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Okay, now that Dice has me going, thought I'd enlighten everyone that cares..which may be nobody.

If you're traveling outside the U.S., be cautious about anything on your hard drive. Coming back from my little jaunt, I made a stop-over in England for a couple of days personal time. Clearing customs with a laptop, I was directed to a small room where I was instructed to turn on my computer at which point a gentleman turned it towards him and proceded to do an \"explore\" of all my files.

Anything that had a jpg, gif or movie file extension was looked at. He found a file that was p/w protected and was loaded with pics. Before anything else was done, he called over another agent and then asked me for the p/w..I told him I'd put it in, he didn't need to know it which didn't go over really well but he did allow me to enter it. I'm sure he thought he'd struck a porn bonanza, what he found were pics of a damaged aircraft and some company files.

The process took around 30 minutes, sure am glad I didn't have another flight to catch. So, a word of warning..if you're traveling outside our borders and have a laptop you're bringing with you, make sure you purge anything that is even remotely sexual. I've no idea what my legal standing was as far as local laws but these folks were not the friendliest I've ever encountered..thought it best not to push any boundries.

OC

That is pretty violating, but at least over there they are checking things.

About 2 years ago i visited a friend in florida at the tail end of a work trip. My friend gave me a new sound card to install on my computer because my old one was dying. I had it in my carry on bag when it was examined (its just a chunk of metal with wires for those that have never seen one) and no one said a word.

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\"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives\"

Yeah, it's completely bullshit, and believe it or not, has been upheld as OK by the courts.

I've been following these stories a lot lately. If you have files that are of official government capacity, all you should have to do is show your ID and they will be done with you.

The reason they are doing this is to find child porn/molesters, etc. It is VERY invasive, and I don't like it. The question of proprietary information and personal information storage has come up, as the government hasn't had the best track record in keeping this type of data safe. There are ways around things, programs to encrypt your drive so that it doesn't appear encrypted, shipping your drive separately, not doing anything illegal, etc.

The other thing is, if they have physical possesion of your drive, they can get information off of it. VERY easily.

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