Defending Privacy at the U.S. Border: A Guide for Travelers Digital Devices
An odd thing about these searches is that they really have no chance of catching anything nefarious carried by anyone halfway intelligent. An acquaintance of mine smuggled digital documentary video out of Iran just by opening up a laptop and loosening one of the two hard drives' connectors so it no longer registered as attached; the brief border search at the airport of course saw one hard drive with nothing particularly nefarious on it, and didn't go to the trouble of determining that this model of laptop should've had two drives. That's not foolproof, but it's going to foil 99%+ of these kinds of casual searches.<p>Of course if someone really suspects you personally and wants to scrutinize your machine in detail, that's another story, but just random dragnet-type searches of machines at borders are laughably easy to foil, with dozens of different methods, so the stopping-terrorism justification doesn't seem plausible.