Australian Customs Officials Will Search Your Laptop For cough

[samh004]

Referring to encryption, there are laws that make you reveal your password in certain places and I would imagine those laws are in Australia too. If you don’t they can imprison you for not giving the password, even though they have no proof you have anything illegal on the drive.

There was a recent case in the UK I recall where someone wouldn’t reveal the password and was subsequently jailed, without evidence. It’s pretty ludicrous, so just having an encrypted drive is worthless these days.

In the past, as well as a web browser I’ve also dabbled with Freenet and Tor, but I found both were too slow to use on a regular basis, so gave up on being that paranoid of the internet.

 

[harvyk]

A customs officer would not have a chance but he would also have reasonable grounds to keep the laptop and refer it to someone that can crack it, namely the NSA, Pine Gap is not far away, if things were that bad.

Good luck with that, depending on what types of encryption where used, there is only
roughly 3.32 to the power of 616 different combinations of keys which it may be. (even with dedicated decryption hardware it's probably going to take a bit of time)

Yes there are techniques to help crack encryption, except in cases such as the one below...

There was a recent case in the UK I recall where someone wouldn’t reveal the password and was subsequently jailed, without evidence. It’s pretty ludicrous, so just having an encrypted drive is worthless these days.

Encryption by it's very nature has been designed so that the only person who can decrypt the data is the person who is meant to be able to do so.

To assume that a gov't hacker can simply press a few keys and bang, automatic decrypted data is a little far fetched (not helped by hollywood \ unless you also believe that the US gov't has back door keys for every encryption protocol out there)

 

[markis10]

To assume that a gov't hacker can simply press a few keys and bang, automatic decrypted data is a little far fetched (not helped by hollywood \ unless you also believe that the US gov't has back door keys for every encryption protocol out there)

I dont assume anything when it comes to the press, or TV for that matter (reality is rarely a participant in any great quantity), mind you having had some involvement with the TPM when I was at Intel I was impressed to hear that Christopher Tarnovsky had cracked it, opening a pandoras box.

The point I was making that yes a customs official may not have the skills, but they can soon hand it over to someone that can do a better job. The fact you have encryption on a laptop and are refusing to unlock it would be the same as ticking yes, I have illegal material on the declaration card! In the context of what the government is trying to do, no real difference.

 

[Oneworldplus2]

Didn't mean to stir up a hornets nest.

I had a feature on this laptop (business HP model, so it came with extra security features that don't normally come on a standard laptop) when l was running XP (now windows 7), that had something like 1044-bit encryption and hidden folders with TPM module (not that l know a whole lot about it - to stop theft l guess). All l used to do was put in a password and a hidden drive would appear. That's where l put all my sensitive material. The laptop functioned as normal, in fact l could have had another 10 hidden folders up to 4gb each and l'm pretty sure that they would be very hard to find (i think that infineon technologies in Germany had something to do with the software and the TPM security side of things).

Anyways, l guess if you really wanted to hide something, just put it on the net and download it when you get to your destination?