12-14-2018 , 09:22 AM
Quote:Are you one of the travelers to the US who’ve been stopped, questioned, and required to hand over your electronic devices for search? Our apologies: there’s a good chance that we still have your data kicking around on a USB drive. Somewhere. Maybe. Unless we lost it, I guess.
The Office of Inspector General issued a report, published on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) website earlier this week, that details how well US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents have been following standard operating procedures for searching travelers’ electronic devices, as authorized by the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015 (TFTEA). The findings: not so great. CBP agents are allowed to carry out warrantless device searches at all 328 ports of entries in the US: they’re allowed to manually – i.e., visually – inspect travelers’ phones, laptops, tablets, thumb drives or other electronic devices as they look for content related to terrorism, child abuse imagery, or other material that smells of the criminal. Beyond that, in a pilot program launched in 2007 in 67 ports, they’re also allowed to copy device data onto a USB thumb drive and upload it on a platform called an Automated Targeting System (ATS) so they can carry out more complex searches on travelers’ data. The OIG found quite a few standard operating procedure (SOP) SNAFUs besides the unwiped drives, and they’re laying the blame on the CBP’s Office of Field Operations (OFO), which handles training manuals and conducts training sessions.
One SOP that’s unfortunately not all that standard: agents aren’t always turning off the internet access of the devices they search. That’s a no-no, since search is supposed to be restricted to only the data that’s physically on the device, not information stored on a remote server who knows where. In fact, even after an April 2017 memo was issued that required documentation of network connections having been disabled prior to a search, the OIG found that more than one-third – 14 out of 40 – searches had no documentation of internet access having been turned off, leaving the results of the searches “questionable.” And that’s when the CBP could manage to carry out any searches at all: a situation that came to a grinding halt when…Oops – I forgot to renew the license for the search software! According to the report, it’s up to the OFO to manage the equipment used to search electronic devices. Well, somebody dropped the ball on that one: some manager somewhere forgot to renew the annual software license for the search equipment on time.
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/12...sb-drives/