I have had a similar experience to the one reported in the article, and was meet
with a similar dejected mood when they fired up my laptop to find not the usual,
nice, graphical widows desktop but Linux, The officer in question picked up a
phone and said to his colleague, It doesn't look like windows I think it is
something else. When I said it was UNIX, he visibly paled in front of me, and
waved me through.
So it would appear that if you are a terrorist, bomb maker, subversive or have a
hard disk full of pornography and plan to travel to London for the IETF meeting
or anything else for that matter, I would recommend trading in your Laptop's
running windows for an Apple or in my case a laptop running Linux, which cannot
be scanned.
It is sometimes kind of silly, but I am also English (working in the US) and
frankly, I have to admit that in the grand scheme of things I do sleep slightly
better at night knowing that these people (H.M. Customs & Excise and even U.S.
Customs) are there plugging away for us, I am sure that the way they look at it
,they also do not want to be doing it, but every so often they must catch a bad
person. (notice, I did not say guilty ;->) that they can charge with something
really heinous.
And let us not forget that these people are enforcing the law that the
politicians make.
What we need IMHO is more understanding by the legislators, without this we are
doomed to have our time wasted by ineffectual laws that serve no real purpose
other than to waste people's time and slow them down instead of protecting the
public interest.
The future may hold that if you are running the non-de facto O/S like MacOS or
Linux then you are technically guilty of encrypting data, because the guy that
wants to search your hard disk is only trained on the commands and how to
navigate the windows file system and no other.
Maybe the NSA will classify Linux and other non windows operating systems as
munitions of war ;-> (which would be interesting seeing as I recall they (NSA)
also run Linux, something about better security)
Jim
**************************************************************************************
Legal Disclaimer
The opinions expressed within this mail are specifically my own and in no way
refer to or relate to any
ongoing business and/or the technical direction of 3Com Corporation, or any
subsidiary companies or
business units within 3Com Corporation and its subsidiaries.
**************************************************************************************
"Steven M. Bellovin" <smb(_at_)RESEARCH(_dot_)ATT(_dot_)COM> on 07/18/2000
11:45:14 AM
Sent by: "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb(_at_)RESEARCH(_dot_)ATT(_dot_)COM>
To: Matt Holdrege <matt(_at_)ipverse(_dot_)com>
cc: Jon Crowcroft <J(_dot_)Crowcroft(_at_)cs(_dot_)ucl(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk>,
ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org (Jim
Stephenson-Dunn/C/HQ/3Com)
Subject: Re: Email Privacy eating software
In message
<4(_dot_)3(_dot_)1(_dot_)2(_dot_)20000718105915(_dot_)00bd2de0(_at_)pop3(_dot_)ipverse(_dot_)com>,
Matt Holdrege wr
ites:
At 11:50 AM 7/18/00 +0100, Jon Crowcroft wrote:
next summer's IETF meeting is tentatively scheduled for London, England
http://www.ietf.org/meetings/0mtg-sites.txt
if you turn up at customs with a laptop, you may be asked to show any
and all files on it to the nice chaps there. if someone has sent you
crypted email (say using your public key) you may be obliged to
connect the lapto pto the public net and access your other key to
decrypt the mail for the nice chaps in customs to priove that it is
not to do with pornography or terrorism - whereeve yo uare from, you
will have no recourse to say "no" or "this is commercial in
confidence" or "my company will fire me if i let this go to anyone or
send it over the net to decrypt at my home site etc etc"
As one who travels to London quite often and has red hair and is of Irish
descent, this sounds a bit overmuch to me. I've never had anything other
than a kind welcome by British customs officials. There are loads of crazy
laws in the U.S. and other countries. We citizens are grateful that the
enforcement branch of the government chooses to ignore them unless provoked.
I'm not sure what "sounds a bit overmuch" to you. Have a look at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid%5F150000/150465.stm
--Steve Bellovin