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[Rob <becida AT comcast.net>]

At  10/30/2008 07:20 PM,Roy Morgan wrote:

> On Oct 29, 2008, at 11:13 PM, bob ford wrote:
> > ... customs officials and police officers have been carrying out
> > warrantless searches of the contents of laptops, mobile phones and
> > other wireless devices.
>
>
> There is a lot more to this than would appear to the technically
> unfamiliar among us.  The topic area is Computer Forensics.  Some of
> our Guvmint agencies are really big into this.
>
> Along the hallway where I worked till early this year were the folks
> who assembled a database of known program files. This data helps
> investigators ignore standard stuff on a computer during a search for
> useful or interesting information.  The data about common files
> included the file name, program source, and an all important digital
> signature ("hash") of the file which dependably and uniquely
> identifies the file.
>
> The challenges in this situation are:
> - To be really sure that tools used in computer forensics really do
> what their producers say they do, and do not do things you don't want
> them to.
> - To be able to competently convince a jury that the search of the
> computer storage was done in a way that did not change any of the data
> - To be able to sift out the changing or changed information on the
> computer from the gobs and gobs  of normal program files that really
> are of no interest.
>
> Doing all this is quite a bit more involved than a customs agent
> looking at your laptop mailing list.
>
> For more info, see:  http://www.nsrl.nist.gov/
>
> Roy

I recall reading an article (not too long ago) about major companies 
not allowing their traveling executives to take the computer with 
them if they had to leave the country. Customs was (sometimes) taking 
the computers when they came thru US customs and giving it back 
'later' after they had sent it to a lab to check it out. This was not 
a search done at the counter.



Rob
becida AT comcast.net