Quote:
Originally Posted by RickyMaveety
2. Do you agree that in the digital age, contraband can be in a digital form and kept on computers?? Yes or No.
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Sorry for just cherry-picking but there is a fundamental property you are missing. The goal of customs is to prevent import of contraband. For physical stuff, ports (airports, sea ports, border stations, etc) are natural chokepoints and thus searching there is common sense. This excludes proportionality and the like.
Digital contraband, on the other hand, does not need to use those chokepoints. Whatever you want. you can download it once you are inside the country. But even if you should choose to import your data in that way:
- Flash memory and the like is tiny enough to allow you hide the chips just about anywhere. Secret data doesn't have to be huge. You could hide stuff inside a fake (large) coin, kept in your wallet. Or inside your watch. Or inside your calculator. It doesn't even have to be made out of metal or some other material the detectors are sensitive to. Customs will probably never detect such things.
- A properly enrypted and hidden memory region on your laptop will also probably never be found. The whole point of cryptography is to make the data seem random. Good luck differentiating random data in unused parts of the HD from enrypted data. Customs will probably never find this even if they know what they are looking for.
I say probably because you cannot say with 100% certainty and there are always idiot passengers or just lucky customs.
But again, this is security theater, not real security. And it is state-sponsored corporate espionage (Boing <> Airbus scandal from a few years ago). Much like with DRM, only regular types suffer while the pros just shrug it off.