Australian Customs Officials Will Search Your Laptop For cough

[NM]

So if a pax arrives with CP and decides he doesn’t actually want it after all, he can safely dispose of it in a quarantine bin?

I don't see why it would be any different to disposing of anything else before "crossing the border".

Better to have any CP destroyed along side an airline apple than continuing in circulation.

 

[harvyk]

Now here is the problem... Just because a file is "deleted" doesn't mean it no longer exists...

Let say someone emailed you some CP (why they would do that I don't know), now let’s say that you opened the email not knowing what it was, and there was the CP. You then get disgusted by the content and delete the email.

Now email programs will usually make a temporary copy of the file somewhere, when you close the email and especially if you delete the email the file is also deleted. But here is where the problem lies...

When a computer deletes a file, it simply removes all reference to the parts of the hard disk which contains the file. It does not wipe the data from the drive. The theory is by making the parts of the drive available for new data means that the data will be wiped in due time as the disk continues being used...

So due to no fault of your own, you are now importing illegal cough, which you cannot (easily) get rid of... Deleting data from a drive so that it cannot be brought back is a very difficult exercise (I've had to do it once, it took a full day of work to ensure that no data was coming back), and often the only sure fire way of doing it is to physically destroy the drive...

Just some food for thought, and why I am totally against the idea, because like most things IT related this government (let’s face it, most governments) are making rules about things they don't understand, and without forethought to the implications...

 

[UP4014]

Now here is the problem... Just because a file is "deleted" doesn't mean it no longer exists...

Explains why the FBI (the only organisation I can confirm) destroy old hard drives by grinding them up and mixing them with cement.

 

[notzac]

Yes, exactly. Some people have to make sacrifices for the greater benefit of others.*snip* And if poor old Alanslegal's laptop being inspected save even one child from harm then that is a benefit compared to the harm to his pride.

I have to take issue with this argument. "Think of the children" gets trotted out quite regularly to justify all sorts of invasions of privacy and denials of civil liberties (example: our shiny new Internet filter that the government seems intent on putting in place, never mind how it's going to do exactly nothing to stop the trade in illegal and abhorrent CP), and I simply don't buy that searching laptops at the border because someone ticked a box is going to do anything useful.

I agree with several previous posters in that those who do trade in CP aren't going to tick that box and aren't generally going to be stupid enough to have .avi files sitting in a "CP" folder on their Desktop.

The experts from the Federal Police already have systems in place to find these people; you don't hear about it because it doesn't get reported on in the general media (intentionally).

 

[greeceplan]

This is Shocking For me

 

[Hvr]

Interesting that Border Security has a story on checking a laptop for cough this evening.

Nothing found but the program is about getting the message out that searching of laptops will occur.

 

[rwatts]

Explains why the FBI (the only organisation I can confirm) destroy old hard drives by grinding them up and mixing them with cement.

Requirements for Australian Government agencies are detailed in the Information Security Manual (previously known as ACSI33) issued by the Defence Signals Directorate. The requirements for sanitisation by overwriting have been somewhat relaxed in recent editions. Previously three write passes with read back for verification were required but for drives manufactured after 2001 and larger than 15GB only one pass is now required. Degaussing is also an option.

Drives of higher classification levels cannot be reclassified by sanitisation down to UNCLASSIFIED. This is due to the re-vectoring that modern drives do when media errors are detected so that some data is then inaccessible under normal conditions for overwriting.

In practice though most drives are removed and destroyed - purely because its too much of a hassle and time-consuming to overwrite. The idea of grinding hard drives went out for us back in the 1980s and rooms full of IBM 3380s. It was easier to chuck the platters in the foundry.

For privacy purposes i employ the open source program Eraser. Easy to use and has its own scheduler (eg for overwriting all unused space overnight).

Richard.

 

[ejb]

Interesting that Border Security has a story on checking a laptop for cough this evening.

Nothing found but the program is about getting the message out that searching of laptops will occur.

It was an old episode tonight.

ejb.

 

[JeniSkunk]

I was just alerted to a story, published online yesterday in The Age about Australian Customs seizing and searching HDD for cough.
'Life ruined' by Customs cough confiscation

I can't yet post full URLs since this is only my 10th post in the forums

theage.com.au/travel/travel-news/life-ruined-by-customs-cough-confiscation-20100602-wymn.html

Jenifur Charne

 

[ejb]

I was just alerted to a story, published online yesterday in The Age about Australian Customs seizing and searching HDD for cough.
'Life ruined' by Customs cough confiscation

I can't yet post full URLs since this is only my 10th post in the forums

theage.com.au/travel/travel-news/life-ruined-by-customs-cough-confiscation-20100602-wymn.html

Jenifur Charne

'Life ruined' by Customs cough confiscation

A Melbourne man says his life has been ruined after Customs officers took his hard drive from him because it contained coughography....

and so it begins.....

ejb

 

[blueflamenco]

His life has been ruined because his hard drive was confiscated?

Oh, the melodrama.

 

[anat0l]

Has nobody noticed that the SMH are also just as guilty as customs in humiliating him on account of posting his full name and the names of the cough films found on his hard drive? (Unless the affected pax gave up those names voluntarily) At the very least, SMH are kinda pushing the boundaries of what they can publish in a news article, aren't they?

I'm not going to even comment on the very poor English grammar in the article.


Away from the article and back to the topic, I think it's a bit extreme to say "life ruined". Being put in the slammer is worse than that. In saying all this, I still think there is a certain too much heavy-handedness on the part of Customs with respect to this new rule, but they have had the power to search hard drives (or any media) for a long time now, so why is it so prevalent now?

 

[Alanslegal]

His life has been ruined because his hard drive was confiscated?

Oh, the melodrama.

If you're wondering, I'm not that person in the article!

 

[Alanslegal]

I still stand by my opinion that this 1) too labour intensive 2) will achieve little results and 3) does very little, if anything, towards the stopping or reduction of worldwide illegal cough trade and/or stopping those victims.

 

[ejb]

I still stand by my opinion that this 1) too labour intensive 2) will achieve little results and 3) does very little, if anything, towards the stopping or reduction of worldwide illegal cough trade and/or stopping those victims.

I share your opinion.

Although I would add that Customs would not have called the media so if this situation is ruining his life why go public. I would shut up.

ejb

 

[blueflamenco]

If you're wondering, I'm not that person in the article!

Hehe.

I had my suspicions but when AmazingHoneyMoon001.mpeg wasn't on the list next to "My Friends Hot Mum" and "Sexy Blond" I realized it couldn't be you

 

[blueflamenco]

I share your opinion.

Although I would add that Customs would not have called the media so if this situation is ruining his life why go public. I would shut up.

ejb

Mr Mansfield is obviously not a very smart man if the quotes in this terrible article are accurate.

 

[ejb]

Mr Mansfield is obviously not a very smart man if the quotes in this terrible article are accurate.

Almost sounds like it could be made up.

Perhaps a certain lobby group is trying to gain more publicity from this.

ejb

 

[samh004]

Well 30,000 songs is a good effort, I’m only at 22,000 and would be extremely pissed off if my HDD was confiscated, because that’s how I sync my music onto my iPod. That’s where I store my 10,000 photos and that’s where I write my blog entries from.

There’s actually a photo of me in the sea when I was younger that contains nudity, I wonder if they’d claim a photo of myself was CP. That’d be funny, I’d love to see them try that one out.

 

[dajop]

There’s actually a photo of me in the sea when I was younger that contains nudity, I wonder if they’d claim a photo of myself was CP. That’d be funny, I’d love to see them try that one out.

I'm sure some isolated non-sexual photos would not be an issue, but it's got me thinking, as on my blackberry last weekend I took a couple of really cute photos of my nieces making funny faces in the bath (which is very similar to a photo I have in an album of my brother and I in the same bath when we were at the same age), but can't see in any way how it could be construed as CP ... so where is the line drawn? I suspect it would be different for me (and for you) if we had hundreds of such photos of lots of different children on our laptops.