A thought while sleeping...

[alexpgp]

A recent item in BoingBoing referred to an article in the Washington Post on how customs officers have been asking some travelers to open their laptop computers and divulge their passwords so that the information on the hard drives can be inspected.

A few months earlier in the same airport, a tech engineer returning from a business trip to London objected when a federal agent asked him to type his password into his laptop computer. "This laptop doesn't belong to me," he remembers protesting. "It belongs to my company." Eventually, he agreed to log on and stood by as the officer copied the Web sites he had visited, said the engineer, a U.S. citizen who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of calling attention to himself.

Last night, it suddenly occurred to me that if the poor schmo was one of those people who deletes browser histories (so that his company, which owns the computer, doesn't learn of his LiveJournaling activities), the lack of such history just might be the factor that lands the guy in the category of "suspicious person," no?

With that off my brain, it's time to turn to and get ready for the trip home.

Cheers...

Comments

[platofish.livejournal.com]

i wish I could write this off to being an 'urban myth'. In the past I would have been 99.9% certain this didn't actually happen. These days, I'm no more than 50% certain! I can see the point of asking someone to power up their laptop, and log on. The batteries in these things could easily be replaced by some kind of 'device' that exploded when the person opened the laptop mid-flight. But, other than that....it would take a long, long time to check through the contents of a disc for subversive or suspicious material. On my laptop I have Safari, Opera, Firefox....etc. What customs person would be able to find all of them in a few minutes?