Courtesy Christopher Voyce, here is a nice new invasion of privacy that is apparently under active discussion.
Comment:: Fuck you and the horse you rode in on! (Customs is supposed to protect people from things that are dangerous, not prevent them from drowning out obnoxious young children who sing the Fanta theme song for the bloody entirety of a six-hour long flight!)
Addendum: Writing "musics" was a typo, but it reminds me of a certain cat meme (and also whence it came), so I'm going to go with it. I meant to type "music", however. Damn governments have me all riled up... (not to mention the stress from my computer issues... my Mac passed its harddrive test, so we'll see how DiskWarrior does in a couple of days).
1 day ago
2 comments:
Mason, you're so idealistic sometimes. :-) After the first part of this decade, you can't be surprised by crap like this anymore... I'd heard of the laptop search authorization earlier (I'm pretty sure that's already in place in the US now), ipods are news to me but an obvious extension of the same problem.
Personally, I don't intend to fly with my laptop anymore. Given how little I travel that shouldn't be hard.
Cory Doctorow's new novel Little Brother is quite good, and IIRC there are links at the end to some tricks one can use to help guard your privacy. In the novel, they talk about making a hidden encrypted partition to keep stuff secret from DHS, which should be quite possible for today's users to do (the novel is set in early 2012, as best I can tell). The laptop news I read stated that people with encrypted laptops would be denied entry if they refused to give the encryption password, but if the police state goon doesn't know the partition is there s/he won't ask to open it...
If all else fails, there's the old school solution - portable CD player with headphones!
I think I'm more surprised than sad. I'll have to see what's in place in the US before my November flight. I couldn't find a reference to anything with my googling.
Not bringing my laptop on flights simply isn't an option for me. I need it for work for almost 100 % of the flights I take. Even if I don't need it officially that way (say, for a conference), I'd still want to use it for some work on the road.
Maybe if I get my grants (which include money to buy laptops), I'll have one laptop for flights and one for other stuff. I'm pretty sure a lot of people have separate work and home laptops for that purpose. Still, the idea of somebody going through my files at Customs makes my skin crawl. Sure, if one has something to hide, there are numerous ways to keep it hidden---these are annoying hoops rather than roadblocks---but this still feels like yet another new low (whether or not one considers it surprising).
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