Travelers' Laptops May Be Detained At Border / No Suspicion Required Under DHS Policies [Telecom]

Amendments 4 and 5 to the United States Constitution seem to have gone right past them.

I can understand that in wartime, "probable cause" might sometimes be fairly thin, but a policy saying it is not required at all is unacceptable.

Customs enforcement enjoys a special status: IANALB I was a customs MP in Vietnam, and the way it was explained to me was that "Nobody forced them to get on the plane", so travelers consent to having their belongings searched because nations have always had a right to protect their borders and to levy tariffs on imported goods.

This is almost, but not yet, a moot point. Those who travel overseas regularly, my brother-in-law amoung them, simply use VPN's to communicate with their home base, and assume that their laptops may be lost/stolen/confiscated at any time. Ergo, they never leave anything on the machine that's not replaceable on short notice just by connecting back to the mother ship with a new machine. Since any proprietary info on their local hard drive is always encrypted anyway, they know they can safely shrug their shoulders and pick up where they left off.

Those (very few, btw) travellers who have proprietary info they need to protect from crypto-savvy prying eyes are told to say that the VPN takes care of all passwords, and to deny that they can unlock a machine. A customs agent who demands that they log on to the company server and thereby make the machine's contents available for inspection will be told that the server contains privileged attorney-client communications and that since it's not being taken across a border, is not subject to inspection. Very few customs inspectors are willing to fill out the necessary paperwork to confiscate a machien anyway, but if they do, they just get an encrypted hard drive and complaints from travellers who tend to be both well-off and well aware of the congressman's phone number.

Notwithstanding all that, I think news editors always keep stacks of these stories for slow news days: it's the kind of "The Sky Is Falling" fluff that turns out to be a non-event as soon as you look into it. My brother-in-law's machine has been regularly x-ray'd at border crossings, and they usually ask him to boot it up so they can see it's a genuine computer, but he's never been threatened with confiscation or even been asked to display the contents of the machine, so I think this story can be safely filed in the same trash bin used for supermarket tabloids.

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Haven't been asked to boot my laptop at airport security for at least several years now (U.S. and Western European travel) -- although having to take it out of its case and send it through the X-ray machine in a separate plastic tub seems to be a universal requirement.

Are procedures significantly different elsewhere?

A long time ago I was told that X-rays are harmful to semiconductors. If this is so, then I would think that they should be even more harmful as the mask gets finer. I suspected that X-ray damage may have contributed to the early demise of laptops which appeared to be otherwise well taken care of.

Does anyone have any knowledge as to whether X-rays can really damage electronics? If so, does the package around CPUs, chipsets, etc. protect the innards from it?

X-ray inspection is an integral part of test in electronics manufacturing. Machines such as the Agilent 5DX systems are comparable to airport x-ray equipment, except they subject the board to several minutes of x-ray energy instead of a few seconds. I can not believe airport inspection equipment could harm electronics if they aren't harmed in the factories during test.

John

I'm pretty sure that any electronics that go into space have to be specially "hardened" to resist various cosmic rays (including X-rays) playing havoc with them and damaging them to eventual failure, so any exposure to commercial X-ray sources must have some negative effect to chips without special hardening.

It would be a cumulative thing, all the doses would add up and kill off things after enough of 'em.