Travellers' mobile phone data seized by police at border

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10177765/Travellers-mobile-phone-data-seized-by-police-at-border.html

by thex86 • 13 years ago

42 30 13 years ago

telegraph.co.uk

sogjis2• 13 years ago

Sounds like North Korea

MDCore• 13 years ago

North Korea is known for many things but not, as far as I can tell, traveller's having their data seized. If anything it sounds similar to the way travellers to the US are treated. Care to elaborate on your comparison?

sogjis2• 13 years ago

They take away your phone, when you enter North Korea. There are no reports of seized data, but you never what they are doing with your phone.

josscrowcroft• 13 years ago

This is pretty alarming but the article points out something often overlooked: "nowhere in Britain do you have less rights than at the border."

reeses4• 13 years ago

This is the same in the USA and most countries. "The border" (really, any ingress point where you haven't passed CBP) is effectively a rights-free zone. It's important to remember that you should have nothing that will cause you difficulty if it is seized, copied, or damaged no matter how you enter the country.

gst• 13 years ago

Due to the UK's key disclosure laws (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_Kingd...) encryption doesn't help. If you don't provide your key to the government they can put you in jail for up to two years.

pi18n2• 13 years ago

The UK is beyond unreasonable with that nonsense. What if you ask a foreign partner to create a key and secure the device without telling you until you are past the border or out of the country? What if you were collecting atmospheric data?

epo• 13 years ago

I disagree with the UK stance on such things but such behaviour on your part would rightly be taken as proof of ill-intent because it would be an unreasonable thing to do and so could only have been intended to avoid complying with the law. These people may be 'unreasonable' but they are much, much, much cleverer than you.

DanBC3• 13 years ago

You make it sound like the US doesn't do anything similar.

homeomorphic3• 13 years ago

If you hadn't provided a link I would have assumed you were joking. What happens under this law with people who carry USB sticks with truly random noise files on them?

reeses4• 13 years ago

They do not have a sense of humor. This would be a cute way of writing a blog post about your day(s) spent in detention before being sent back to your country of origin/citizenship.

DanBC3• 13 years ago

The actual law is called RIPA.

There are serious problems with it. (I speak as someone who's normally okay with 'big government' and legal restrictions.)

In theory you'd have to be doing something to get their attention. The most well known case is of a man who has a psychotic illness and who was also importing "explosives" and behaving in odd ways. But that's what some people with a mental illness do. It's one of the features of illness, that people are not rational and do not do things that are in their best interest.

The "give us your key or go to jail" are not the worst abuses of RIPA though. This would be rare, and people would have legal representation. The local councils mis-using RIPA to see if people are applying to the wrong schools are worse. These are already so common they've had to be cut back, and there's little opportunity for legal representation and the oversight is much less.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Po...)

panarky• 13 years ago

"David House, a former MIT researcher who cofounded an organization to raise money for Bradley Manning, accused the Department of Homeland Security of violating his civil rights when he passed through a Chicago airport in November 2010."

"Homeland Security agents did not have a warrant when they seized House’s laptop, camera, and a flash drive, then asked him questions about his relationship with Manning."

"The Department of Justice had tried to have the lawsuit thrown out, asserting that the government has the authority to conduct routine searches at a US border."

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/05/30/supporter-leak-s...

DanBC3• 13 years ago

London (and other) police ofrces have been doing similar for a while.

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/may/17/met-softwar...)

(http://www.publicservice.co.uk/news_story.asp?id=19807)

(http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/met-police-acquires-mob...)

Police grab as much data as they can, and keep it for as long as they can. So it's a problem if they can cheaply and easily slurp cell-phone data because we know that they probably will.

See, for example, the length of time they keep DNA data.

jrockway• 13 years ago

Probably best to mail it to yourself. If you carry something over the border, it's fair game to deny you entry to the country until you cough up whatever useless information they want. But if you mail it, then you're already in the country and have some rights if the government feels like searching what you've mailed.

malandrew• 13 years ago

You don't even have to mail it. You just need to store it on a server abroad and ssh into that server and copy your encrypted files.

coldcode• 13 years ago

What will they do when someday our phones are chips in our brains? "Please sir, I need to cut your head off for a bit". Eventually technology will make it almost impossible to do a real border search.

brokenparser• 13 years ago

"For reasons I'm not permitted to disclose, I need to stick this wire up your nose."

gojomo• 13 years ago

They'll require root access as a condition of travel.

(A variant of this idea appears, as a throwaway peripheral detail, in the excellent s01e03 episode of the TV series 'Black Mirror', 'The Entire History of You'... which according to Wikipedia has been optioned by Robert Downey Jr. as a potential film.)

Travellers' mobile phone data seized by police at border

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