PervScan rarely reprints items from other blogs, but a technology guru recently posted an account of the absurd search to which he was subject by Canadian customs officials. Here is the meat of it:

He asks to see my computer (a small Sony Vaio). I oblige. He spent a couple of minutes looking at it, rotating it, studying it, turning it around, flipping it over, looking it all up and down. I finally asked “are you looking for something?”. He said “the latch, to open it”. There is no latch, just lift the lid. “Ahhhh, got it”.

So, we have the laptop open now — he wants to turn it on. Before doing that — he asks “is it password protected?”. I said “some of it is”. This perplexed him — I don’t think he’s ever heard that before. So we turn it on. We are presented with a logon screen…

He asks me how to proceed. I was a bit dumbfounded at that point — what do you mean? “Well, what should I click on to log in”. I tried to explain what the three accounts were — Administrator used to, well, administer the machine. Family — used by, well, my kids to play games. Tkyte — used by, well “me”. He asked me to pick one. So I said let’s use tkyte, I know that one best.

He clicks on it and it asks for a password. He looks surprised and says “it needs a password”. I was like — that is OK, I have it, here you go… Now he is logged in. But — my desktop looks a tad different from most — there is no IE on the desktop, just the recycle bin and a folder called programs — nothing else.

He really doesn’t know what to do now. No special searching software, nothing. He looks at me and says “you know what we are doing here right?”. I said — not really (I knew what we were doing, I read the news and all, but just said “no”). “Well” he says “we are looking for pornography”. Ahh I say… Ok, no problem.

But he is stuck. There is nothing familiar. So he clicks on the start menu and finds “My Pictures”. You know, if I was into that — that is precisely where I would stick all of my porn — right there in “My Pictures”. He goes into it — and sees all of my folders. And all of my pictures, which we looked at. He said “wow, you travel a lot”, I said “yup”.

Now, after about 15 minutes of looking at my pictures (I have to resist the urge to point him to my favorites :) he shuts down my computer and says “Ok sir, thank you very much, have a nice trip”.

What an utter and complete waste of time. His, mine, all of it.

I have three accounts, tens of thousands of files. Each account sees a different set of files. I seriously doubt I would keep in “My Pictures” a folder full of “not good stuff”. Heck, I might encrypt the data, I might hide the file name, I might put it somewhere not obvious, I might use an account not visible on the logon window by default. I might do a lot of stuff.

The person doing the search — they were afraid of the computer. They did not use one. They did not know what they were looking for. They did not know how to look for it. I felt like giving him POINTERS as we were going through this. I had to bite my tongue and refrain from giving him tips. The reason — the last person on the planet you want to annoy — the customs people at a border crossing. They can really ruin your day if they want to.

It’s clear what the “not good stuff” was. Customs officials were searching for child pornography. But as the technologist and numerous commenters have pointed out, this customs official plainly had not undergone the least bit of training in forensic computing. He had no idea how to open the laptop, let alone search it for the thousand different ways a person could conceal illicit pornography. The technologist goes on to point out that he even had a USB drive with him that the agent did not bother to look at.

You can draw several conclusions from this absurd, wasteful episode. First, without disparaging the probably overworked agent, he had obviously been given a mandate — “Check all suspicious laptops” — that he could not fulfill. What’s more, the Canadian government is not likely to enable the mandate to be fulfilled by training its agents or hiring forensic examiners to work its borders. As a result, customs agents are struggling to enforce a protocol that will have little or no efficacy.

Second, this situation is probably not unique to Canada. Every politician will want to be the one to enact legislation fighting such evils as child pornography, but the same politicians will be hard-pressed to allocate funds to staff physical borders with cyber-agents.

Third, this means that child pornographers — and terrorists and ID thieves and scammers and fraudsters and so on — need only practice the barest minimum of security. If an episode such as this is the norm, you only need to hide, disguise, or encrypt a file, and you’ll cross the border unmolested.

Fourth, in spite of the ease with which you could evade these procedures, there will remain complete retards — such as this guy — who practically make desktop backgrounds of their kiddie porn, throw themselves into the arms of law enforcement, and thus convince the government that its anti-c.p. program is working just fine.

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