Customs staff typically don't know to prove there is, they just need reasonable suspicion to seize goods for further investigation. The fact you've booted into a 50GB partition on a 500GB disk may well be considered reasonable suspicion to seize the goods for the sake of further investigation.
In the free space of the large data partition there lives the sensitive hidden root. It's maybe 250GB, with a 100GB offset from the start of the decoy data, and 50GB guard space at the back, where ext4 writes all sorts of crap. So you get to use about 50% of your raw disk capacity inside the sensitive environment, as a single encrypted root.
The beatings will continue until you decrypt it. Hopefully you can and it's not actually just random data...
Another caveat here is that the inner volume must use the implicit encryption parameters of cryptsetup, or that the correct parameters are supplied in the command line. A LUKS header should absolutely not be used, as it will be plainly visible inside the partition, and would indicate, at the very least, that some other encrypted data was stored in the past on the disk leading to new questions about its password etc., killing plausible deniability.
"This means that if you have a large set of random-looking data, they can already lock you up."
In the UK, with RIPA legislation, there is a real risk of someone dropping a USB key full of random data on you, telling the cops there's child porn in it, then you get locked up for 5 years for failing to decrypt it.
Sure, once in the hands of the Russian FSB, Italian Mafia or Nicolas Maduro, any detectable amount of random data could result in torture - just to be on the safe side, maybe there is a hidden volume there after all.
But in any state where rule of law is observed, the prosecution must establish probable cause and, once in court, prove beyond reasonable doubt that the illegal act was indeed committed - in this case, failure to disclose the encryption key of a locked volume. So there must exist corroborating evidence that should exclude any reasonable accidental or normal situation that could produce the random data. For example, a border agent could testify that he saw illegal material on your device's screen and a random file could be found in your home directory. In your device history, traces to a missing volume or partition could remain etc. The defense can easily explain away a partition initialized to random, if that's what standard system tools produce in their normal configuration and no other corroborating evidence exits.
A LUKS header is a clear indication that another encryption configuration was/is used on the computer, so you would then be compelled to give explanation about it's presence, it's password, the provenance of the laptop etc. The explanations given in the FAQ (experiment, random swap) are unconvincing if they are not corroborated by other patterns, for example modification timestamps on /etc/fstab and /etc/crypttab and so on.
So the absence of the LUKS header really does fill a practical gap, and it happens that most legal systems today are squeezing harder and harder into that gap. Unlike the dubious claims in that FAQ entry, Truecrypt hidden volumes actually have established legal precedent.
https://www.truecrypt71a.com/documentation/plausible-deniabi...
Continued by VeraCrypt: https://www.veracrypt.fr/
This regulation is clearly made by people who don't understand the technology and capabilities of these devices. A waste of time and money; who is going to train customs officials to search through phones?
Why can't you just take a new phone and say, "it's empty because I got a new phone"?
Staying ahead of them with a technological trick is only a partial, temporary solution, though. Eventually you can expect that there will be an attack, whether purchased (see GreyKey) or legislated, on the workaround. What should happen is that the whole arms race should be nipped in the bud by outlawing this kind of data collection coercion. But I don't have a lot of hope about getting that genie back into the bottle.
the only safe harbor will be one you don't carry with you except as a device which can guarantee secure access to that remote information.
They boot, which drops to a linux (bsd?) command line. Agent is not pleased. User sets PS1 so the prompt now looks like DOS. Agent is satisfied (they may just have been satisfied that the device worked, but this story dates from when a DOS prompt was a believable thing for someone to recognize as "computer" )
Now, dealing with the customs/pre-clearance checkpoints, that's another matter.
If it works, customs officers cannot find actual illegal contents, and criminals walk free through customs.
If customs officers somehow detects you are doing this, you risk obstructing security measures.
This forum largely believes that the balance struck by New Zealand - that you don't have the right to data privacy when traveling - is completely unacceptable, and as technologists we try to find technical countermeasures.
What if we have a "physical encryption" technology that allows encrypting physical objects so that X-ray scanners, drug detecting methods or metal detectors cannot see through them?
Would customs be allowed to ask for the decryption key? Or should the customs just ignore whatever encrypted inside?
The justice system and separation of powers acts as checks and balances from anyone (good or bad) being harassed unless there's a strong reason why. Get a warrant with a limited scope and then do the search.
No need to imagine. There are innumerable cases over the years where cops have turned into stalkers backed by the power of the government when their girlfriends dump them. It happened to one of my ex-es, but I've seen it in newspapers dozens of times over the years.
The problem is that cops are still people. And people are often messy, emotional, irregular, obsessive, mean, or just have a bad day and need someone to take it out on.
Wetware will be wetware. All we can do is advocate for better training and smarter policies.
Given some hypothetical new technology with vast societal implications, I would be forced to carefully reconsider that position, but in this case I believe privacy is a basic human right that does not simply disappear at the borders.
And I am more than happy to learn that you would re-consider your position given such hypothetical situation.
Would customs be allowed to ask for the decryption key? Or should the customs just ignore whatever is encrypted inside?
I would say the benefit is too good, weighing against privacy.
Of course, you would then request for brain scanning technology to be more widely employed and that brain scanners be installed in the subway, on buses, gas stations and any other place drug dealers and terrorists could happen to go by. I think we all know what is the end for this line of reasoning.
Anyway, it is quite apparent that we have fundamentally different views on these issues, so let's agree to disagree and call it a day.
Does that mean I am going to self-sensor my views to avoid losing karma? No. You have your rights to disagree, I have my rights to express my views.
Only if you don't mind the downvotes. For some odd reason, these 'imaginary points' end up causing me to self-censor anyways.
On further-thought, it makes me think it's just something built into us. We seek social/group approval, and it makes us regress to the mean when it comes to thought/opinion. However, I don't think it's the right way for our brains to be wired, especially with social media exposing us to the entire world.
And now with this border-search thing. If it means that the state end up having access to all your social media accounts, that now span decade+ timeframes, not even time and personal growth/regret can protect us.
No, it wouldn't. One key weakness of totalitarian systems (and that is what you are advocating for) is always that the massive power of the system attracts criminals and corruption into the system and has a major risk of the criminals ending up using the totalitarian power for themselves. If you think there is some sort of absolute solution to a social problem, you are ignoring that implementing the solution does itself build on society. If society isn't free of crime, your solution won't be free of crime either, and if society if free of crime, you don't need the solution. And if your solution isn't free of crime (so, you have corrupt police officers or judges or whatever), then you have thus given criminals the option to use a massively powerful weapon for themselves in some ways.
Tacitus
Furthermore, if you want to stop drug trafficking, legalize them.
If that is your argument, then I don't think anyone can convince you.
> What it would do is erode the rights and freedoms of law abiding citizens (something that terrorists seem to want).
That's not how Wikipedia (and I myself) define terrorism:
> Terrorism is, in the broadest sense, the use of intentionally indiscriminate violence as a means to create terror among masses of people; or fear to achieve a financial, political, religious or ideological aim.
Physical objects usually don't reveal this much at once and require a warrant. With a border phone search, there's no due process at all. If you're so afraid of bad actors that you're willing to subject yourself to this, you're free, but the bad actors have won.
What happens if you use the postal service to deliver your phone across a border? Are the same authorities who claim the right to search your phone if it is on your person at the border also claiming the authority to confiscate and duplicate your phone if it shipped/mailed? Do you have to put your password on a sticky note on the the front of the phone? And if you ship the physical device but transfer the data separately does that change the expectations?
It is interesting that condensing information into a digital format that can be easily duplicated and searched (before or after duplication) seems to change the expectations for the authorities and I think for individuals.
I think this is another example of the modern digital world/economy has left the legal system in the dust.
The boundary between what should be allowed and what should not be allowed has nothing whatsoever to do with the state of technology.
Freedom is not possible without privacy. As soon as you are in danger of privacy violation, you change your behavior. This is also known as self-censoring. You can already see it here in the forum: people report that they have nothing to hide, but they still reset their phones and use fake accounts when crossing the border.
What is particularly insidious about border control is that there is no legal checks-and-balances system behind it. Police cannot search your home without a warrant issued by a judge. Border control can search everything without any warrant.
In the past, you could yourself 'balance' this by not taking very personal things (e.g., a diary) with you when traveling abroad. But with our digital lifes, this is not possible anymore. You cannot leave your photo album at home anymore.
What makes it so much worse is that criminals can so easily circumvent this issue. They anyway use throw-away phones. They don't need to carry notebooks with them, they can just buy a new one on arrival - if needed at all - and download encrypted files from the Cloud.
So we now have established that border control has an unprecedented and uncontrolled access to our privacy. Shouldn't they be forced to prove that this pays off for our society? Please show me the cases of successful prosecution after digital search of a phone. To me, there seem extremely few of them. So it seems a high price for a marginal benefit.
http://time.com/5344265/3d-printed-guns-legal/
I would be surprised if that's not possible for drugs or explosives in 5-10 years.
Edit: Looks like they are already possible or at least on the way:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/01/you-could-soon-be-man...
https://all3dp.com/custom-shaped-explosives-us-navy-3d-print...
I would very much be surprised if it becomes possible for drugs or explosives any time within my lifetime. Chemistry and physics just don't work that way.
I think google doesn't censor results based on location? So you should see the same results.
Edit: To save your time and avoid polluting your search history:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/01/you-could-soon-be-man...
https://all3dp.com/custom-shaped-explosives-us-navy-3d-print...
Still, you do need very specific input materials for both processes.
In the case of the latter, you basically need a spool of explosive string. You're not so much printing an explosive as you are shaping an explosive into a desired form. I'm sure it's still very useful, but I don't think it's a particularly big game changer in the "smuggling things into a country" field.
"Illegal contents", as in what? Unflattering cartoons of the president? A spreadsheet marked "cocaine delivery schedule"? Why is this on the alleged criminal's phone while she's crossing the border? Has she never heard of the internet? No real criminal could be caught by any of this buffoonery. Lots of normal people whom the state would like to harass will be harassed, while wasting a great deal of money, which is the point.
In Thailand, both tourists and locals can be severely punished for making fun of the King.
(I'd Google some links, but I'm on a dialup-speed cellular connection right now. It shouldn't be hard to find, though.)
Just another example of the different way in which speech/information is treated in different countries.
one big strong and noisy facepalm...
:)
But a lot of the agents will have MAGA hats in their car, so I probably wouldn't have unflattering Trump cartoons on my phone. Though I would love it if EVERYONE had 'fuck trump' as their phone background.
It's a shame that people now have to guard their privacy like drugs.
No sane criminal would bring illegal electronic data with him on a physical device... He'll just download it when he gets there.
Or use same technique as Chinese fakers are using to create fake flash cards or SSD's: just reduce size of drive directly in the controller.
Not after they subpoena this HN comment. ;)
Anyone subpoenaing this comment would discover I post on HN exclusively over Tor :)
Once inside customs, i'd verify the SHA1 sum of the USB drive image vs. the one on the Debian site, and reinstall the machine, setup a VPN back home, and pull the data i need onto the machine.
Repeat the "dummy" install when leaving the country.
Secondly, high-entropy data is evident at even a courtesy glance - normal computer and filesystem operations do not produce high-entropy data on disk, therefore a large portion of high-entropy disk data is highly suspect. The author discusses this in detail in sections 2.4 and 5.2 of https://gitlab.com/cryptsetup/cryptsetup/wikis/FrequentlyAsk...
Be sure that doesn't get into your .bash_history
booting into a 50 GB partition on a 512GB SSD isn't suspicious?
Needless to say, using these schemes for SSD drives requires special consideration in regard to trimming.
It seems to me this would fix the larger problem most the time.
How would they hire enough manpower smart enough to do that?
"Hey Hank, the machine says we've got another hidden encrypted partition, go get the rubber hose..."
If this is the line of the argument, then why is the search done at all? I am perfectly fine telling an agent of the state "No sir, I do not have any illegal data on this device" - fully knowing that a lie is conducive to imprisonment. What I object to is the search itself, which by the way, is unlawful under the US constitution.
I have found practical success by booting from an encrypted Linux partition that has absolutely nothing relevant on it, with a weak password I can always enter when requested by big guys with guns. Unbeknown to them on the same partition there sits another encrypted volume, at some offset from the outer's partition start. If I fail to enter the correct password for the outer partition, Ubuntu drops into the command line of the initrd, that is equiped with all the tools you need to mount the real, offset partition:
So instead of having a nice GUI into which you directly enter the uber-secret password, you press enter a few times in the GUI, drop to command line, issue a single command and only then enter the uber-secret password. A mild nuisance in your bootup process, once you get the hang of it.It's impossible for any court forensic team, let alone an airport goon, to prove there is actually another partition inside the outer encrypted partition, unless you mount common volumes and cross-contaminate. An important caveat is to properly defragment the outer partition and fiddle with the offset and the size of the inner partition to prevent any conflicts, then avoid writing in the outer partition.