Two recent articles published by Computerworld discuss the Electronic Privacy you have, or in this case don’t have, while travelling across U.S. borders. The second article is more of an update so that you can travel and know how Customs agents can invade your privacy. Customs does not need any form of reasonable doubt or suspicion to search a person’s electronic devices, especially laptops and PDAs. Any type of device that can, “store large amounts of data, ideas, e-mail, chats and Web-surfing habits,” is fair game. The Ninth Circuit ruled that these devices can be searched and seized without a warrant or probable cause, and the Customs Department went on to say that anyone travelling can, and most likely will, be searched for having these devices. The main focus was centered on traveling with laptops. Not that this automatically makes you a criminal, but it is putting your personal privacy in jeopardy. Searches made at the border are “reasonable simply by virtue of the fact that they occur at the border.” Searches are not limited to hard-drives, meaning any internet usage is also subject to being searched, including internet history, e-mails, cookies, etc.

This brings about some questions…

• What is the extent of the search and seizure of laptops?
• Will they take my laptop and when can I get it back?
• Will my company information be subject to the search? This violates many company’s privacy policies, especially when dealing with personal information or financial information (such as credit cards and bank accounts).
• Where is the information that Customs copies kept?
• How long is this information kept?
• How is it disposed of? Or is it disposed of at all?

Do Customs agents have any protocol to follow at all, or are these questions something of little importance? Depending on the amount of information being stored on a hard-drive, many people can lose their anonymity and privacy. The Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) is warning travelers to keep limited amounts of information while traveling, and to keep your computer protected from privacy threats. The ACTE is concerned that corporate data could be copied and lead to security breaches and numerous other privacy risks. This means a database of customers’ names and information, which at one point was completely confidential, can be seen by anyone who works for Customs…

Secret rooms where the government monitors all Internet communications including e-mail, web surfing and even voice over IP. Sounds like a great fiction story. All it needs is a hero and a villain.

Unfortunately this is not the newest book by your favorite author. Nor is it the imagination of a conspiracy theorist blogger. Luckily we have a hero, Mark Klein.

So if everything you do is being monitored, what can you do? You have two choices:

1. Don’t do anything on the Internet that you want to keep private.
2. Use a proxy server located in a country other than the US.

If you don’t do either, just know that your Internet Privacy is at risk!

The alleged human rights abusers are not helping their case after the problems in Tibet. According to The Tech Herald China is trying to censor the internet in U.S. owned hotels during the Olympics this summer. The Chinese government is being accused of “exerting pressure on U.S. owned hotels to install Internet filtration systems that will censor online content during the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing.” The accusations come at the hand of U.S. Senator Sam Brownback. He stated that the Chinese government sent orders to at least two hotels, and continued to say that China is turning the 2008 Olympics into the “Olympics of oppresion.”

China wants the U.S. owned hotels to install internet filtration systems to be used to censor certain online content during the Olympics. My guess would be….any news sites, blogging sites, Wikipedia, and Google. This is the trend within the Great Firewall, so most likely the same content will be banned by the government during the games. I wonder how many laptops passing through customs will have some kind of anonymity software installed? My guess is…too many to count. Some more information on internet privacy and maintaining anoymity can be found here.