Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

*sigh*

So I guess the easiest thing to do if you're traveling to another country and returning is to replace your hard drive, fresh install the OS, install the minimum amount of programs and data that you need, and be ready to lose your equipment when you return to the good ol' U.S. of A.

From the article: In dissent, Judge Betty Fletcher wrote that the government should have had a better reason to search Cotterman other than him being a convicted in 1992 of child molestation.

“I add my voice to the chorus lamenting the apparent demise of the Fourth Amendment,” Fletcher wrote.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/04/border-search/

Bruce Schneier is an internationally-recognized expert in cryptography and computer security. He has an interesting proposal. First, you get a whole-disk encryption program and encrypt the entire disk. You create a normal key that you would remember. Then you create a massively random key: pound on the keyboard for a few minutes. Email the hash to a friend, preferably to one with whom you have a high level of privacy/protection with, your attorney or priest, for example. When you land wherever you're going, before you hit Customs, you delete your normal key, leaving only the highly random one. When they ask to inspect your laptop, you tell them truthfully that you cannot boot it as you do not have the key. Once you get through, email your friend from an internet cafe and get the key back.

A commenter said that this would not be a legal defense in England and could potentially lead to your arrest.

It occurs to me a similar technique, if you're traveling with your spouse, would be to send it to their webmail account and vice versa, assuming you do not have direct access to your spouse's account, since your spouse cannot be compelled to testify against you (at least last time I checked, I could be totally wrong).

There are those who say, well, if you have nothing to hide, why should you do something like this? I finally found a good response to that: just because I have nothing to hide doesn't give you the right to go poking around me. Privacy may not be a Constitutionally-protected right, that doesn't mean we can't get some every now and then.

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2009/07/securitymatters_0715

A district court ruled that searching laptops coming in to the country is legal and don't require a court order or probable cause.

So clean up your laptop before entering the US. A friend of mine bought a MacBook Air with its solid state hard drive and he'll access the files that he needs via .Mac online access: there will be nothing to access on his laptop when he comes in to the US.

http://www.dailybreeze.com/ci_9009312

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/22/1733251