the ACTA or Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement which is “classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958.” In other words, it’s big government bullshit as usual and the new administration seems all too happy take the anti-privacy torch that was handed off to them from the Bush administration.
Parts of the agreement will allow border agents and officials in airports to seize your digital equipment such as laptops, mp3 players and phones to search for copyright protected material. People who are found to be in violation can have their equipment seized and destroyed as well as a fine.
People crossing borders such as the US/Canada or US/Mexico border can have their equipment seized by the border patrol, searched for contraband such as child pornography, copyrighted material and “terrorist materials.” Who isn’t considered a terrorist in America these days?
What can you do?
You can use full disk encryption with free and open source software such as TrueCrypt. Full disk encryption will prevent anyone from accessing your laptop or PC without providing the correct password. Use the method in this article I previously wrote to get rid of the identifiable string “TrueCrypt Boot Loader” so as to make it a bit harder to say that you are in fact using full disk encryption.
Remember to completely power down your equipment or use a strong password for the account that will be in hibernation or sleep mode. It is better to fully power down your equipment though because you can display a custom boot message during startup. This could be used to throw off any federal agent, especially if it says “no operating system found” or something similar.
You may want to ship your equipment or hard drives to a location a few days before you leave. Believe it or not this can be a big hassle for computer forensics examiners who work for the defense and are on a case outside of the country.
You could keep files and data stored somewhere besides on the digital storage media you’ll be bringing across the border. You can purchase storage space from online services or use something like a google mail account.
For cell phones and MP3 players, you might have to put all of your “pirated” media and store it in an encrypted container, then re-load your devices after you arrive at your destination. I’m not sure how far they’re going to be able to go to prove that your DRM free media is actually pirated though.
More Sources
“What is the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)?” – Link
“The Office of U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), part of President Barack Obama’s office, has denied a company’s request for information about a secretive anticounterfeiting trade agreement being negotiated, citing national security concerns.” – Link
WikiLeaks – Link
Electronic Frontier Foundation – Link
If you have some tips to help protect your privacy against this agreement and anything related to it then please leave a comment.
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DANG THIS IS NEWS FOR HE LIKES TO RUN HIS MOUTH
-sigh- this is why I don’t trust anything the government ever says. Hopefully the agreement will fail.
I think the best you can do in this situation is like you say with the full disk encryption or storing your stuff on an online storage website or whatever.
they mention just going through your laptop, I haven’t had time to read through the wording but does it mention other digital things such as USB drives or iPods/iPhones etc? A smart idea would just to set up a home VPN or remote access to get the files you might need when traveling and have a clean laptop/netbook with nothing on it therefore avoiding such seizes.
Yeah, it involves other devices such as MP3 players, USB drives, etc. I find it hard to believe that much of this could actually be enforced. Unless they are just going to seize your MP3 player, then send you on your way and mail you a fine once they’ve determined your music is pirated. It’s really ridiculous. It’s such a broad subject which leaves a real big gaping hole for abuse.
I can imagine there are some feds who would probably just seize equipment and take it for themselves. In fact I think there was a homeland security agent doing this?
I agree about the remote access. That is a good option for work files and other sensitive data. Cause you know the first thing some of those agents are going to do is pull up a gallery view of your hard drive to look at your nudies ;p
I suppose they could image the device’s drive or storage and review it at their leisure, or send it out to be reviewed at a lab.
So you may get through that border checkpoint and never know if/when you’re going to get a visit.
Although Truecrypt keeps you safe today, I’d hate to think that they could keep an image for 10 years until some inventive mind finds a hole in the Truecrypt encryption.
I can’t get over my shock that this can be done without cause.
Overall Good site. I like the direction its taking (I read it whenever you post a new article)
Anyway, I have a relatively important question and I would really appreciate it if you could answer it at your convenience:
Q: How can I ENCRYPT my Entire Disk in a Dual-Boot (linux/windows) environment?
(I know you can put a bios password etc. but I would like to encrypt the ENTIRE disk with both OS’s in it)
Thanks Rish.
I do not know of a way to encrypt an entire hard disk that you want to dual boot from. I’m guessing the encryption software would need special support for a secondary boot loader like grub which it loads after its initial boot loader.
For example TrueCrypt full disk encryption has a small unencrypted boot loader. I don’t know how difficult or possible it would be to have it point to another boot loader like grub after the encryption key has been entered.
I believe there are methods to encrypt separate partitions but that would leave your boot loader unencrypted (grub, lilo, etc.) which may defeat the entire purpose for doing this. There would also be unallocated, unencrypted space outside of the partitions which might contain something you don’t want others to see (like what you were thinking I’m sure).
I think the easiest way to overcome this in most situations is to just boot from one operating system and use virtualization for your other operating systems (VMWare, VirtualBox, etc.).
Hopefully there are others that can provide more information on this though. If you feel up to it throw the question on the forum :]