An odd thing about these searches is that they really have no chance of catching anything nefarious carried by anyone halfway intelligent. An acquaintance of mine smuggled digital documentary video out of Iran just by opening up a laptop and loosening one of the two hard drives' connectors so it no longer registered as attached; the brief border search at the airport of course saw one hard drive with nothing particularly nefarious on it, and didn't go to the trouble of determining that this model of laptop should've had two drives. That's not foolproof, but it's going to foil 99%+ of these kinds of casual searches.
Of course if someone really suspects you personally and wants to scrutinize your machine in detail, that's another story, but just random dragnet-type searches of machines at borders are laughably easy to foil, with dozens of different methods, so the stopping-terrorism justification doesn't seem plausible.
That is why we call it "security theater" - because every informed person will realize it's a heap of bullshit that serves no purpose but to get people used to methods of a authoritarian police state. Terrorism is a retarded excuse, period, and anyone who uses it as their primary argument should be laughed out of the building.
I commend you for saying this out loud in a public forum. How things have changed in just a few years! Just after 9/11 you would have been laughed out of the building for pulling out the "security theater" card. It warms my heart to see so many people vocally & publicly calling out the bullshit governments are trying to pull on us, no matter if it's SOPA, PIPA, ACTA or whatever they will come up with next.
I've been thinking about this internet freedom movement quite a bit lately & I am convinced the single most powerful thing we can do is to come out of our anonymous hiding places & publicly declare our intentions. That's why I created my freedom.txt & hope others will do same: http://fr.anc.is/freedom.txt
Another good option is to take a 32-gig SD card, and re-label it as a 1 gig. Then fill the card with random output, reset the number of cylinders in Fdisk to match 1 gig, format a 1 gig partition and fill it with pictures of scenery. Put you encrypted data at some point after 1 gig on the raw device. To anyone looking at it casually, it will appear to be just a 1 gig card. Even if they see the empty space afterwards, with good encryption it should be indistinguishable from random noise.
Bonus points for modifying the firmware on the SD card so that it looks like 1 gig at the low level.
They don't use the forensic tools on everything that passes through, and an SD card full of landscape photos is a lot less likely to arouse suspicion than one full of unreadable encrypted data.
The core problem is, laws are not created result orientated.
When the people who are targeted, are the ones who avoid being caught, the result will be near zero.
We need intelligent accounting here.
For example, when the result of this law is: We spent 100 Million to catch 0 terrorists and 20 people for minor felonies.
Is it in the public interest to pay 5 Million for catching a person who downloaded an illegal movie?
The politicians should be accountable for these things, or they should say in advance "we try this for a month and if it doesn't work or is inefficient we stop it".
I also know that statistics are often manipulated, but that is another problem.
"The politicians should be accountable for these things, or they should say in advance 'we try this for a month and if it doesn't work or is inefficient we stop it'."
I think this goes back to how politicians are deathly afraid of ever, anywhere, being wrong. This seems to even preclude improving/changing their own positions on most things.
There is nothing wrong with realizing you were wrong and changing your opinion, rather there is something wrong with hanging onto a belief or opinion when the pile of evidence is not only against you but continues to grow.
Well given the fact I've had SD cards go through washing machines, dryers and even had a DS game get run over by a fully loaded truck and survived.
I guess you could literally eat a MicroSD card and deliver it safely and intact in another country. This would even make it better than smuggling something the old way (swallowing a condom) because an air bubble has the chance of showing up in an x-ray. A MicroSD card would likely be completely invisible. Any copper would obviously show up, but the amount is likely to be indistinguishable from the iron we digest and the iron in our blood that is concentrated around our intestinal walls.
Of course if someone really suspects you personally and wants to scrutinize your machine in detail, that's another story, but just random dragnet-type searches of machines at borders are laughably easy to foil, with dozens of different methods, so the stopping-terrorism justification doesn't seem plausible.