... 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.