Re:Ask HN: How screwed is a 17-year-old trying to enter US w...
by tptacek on Monday June 15, 2015 @01:31AM
(#9717674)
Your laptop looks pretty much exactly like about 4,500,000 other laptops running Windows or OS X with their FDE enabled. Nobody cares; they don't have time to.
Having said that: your rights to privacy are basically at their nadir in this situation: you're opting into air travel, which gives the US administrative search privileges; you're crossing borders, which virtually every country in the world believes gives them the sovereign right to invade your privacy as a condition of entrance; you're interacting with customs, whose job it is to find reasons to hassle people.
So: not the craziest idea in the world to take your sensitive stuff, put it on a USB drive, encrypt that, and just Fedex it to wherever you're going.
You won't need to go through that trouble, but it might make you feel better, and it's cheap insurance.
Having said that: your rights to privacy are basically at their nadir in this situation: you're opting into air travel, which gives the US administrative search privileges; you're crossing borders, which virtually every country in the world believes gives them the sovereign right to invade your privacy as a condition of entrance; you're interacting with customs, whose job it is to find reasons to hassle people.
So: not the craziest idea in the world to take your sensitive stuff, put it on a USB drive, encrypt that, and just Fedex it to wherever you're going.
You won't need to go through that trouble, but it might make you feel better, and it's cheap insurance.