Crossing Borders with Laptops: Password Protection

Today I heard parts of a radio program that talked about crossing borders with laptops and the rights of the border officials to search your hard drive and even keep your laptop in order to search it at their leisure — and mail it back to you later. (Ha!) This report seemed to be mostly about activities at the USA-Mexico border.

Is this legal? Well, dubious. Seems that, in the USA, at least, there’s a rule that officials can search the contents of various and sundry items like your home, your car, office, files, even if they’re under lock and key. The courts can compel you to hand over the key. Why? A key is a physical object that does not reside in your brain. But if your computer hard drive is unprotected by a password that lives in your brain . . . well, it’s fair game.

It seems that there’s both a psychological and legal difference between handing over a physical key to a lock and divulging the combination to a combination lock. Officials can compel you to hand over that key in your pocket but they cannot compel you to utter  information that resides in your brain that may make you guilty (as in the combination of a combination lock or the password of your computer). They can blow up a safe or bust your door down, but try though they may, it turns out that even the most sophisticated encryption decoders cannot decode the simplest computer password encryption. So you can take the fifth and tell them to just go ahead and blow up your hard drive. (Try not to smirk.)

So if you’re crossing a border and officials want to look at your computer, and access to your hard drive is password protected, they can’t make you tell them the password, I guess as long as you live in the USA. (Just don’t make it the marque of your motorcycle or your middle name, okay?) They might  seize and even destroy maybe the computer but they can’t get inside  to see the contents of your brain — I mean — hard drive.

So I thought, okay, here’s the first line of defense when traveling (and maybe even in daily life since we live in an era where big bro might decide at a moment’s notice that he’s justified under the patriot act). Use the built-in password protection on your computer — even though you have to log on every time you turn it on (and yes, whenever it goes to sleep for a while.) Yep, it’s a hassle, but you may find it really convenient one day.

I already have password protection for my computers. I have a guest account so if someone wants to use my laptop to write a letter or check my email, they can’t purposely or accidentally mess with my very carefully constructed file structure or change the preferences in my browser. (Don’t you hate it when that happens? It’s like somebody changing the radio station presets in your car.)

I thought this might be a good thing to do before traveling, especially around the world: Set up a guest account, and a "safe" account that has only Dear Mom letters and innocuous stuff like that, and your "real" account that has your browser preferences with bookmarks to you blog and your emails. Why go to all that trouble? Because if you’re pegged as a journalist in some countries, you could be in very, very, very big trouble. Travelers love to write "journals," and you might  not want to be misunderstood in this world where bloggers in some regimes have been jailed for years, or worse.