Government warns travelers of laptop threat in secret document

by Ned Levi on September 16, 2008

Turns out the Department of Homeland Security isn’t the only agency confiscating travelers’ laptops. Foreign governments are targeting the PCs of US corporate and government personnel traveling abroad, according to a secret document released last week. And it’s about to get worse.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) policy of confiscating laptops, PDAs, cell phones and other electronic devices of US citizens reentering the country is a controversial one. But until now, no one knew that the threat went both ways.

Here’s what the government had to say in the classified document, “Foreign Travel Threat Assessment: Electronic Communications Vulnerabilities,” which was released on WikiLeaks.

Foreign governments routinely target the computers and other electronic devices and media carried by U.S. corporate and government personnel traveling abroad to gather economic, military, and political information.

Use of cell phones, laptops, and personal digital assistants (PDAs) in foreign countries exposes these devices to unauthorized access and theft of data by criminal and foreign government elements. Travelers should assume that they cannot protect electronically stored data and should not transmit sensitive government, personal, or proprietary information on the Internet or through telecommunications equipment.

If you’re a business traveler, you might want to seriously consider taking some of the precautions I suggested in my last post on this subject. When I travel, there is little or no personal or business information stored in my laptop. Unless I’m going to work on a document on the plane flying abroad, my laptop is essentially little more than a smart terminal which I use to connect to my office via the Internet. This thwarts anyone from obtaining my personal and business information and records, including thieves, if my laptop is stolen.

If you’re a casual traveler, you might not think DHS’ warning means much for you, but that could change in the near future. It appears that some form of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which aims to establish a multinational standard for anti-piracy enforcement, is coming, and may be coming soon.

The trouble is we don’t know what ACTA is going to actually say, or when it will go into effect. As reported this summer in the LA Times and elsewhere, it’s being negotiated in secret, as are all trade pacts. ACTA is being negotiated between Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Jordan, Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports the pact could have serious repercussions for travelers.

The ACTA draft is a scary document. If a treaty based on its provisions were adopted, it would enable any border guard, in any treaty country, to check any electronic device for any content that they suspect infringes copyright laws. They need no proof, only suspicion.

They would be able to seize any device – laptop, iPod, DVD recorder, mobile phone, etc – and confiscate it or destroy anything on it, merely on suspicion. On the spot, no lawyers, no right of appeal, no nothing.

It looks as though the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), through the very willing Bush Administration, has enlisted most of the developed countries of the world to be their private police force, funded by our tax dollars, to ferret out ripped CDs and DVDs at the border. I guess finding out that someone has copied a DVD they own to their iPod will make us safer from terrorism.

If you think things are bad at the border now, with random confiscations of U.S. citizen laptops when you reenter the country, wait until CBP starts confiscating all those iPods from your teenage children when you return home from a vacation out of the country to look for illegal copies of the latest Alicia Keys or Amy Winehouse songs, and never returns them.

Can you imagine the hullabaloo when that happens? I sure don’t want to be in earshot of those teens. Those CBP agents will never know what hit them.

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Tagged as: ACTA, CBP, cell phones, DHS, Homeland Security, ipod, laptops, PDAs, RIAA

  • Craig

    What’s with all this FUD (fear/uncertainty/doubt) about taking iPods? You can’t tell a pirate song from a purchased song just by looking at the iPod. They are looking for documents and spreadsheets, not music. What do you gain from spreading this type of misinformation?

  • Ned Levi

    Craig, I don’t often respond to comments of my columns, but you are incorrect about about ACTA (The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). The whole point of this treaty is to impose strict enforcement of intellectual property rights related to Internet activity and trade of information-based, and other intellectual property. The treaty will establish an international coalition against copyright infringement, imposing strong, top-down enforcement of copyright laws in developed nations.

    The currently proposed agreement would allow and in fact, direct border officials to search laptops, MP3 players, and cellular phones for copyright-infringing content, including, but not limited to, music, movies, books, photographs, and other documents and files.

    Take a look at the original discussion paper which was used to start the ACTA treaty negotiations: http://file.sunshinepress.org:54445/acta-proposal-2007.pdf

    Also take a look at the Wikileaks page on ACTA which gives a good explanation of what’s going on: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Proposed_US_ACTA_multi-lateral_intellectual_property_trade_agreement

    Finally, here’s an excerpt from the official announcement from the US Trade Representative about ACTA,

    In a major step in the fight against intellectual property rights (IPR) counterfeiting and piracy, U.S. Trade Representative Susan C. Schwab today announced the United States and some of its key trading partners will seek to negotiate an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

    “Global counterfeiting and piracy steal billions of dollars from workers, artists and entrepreneurs each year and jeopardize the health and safety of citizens across the world,” said Ambassador Schwab. “The United States looks forward to partnering with many of our key trading partners to combat this global problem. Today launches our joint efforts to confront counterfeiters and pirates across the global marketplace.

    The “Global counterfeiting and piracy” referred to clearly includes music, movies, games, and other electronically played entertainment.

  • http://www.ffocus.org Bruce InCharlotte

    That’s all well and good, but it still doesn’t indicate why me carrying an iPod with 6000 songs on it is a problem if I own all of the songs 10,000 miles away on CD’s in my den in Peoria.

    If someone had obtained songs illegally, how could ACTA tell when they are going through Customs into Elbonia?

  • Ned Levi

    Bruce, you’re looking at this treaty as though it should be logical, fair, and lawful. This is a treaty, in my opinion, clearly being written by lobbyists for the recording industry.

    The RIAA believes that if you want to listen to copyrighted music on your digital MP3 music player, you should go to Amazon or iTunes and buy a digital copy there, not rip a CD intended to be listened to on a CD player. Anything else is infringement in their eyes — even if they have no way of catching you do it.

    Read what RIAA has said in testimony before Congress.

    “Nor does the fact that permission to make a copy in particular circumstances is often or even routinely granted, necessarily establish that the copying is a fair use when the copyright owner withholds that authorization. In this regard, the statement attributed to counsel for copyright owners in the MGM v. Grokster case is simply a statement about authorization, not about fair use.”

    So your ability to continue to make copies of your own CDs on your own iPod is entirely a matter of their sufferance, or in other words, unless they specifically state you can copy the contents of the CD you purchased to the iPod you own, and use it solely for yourself, you can’t do it. When was the last time you saw a CD which said on its jacket, “go ahead and rip it to your iPod?”

    Through their testimony RIAA has clearly stated they absolutely do care about you “carrying an iPod with 6000 songs…if I (you) own all of the songs 10,000 miles away on CD’s in my den in Peoria.” Furthermore, they consider those 10,000 songs to be illegal copies. They believe you purchased the CDs to play on your CD player, and that you should be purchasing separate digital copies of those songs for your iPod. As far as they are concerned your iPod should be confiscated at the border, and at the very least all those songs should be erased.

    If you doubt that I’m right about this, and think my interpretation is all wet, start reviewing RIAA testimony before Congress and take a look at their website. More important, take a long look at the initial proposed draft of ACTA and tell me it doesn’t make border patrol agents copyright police with the full power to confiscate or destroy, any material “they” consider to be pirated, without any due process for you to prove “fair use,” and that the copies are legal under copyright law, which many, including the lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Association and the ACLU, believe is the case.

    If you want to discuss this further and in more detail, let’s move over to Tripso’s forums at TalkingTravelers.com

    Until Congress steps up to protect citizen rights with regard to copyright law and far use, we will continue to be sorely abused. Personally, I am a stickler for not violating copyrights. Nevertheless I believe that ripping CDs or DVDs you own on to your iPod for your personal enjoyment is a “fair use” of those products. At some point Congress and the President have to bring 19th century copyright law into the 21st century.

  • Ed Kummel

    The key issue in the song copying arena is that when you purchase a CD, you are purchasing two things. 1) the plastic substrate, liner notes and other asundry plastics and, 2) a license to listen to the contents of the CD on the device that the media was created to be played on. I believe the reason for this is that theoretically, someone could be using the license to listen to the CD at the exact time you are listening to the song on your iPod. This means that two licenses are being used when only one has been purchased!
    I suppose, semantically, once you RIP the music from your CD, you can then destroy the CD to prevent that violation. And when you RIP the music, in the comments section of the MP3, you can put a comment in it like “for my own personal use only”. If nothing else, it shows conscienciousness in the spirit of the license use.
    But you know, that is all moot to me. My laptop is encrypted with PGP, my phone is locked and also encrypted with PGP, including my 6gb microSD card which holds my music. So go ahead, confiscate my computer or phone…you’ll get nothing out of it because my PGP is configured to erase the devices if the password is brute forced…and you know what?
    Ed
    web/gadget guru

  • Keith Guthmiller

    I think the truly important point here is the eroding of our rights as human beings. It can be said that this is done for money and that may very well be true. For example, water is not guaranteed to be a basic human need but a commodity that can be bought and sold. Yes, trying to prevent crime is important. BUT when the ability to protect oneself and stop others is taken out of our hands and handed to a select few, then we have a Draconian government. Our rights are being violated everyday and more rights will be removed as time passes. The thing that misses most people is that WE, the people of our respective countries, HIRE people to run the country for us IN OUR BEST INTERESTS. That means those employees (representatives, leaders, etc) must listen to what the collective will of the people is. But no. That is not the case anymore. Our employees tell US what to do! As a business owner, I have fired people for that kind of attitude. So what needs to happen is that everyone must lose their awe and fear of our “governments”, realize that we can pull them out of office just as easily as we hired them and take back our dignity. If this doesn’t happen, we lose. Oh and the government secret meetings? Garbage! All government must be transparent. That is a principle. So folks, no matter what the issue is, laptop searches, wiretapping, cameras everywhere, basic human rights being discarded, please realize that you can take action and stop this mess. If you are one that believes our governments have created a better world, look around; global climate change, clear cutting, war, famine hunger economic recession, erosion of human rights, abuse of power, bailouts to companies that cannot be self-sufficient, the list goes on and on. Sorry I babbled, this is not very organized. Very emotional topic for me.

  • Jon

    The digital age has made copying of virtual media cheap and easy. We’re not going back to the 19th century. So maybe we should eliminate copyright law for virtual media. Then the copyright lawyers could focus on photocopied books & photos, pirated CDs, DVDs, and other physical stuff, etc. -the things that criminals do for a profit. And society (via private organizations or government) could focus on how to keep their favorite writers, film-makers, musicians and artists alive and working.

  • http://www.tripso.com/author/ned/ Ned Levi

    Jon, it may be cheap and easy to steal someone else’s work, but it’s still someone else’s work. I have before and will continue to protect my original copyrighted work. Most people are honest and don’t steal it and recognize that someone else created it.

    My work has value to me and I’m not giving it away. We need to continue to protect and original and derivative work with copyright law. Society needs that.

    You’ve got to protect more than favorite writers. Guess how they became favorite writers? Answer: the wrote, and wrote and wrote until they became favorite writers. If we only protect those at the top, soon there won’t be anyone at the top.

    Sorry Jon, while you’re entitled to your opinion, in my opinion, you couldn’t be more wrong.

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