Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.
Saturday, August 02, 2008
Why "They" Hate Us
Because we're free, of course.
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2 comments:
Spyware is easy to install. I accidentally did with an errant click of the mouse, and now I have a new computer because the spyware installed itself as PC administrator and rendered itself immune to deletion or modification.
All a REAL terrorist has to do is communicate in Arabic. Our national security community is about two years behind in translating UNencrypted Internet and telephone traffic in Arabic.
This laptop-probing program is for US. Paid for by taxpayers, performed on taxpayers. A way of showing us where our money goes.
Who travels with a computer? Productive citizens. Yeah, keep punishing them. They'll go away.
Don't re-elect anybody, not even your mama.
Why not use TrueCrypt? It's a simple, secure, free, and open-source disk encryption program. It can protect removable drives (like a USB stick) or a system drive (while the system is running, with no downtime other than a brief restart to start the process).
I use TrueCrypt on my laptop and keep all files backed up on my desktop at home (which I can securely access from anywhere in the world). If DHS wants to seize my laptop, only the hardware is lost, not the data. I can replace hardware, and can sue to get it back. Good luck breaking the crypto.
...and I don't "have anything to hide", other than some work-related documents, personal photographs from the last few years, etc. All common, ordinary stuff. Imagine how sneaky genuine bad guys will be?
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I have a brief response to Defender's comment: If spyware cannot be removed with ordinary means (like the use of SpyBot Search & Destroy, CounterSpy, etc.), you don't need to buy a new computer.
If you have backups (you have backups, right?), just format your hard disk, reinstall your OS of choice, and restore from the backups. Easy.
If you don't have backups and your computer is bootable, turn it on, back up your files to an external disk (USB stick, external hard disk, etc.), then reformat, reinstall, and restore.
If the spyware has broken your operating system so badly that it won't turn on, use another computer to download a free copy of Ubuntu linux, burn it to a CD, and boot your computer with it (Ubuntu can boot into a full-featured system from a CD without writing anything to the hard disk). Back up your files, reformat, reinstall, and reboot.
You might even consider using Ubuntu instead of Windows -- you can try out the "Live CD" (full-featured system on a disc) without making any changes to your existing system. Don't like it? Just eject the CD and restart. If you do like it, it's easy to setup, easy to use, and totally free.
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