January 18, 2010

Tangier, Morocco

If you’re on the run and looking for a place to lay low, one city you should consider is Tangier.

You have to start with a bit of history– as far back as the days of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, Tangier was an important commercial center due to its location at the entrance of the Mediterranean.

For the next 2,000 years, the city was conquered by successive nations, including the Arabs, Berbers, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English. In 1912, though, several countries signed a treaty declaring Tangier a politically neutral, economically liberal ‘international’ city, open to all nationalities and businesses.

As such, Tangier attracted a shady cast of characters ranging from international bankers and businessmen to foreign diplomats to expat artists, as well as legions upon legions of spies. People came from all over Europe, Africa, and the Middle East to Tangier, and its place in history, particularly in espionage, is unparalleled.

Movies and storybooks paint a romantic picture of the city… and all of Morocco for that matter– the name conjures the same imagery as Casablanca, including my favorite scene from the classic movie:

Unfortunately, Tangier is now a long way off from Bogart’s day. Sure, it was once quite picturesque, laden with European architecture amid Berber traditions. Today, while there are still some nice parts of town, the whole place is generally run-down, as if the maid hasn’t shown up since 1956.

The best analogy for Tangier is probably Havana, Cuba; Tangier was to the Europeans and Arabs what Havana was to North and South Americans– fully of tourists, wealth, hedonism, shady deals, and spies… lots of spies.

Similarly, the last 50-years has been rather unkind to both cities, due largely to an exodus of foreigners and their capital. But while its original wealth has faded, Tangier has still retained its ‘can-do’ (i.e. corrupt) outlook… and this is part of what makes it a great place to disappear:

First, the costs are reasonable… not cheap, but reasonable, so it won’t break the bank to lay low there for a while. Real estate (if you would consider buying there) will set you back around $1,500 per square meter for a clean place with a sliver ocean view, roughly 10% of the price in Rome.

Renting a modest apartment will cost you less than $500/month.

Food is also quite cheap, and you can buy fresh vegetables, herbs, and spices from the markets in the same place that merchants did thousands of years ago.

Second, language is not a problem, so you will be able to communicate. One of the strange side effects of being conquered so many times is that the locals managed to pick up quite a few languages. Most people you will meet speak English, French, Spanish, and Arabic.

Third, the city is crazy. For first-timers, it can be shocking, and even for hardened veterans it can be overwhelming. You have to constantly be on guard against being fleeced, accosted, harassed, or otherwise annoyed by your new friend who wants to ‘make you very special price’ on a Moroccan rug.

In other words, most people are not going to want to come looking for you in Morocco because it’s simply too much hassle.

Fourth, everything is for sale– and negotiable. Do you want you passport stamp backdated? Not stamped at all? Do you want to eliminate all record of your visit? Do you want to trade for goods and services in gold? Assume a new identity?

Tangier is the place where all of this can happen before you even leave the port.

January 4, 2010

Reporting from: Malaga, Spain
Welcome back; I hope you had a relaxing holiday.

I spent 10-days with my family combing through the Italian countryside and drinking some unbelievable wine from a local grape called “Primitivo.” It’s a distant cousin of the California Zinfandel, and is only found in this region. A bottle from the best vineyard will set you back about 9 euro.

For New Year’s Eve, I saw a fireworks show that was simultaneously the most disorganized and explosive I have ever witnessed… so literally for me, the new year began with a bang.

I’m optimistic about 2010. I know a lot of people in the financial community who think that ‘this is it,’ that 2010 shall bear the worst economic cataclysm in history, causing widespread doom and agony.

Sure the conditions are ripe for stock/bond market crashes, a currency crisis, and multiple sovereign debt defaults.  But these are a far cry from a gloomy end of human civilization.

It’s not that I have tremendous faith in world ‘leaders’ (as ridiculous a moniker as that is to use); last month’s debacle in Copenhagen only further underscored how perverse and ineffective the existing political process is, and everyone is really starting to see it.

The Social Contract is deteriorating rapidly, and in the end, the one thing that you can count on is that people will ultimately do what they perceive to be in their self-interest.  This is what drives markets and trends.

As the protracted effects of government stupidity become more apparent, one such trend that I see emerging this year is the rise of the sovereign individual– the rebirth of the multiple flags approach.

I’ve talked about this before and I wanted to start off the year with a quick primer since it is a recurring theme of this letter. To be more specific, I absolutely implore you to plant multiple flags as part of your New Year resolutions.

The idea, originally conceived by international finance guru Harry Schultz, suggests diversifying different aspects of your identity across multiple ‘flags,’ or geographic jurisdictions.

As an example, Schultz coined the term ‘three-flags’ in the 1960s, suggesting that an individual should have citizenship in one country, residence in another, and businesses in another.

Later authors expanded on this idea by adding other ‘flags,’ including places to bank, places to ‘play,’ places to house electronic assets, etc.

Many writers today talk about ‘five flags’ or ‘six flags,’ but frankly I don’t see a limit on the number of things we can diversify geographically: email, citizenship, residence, banking, brokerages, gold/silver deposits, business registration, e-commerce, customer base, phone/fax, financial instruments, postal mail, etc.

So what’s the point? Why should you do this?

Diversifying geographically increases your freedom, your privacy, your sovereignty, and potentially reduces your tax burden. It protects you against bank failures, market changes, litigation, divorce, overzealous governments, and “NGC’s” (non-government criminals).

Perhaps even more importantly, planting multiple flags expands your existing contact base and opens a lot of doors to new opportunities.

Think of it like a life insurance policy– even if the worst never happens, it gives you great peace of mind and in many cases can rank as a significant asset.

While everyone recognizes these benefits of life insurance, no one actually expects to die anytime soon… so they put shopping for a policy on the back burner, sometimes until it’s too late.

In this case, the time to start diversifying internationally and planting multiple flags is now… before it’s too late– before currency controls are imposed, before tax codes change, before the last remaining foreign banks close their doors to foreigners.

I could cite you examples all day long, but I will list just a few hypothetical cases–

Imagine getting sued, losing the case, and having your financial assets commandeered by the court. Now imagine if your assets were safely offshore in another country.

Imagine being investigated by the government and having your email archives turned over to the authorities. Now imagine if your email server were in another country.

Imagine being robbed (taxed) by the government because your business is structured within its jurisdiction. Now imagine if your business were registered in another country.

Imagine having everything in your home country taken from theft, coercion, and litigation. Now imagine having cash and gold locked away in a secure, private vault overseas.

Imagine the social decay in your city getting so bad that riots and violent crime are a common occurrence. Now imagine having property overseas.

I’m sure you get the idea. Putting your assets, your business, your citizenship, your residency, your family’s livelihood under one flag, one government, is putting all of your eggs in one very frail, weak basket.

Technology makes it incredibly easy to diversify, and I see more and more people waking up to that reality each day. It takes only moments to set up an offshore email account, a few minutes to lease a private vault, and just a couple of hours to set up a company in Singapore.

The possibilities are truly endless, you just need to find the right tools and the right flags that work for you. Yes, even if you are a US citizen who is taxed on worldwide income, there are still several options available to live a multiple flags lifestyle.

I will be discussing the options in future letters, as well as individual case studies.

We all know that Google is in bed with the government… I suppose it’s nice that CEO Eric Schmidt is at least open about it.

In a recent interview with CNBC, Schmidt effectively admits that Google archives everything about a user– web searches (google), email and contact lists (gmail), online office documents (google docs), photographs (picasa), text and voice messages (google voice), and even a user’s current location (google maps).

The depth of this information is a bureaucrat’s fantasy, and as Schmidt indicates, Google is obliged to hand it over.

Google is obviously very convenient; its features are powerful and can make life very easy… it’s really unfortunate, however, that they are subject to the oversight of an increasingly intrusive and corrupt government.

This is simply a choice that you as a user have to make– privacy over convenience. If you fall in the ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ camp, giving the government access to your entire electronic life may be perfectly acceptable.

For the rest of us, there are great solutions that provide a lot of conveniences.

I’ve discussed electronic privacy in the past and promised to give you a list of countries that don’t snoop on phone and email conversations. You can obviously scratch off most of North America and Europe, but there are still countries that respect individuals’ privacy.

The folks at Cryptohippie were kind enough to do the heavy lifting for me, ranking 52 major countries on issues such as constitutional protection of privacy, data retention, ‘loose’ warrants, financial tracking, and likelihood of data inspection at border checkpoints.

You can download the full report here.

Although their list is definitely incomplete and needs updating, I generally agree with their rankings.  Sweden and Thailand, which have strong elements of electronic snooping, need to be moved higher up the list.

According to CryptoHippie, the top 10 electronic police states include North Korea, China, Belarus, Russia, UK, France, Germany, and of course, the United States.

From my assessment, countries that respect electronic privacy include Panama, Costa Rica, most developed Caribbean nations like the Bahamas, Brazil, the Philippines, and Switzerland.   

One email provider you may want to consider is Australia-based Fastmail. As the name suggests, the technology is incredibly fast, and contains some of the most customizable features I have ever seen. For example, you can set a ‘distress’ password that, when typed in, will lock down your email account for a defined period of time.

Best of all, while Australia is a ‘middle of the road’ electronic police state, the Fastmail founders have taken on a multiple flags approach, basing their primary and backup servers in different countries outside of Australia.

If you have your own domain for email, e.g. yourname@yourdomain.com, you can easily change your domain’s setting to point your email servers to Fastmail. You will never notice a difference in service and can rest a bit easier knowing your email archives aren’t feeding bureaucrats.

I think it’s a sharp idea for anyone who takes privacy seriously to plant an ‘electronic flag’ somewhere other than his country of residence. In terms of living a more free, multiple flag lifestyle, it’s definitely the easiest, most cost effective thing you can do.

Sending an unsecured email is like shouting something across a crowded room… if you expect the information to be kept private that is probably one of the worst methods available. You might as well rent a billboard so everyone can see.

The problem with the internet is that there are so many touch points. Email traffic is routed across a hierarchy of networks, and between the sender, the receiver, the various email hosts, internet service providers, etc., there are a number of nodes that have access to our data. Consequently, network transmissions are anything but private and secure.

Governments figured this out a long time ago.  In the United States, for example, the government set up a series of special encrypted networks that function just like the internet.  The Department of State and Department of Defense (ok, offense) uses a network called JWICS.

JWICS, pronounced Jay Wicks, stands for Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System– essentially; it is a secure version of the regular Internet.  Special computers that sit in buildings with no windows communicate with each other through high level encryption algorithms.

Functionally, JWICS looks similar to the Internet that everyone else uses– there’s email, web pages, etc.  From a technical perspective, though, JWICS is highly secure, and the government uses it to transmit classified information up to the Top Secret level.

While you can’t plug in to the government’s classified networks, you can use free software to create your own secure environment.

PGP, which stands innocuously for “Pretty Good Privacy,” is the closest you could possibly get to NSA level encryption.  The algorithm uses a unique ‘public key / private key’ model that has confounded government authorities around the world.

It works something like this:

Everyone who uses PGP has two ‘keys’, a public key and a private key.  For a physical example, imagine you literally have two physical keys and a lock box.  The public key is appropriately named because you give it out to everyone… you go down to the locksmith and make hundreds of keys to hand out to your friends and business associates.

Anyone who wants to send you a secure message can write it on a piece of paper and put it in the lock box.  Using their public key, they can lock the box, but they cannot unlock it.  The only person who can unlock the box to read the message is you, using your private key.  Naturally, you keep your private key secret.

In the email world, it essentially works the same. The sender will encrypt a message using your public key. Once this happens, the email message will look like a bunch of gibberish. This gibberish is what is sent across the network, so anyone who intercepts the message will only be able to see the gibberish, not the actual message.

Once you receive the message, you decrypt the gibberish with your private key, and voila, the original message is displayed in plain text.

So how secure is PGP? In a word, very. Nothing is unbreakable, but it would take teams of analysts and supercomputers quite a number of years to crack the code, if they could do it at all. Bottom line, governments will have to REALLY want your data to invest the time and money into cracking the code.

I’ll skip the math, but the PGP algorithm is based on matching together incredibly large prime numbers– I’m talking millions of digits. Huge. Mathematicians occasionally ‘discover’ new prime numbers, and while most of the world laughs off these nerdy academics, each new prime number adds a whole new dimension to encryption technology.

So how do you implement this?

PGP caters to big businesses looking to secure their communications, though they do have some solutions available for individuals.  Personally, I would recommend using the ‘free’ version of PGP under the GNU general public license.

It’s called the GNU Privacy Guard (GPG), available at GnuPG.org/download

All the documentation is available right there on the website; just read, and it will tell you exactly what to do.

Once you have GPG installed, I suggest installing FireGPG as well (getfiregpg.org) if you use Firefox as your web browser.  FireGPG is an add-on for Firefox that can instantly encrypt/decrypt plain text right within your browser window; if you use a web-based email like Yahoo! or Gmail, FireGPG is a very easy solution.

It was with great irony and despicable deceit that UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown was commemorating the fall of communism in Berlin on Monday.  In his remarks, he insisted that the tide of history was moving towards our “best hopes,” and praised the people who helped end tyranny and bring down the wall.

Too bad it was all poppycock.

Simultaneously, Brown’s government back in London was announcing its plans for the rather innocuous sounding “Interception Modernisation Programme,” which is a law that grants the British government access to the phone records, emails, and web searches of its citize… er, subjects.

To be clear, ALL European Union member states, including the UK, are already required by EU Directive 2006/24/EC to retain private electronic data for a period of 6 to 12 months. The information that governments must collect includes the date, time, duration, source, destination, and device information of all electronic communication, to include phone and email.

I came face to face with this directive while attempting to use a public internet terminal in Italy earlier this year– the attendant was required to make a copy of my passport, and I was notified that my web activity would be logged.  Needless to say, I politely declined.

Despite these utterly draconian measures, the British government believes that the EU directive does not go far enough.

Now, the Interception Modernisation Programme plans to force all electronic communication providers (wireless companies, cable companies, internet service providers, etc.) to keep a record of every communication by every customer for a period of 1-year, and make the data available to 653 public agencies.

The most insulting part about the program is that the communication providers will be reimbursed for this inconvenience at taxpayer expense to the tune of about $360 million each year.

The UK turned into a surveillance state long ago… and unfortunately the trend is getting worse, not better.

There are legions of yellow vested government do-gooders in constant presence across Britain’s cities without any apparent mission other than to exist and take notice.

Similarly, during one stay at a swanky London hotel, I counted 7 CCTV cameras on the route from the hotel bar to my room.  I once counted over 20 cameras at a busy London intersection.

In fact, signs reading “CCTV Monitoring in Progress” are ubiquitous, even in places where there is absolutely, positively no camera present. It’s almost as if the government intends to spook people into behaving properly, just like the “Do not open door, ALARM WILL SOUND” signs you see in the US. 

Hey, nobody wants to be the guy responsible for the alarm sounding… better keep that behavior in check.

Ironically, the UK’s spying program has its roots in a 1985 law called the Interception of Communications Act; at the time, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the practice of intercepting communications violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Ah, once upon a time, privacy was a human right? But then again, we were all fighting godless Soviet commies at the time and went out of our way to underscore individual freedom and liberty. 

Now our governments feel the need to protect us from angry men hiding in caves, damn the consequences.

I think there must be a lot of boiling frogs in the UK that are starting to notice how hot the pot is becoming.  Sadly, the reality of all governments is that once a power is given to the politicians, it is rarely relinquished.

Consequently, do not expect the British government, or any other, to sound the ‘All Clear!’ bell and suddenly abdicate its ability to monitor the citizenry.

So… what to do?

We’ve talked about anonymous mobile phone calls, offshore email accounts and TrueCrypt hard drive encryption before.  In addition to these tools, there are email encryption platforms available like EndCryptor (www.endcryptor.com) and PGP, which I will review in greater detail in the future.

For a more private web surfing experience, you can use a browser add-on like Tor (https://www.torproject.org/overview.html.en), and go through a secure tunnel VPN that will change your IP address, like www.publicVPN.com

Let me know  if you’d like more information on these tools and I can write a more detailed article.  Furthermore, I plan on releasing a list of countries that I have traveled to where privacy is still the rule, not the exception.

Do you think your government doesn’t have the means to listen to your phone calls?

Think again.

Governments from around the world, not just exclusive to North America, have technologically advanced eavesdropping programs which can capture mobile phone conversations without anyone ever knowing.  And just in case the government isn’t so technologically advanced, they coerce wireless carriers into coughing up encryption schemes (cough, cough, Russia)…

Unless you have your own two-way encryption or intricate scrambling mechanism, there is no way for you to prevent this eavesdropping. What you can do, though, is make sure the government doesn’t know who’s on the line.

Right now, there are two key data points which identify callers to snooping federal agents:

First, the wireless signal from your conversation transmits unique identification codes that link back directly to your specific wireless account… and your wireless account contains a host of personal information– name, address, social security number, and naturally, phone number.

Second, most legitimate mobile phone handsets and data devices have a special serial called an IMEI number.  IMEI stands for “International Mobile Equipment Identity,” and it serves to uniquely identify a piece of wireless equipment.

In theory, the IMEI number is only associated with the equipment; in practice, though, wireless companies monitor and track who is using a particular piece of equipment… their systems are constantly matching a handset’s IMEI number to the subscriber data found on the SIM chip.

You can see your own IMEI number by pressing “*#06#” (as in star-pound-zero-six-pound) on your mobile phone. The number indicated on your screen is absolutely positively linked to your wireless account.

In other words, when you use your handset, the wireless company knows it’s you, and so does the government.  Just like unencrypted email communication, mobile phone conversations are about as private as shouting something across a crowded subway station.

Personally, this bothers me on a philosophical level… not to mention that there are times when I just want to have a private conversation with somebody without having to worry about which federal agency is taking notes to put in my file.

As you could imagine, I have a solution.

Do you remember when you first signed up for your mobile phone service? In many places you have to give the company all sorts of information and identification– even for prepaid service. It’s actually quite revolting.

There are some countries, though, where buying prepaid mobile phone service doesn’t require three forms of ID, a stool sample, and a reference letter from your priest… you just walk up to the counter, give them the money, and they give you a SIM chip. Simple.

While there are several countries where you can do this (Uruguay, China, etc.), I believe that Panama poses the best solution. Here’s what you do:

The next time you find yourself in Panama, go to any shopping mall or electronics store and buy a prepaid mobile phone SIM chip– the one you want to buy is called “Mas Movil Roaming Prepago,” and it should cost you about $5.

Mas Movil Roaming Prepago is a prepaid mobile phone service that was specifically designed for use outside of Panama– it works very well in the United States, South America, Spain, France, Belgium, Ukraine, and Russia.  Sorry Canadians, no service there to the best of my knowledge, eh.

Your shiny new MasMovil SIM chip will have a unique Panamanian phone number that is NOT tied to your name. The next thing you need to do is purchase a new mobile phone– there are plenty of cheap phones in Panama to choose from, many ranging from $10 to $20.

Again, this new phone will NOT be tied to your name personally.  It is important that you ONLY use this phone for your Mas Movil Roaming Prepago chip, otherwise it could compromise the anonymity of your new phone’s IMEI number.

Lastly, since Mas Movil Roaming Prepago is a prepaid service, you will need to buy several top-up cards to charge the balance on your account; these top-up cards come in a variety of denominations– I would suggest an initial balance of at least $20 and recommend that you buy a few spare top-up cards to recharge your account once you’ve left Panama.

Naturally, it would behoove you to pay cash.

Now, for the price of less than $50, you have a new phone, phone number, and charged-up SIM chip, none of which are tied to your name.  When you return to your home country, you will be able to call anyone you wish knowing that you are completely anonymous.

Call rates are $0.99/minute in the United States, so use sparingly.

Last month, a Wyoming bank employee was routinely emailing some loan documents to a customer’s personal Gmail account. It sounds like a simple enough task, yet somehow the employee made an enormous error.

Not only did he erroneously attach a file to the email that included the names, addresses, tax IDs, and loan information for 1,325 customers, but he sent it to the wrong Gmail address!

We’ve all been there… victims of our own fat-finger negligence– good intentions gone horribly wrong because our technology moves so quickly.

And so, with pulse pounding and panic setting in, the bank employee immediately sent a follow-up email to the mistaken address, pleading with the account owner to delete the sensitive data and contact him as soon as possible. And then he waited…

After several days had passed without response, the bank contacted Google for help. They wanted information about the unintended email recipient– is the Gmail account even active? What is the account holder’s name? Would Google take steps to ensure that the confidential information is not open or disclosed?

Google refused to comply without a court order, so the bank sued… and in this particular case the wheels of justice moved rather swiftly– within a few weeks, US District Judge James Ware ordered Google to temporarily deactivate the recipient’s Gmail account and disclose information about the account to the court and to the bank.

Days later, Google and the bank jointly announced that the issue had been resolved… but because of the court order, the user’s email account has to remain deactivated until the judge hears the case again on October 5th.

I read through the case files with great interest because, frankly I was disgusted that ‘the honorable’ Mr. Ware could compel Google to deactivate an individual’s email account.

Sure, the bank employee made an unfortunate mistake. But email accounts are deeply personal, even more than physical home mailboxes. I wondered if the employee had accidentally put a physical package in the mail to the wrong mailing address, would a federal judge direct FBI agents to beat down the recipient’s door?

Doubtful. Rather the judge would have told the bank, “Sorry guys, but you’d better start notifying customers of the security breach pronto.”

Advances in technology have a significant impact on the world; as I am fond of saying, technology is key economic growth engines over the long-term. But governments and regulatory authorities have a bad habit of abusing the ease and comforts that technology provides as a means to erode personal privacy.

Email usage, web searches, e-commerce, credit cards, etc. all make life easier and more convenient for consumers. They also make it easier for the government to keep tabs on our activity and whereabouts– and as this Google case demonstrates, the burden of proof required to violate an individual’s electronic privacy is quite low.

To take a page from WG Hill’s ‘Three Flags’ approach, I believe wholeheartedly in spreading one’s sovereign risk among different jurisdictions– establishing residency in a country that values foreign visitors, while maintaining citizenship in a country that doesn’t tax worldwide income and basing assets in yet another no-tax/low-tax jurisdiction.

To this approach, however, I would add another ‘flag’: jurisdictions in which an individual should base sensitive and electronic assets. The goal is to ensure that the computer server where your email is hosted, as well as the company which owns/manages the servers, are both outside of your country of residence and citizenship.

Clearly there is going to be some element of counterparty risk in any transaction that involves more than one person; but if the Gmail recipient had been using an email account in, say, Singapore or Switzerland, the chances of a foreign judge ordering the account to be deactivated are slim to none… and slim’s out of town.

Below I provide a links to a few offshore email providers whose servers are located overseas. With a properly configured account, you can switch to an offshore provider and still keep your existing email address:

Neobox-  http://www.neomailbox.com (Netherlands)

e-mail.ph-  http://www.e-mail.ph (Philippines)

HongKong Mail-  http://www.mymailhk.com (Hong Kong)

mBox-  http://www.mbox.com.sg (Singapore)

Green-  http://www.mails.ch (Switzerland)

Swiss Mail-  http://www.swissmail.org (Switzerland)

Remember, using these providers decreases the likelihood of your email account being confiscated or deactivated by your home government– offshore email hosting does not guarantee privacy or security unless you use encryption schemes (to be discussed in the future).

If you have suggestions for other providers, please let me know.

He was brown.

A few inches shy of 6 feet tall and well-dressed in a tailored suit, my guess was that he was of Lebanese origin given his easy command of French, English, and Arabic… but regardless, he was standing in the US citizen line at the airport immigration checkpoint.

I don’t know exactly what was said between the man and the border patrol agent, but the encounter was brief; within 30-seconds he was being escorted to the secondary screening room.

Given that I had briefly chatted with this gentleman on the plane from Tokyo while waiting for the lavatory in the business class cabin, I considered him to be a ‘single-serving friend’ and felt comfortable enough to approach him later when I saw him later waiting for his wife.

“What happened back there?”

“Oh, typical. He asked me how long I was gone and if I had purchased anything while abroad… I said ’6-weeks’ and ‘no,’ which must have set something off, so they sent me to the back room.”

“Yeah I’ve been there… it’s big fun. But you weren’t in there for too long.”

“No- it was quick. I hadn’t sat down for more than 2 minutes before they called my name, asked me some questions, and said they would need to search my laptop. Naturally I complied, you have no rights in there, and I just wanted to get home as quickly as possible.”

“So did they seize your computer?”

“No, they told me to log in to my computer. I did…. then one guy, he was really fat, disappeared with my laptop for about five minutes. When he came back they escorted me down to baggage claim, sent me through the ‘red line’ to inspect my checked bag, and that was it. The whole thing was over in 15-20 minutes.”

I was floored.

Not because the US government is detaining its own citizens and inspecting their most private possessions without reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing, but because of the speed and efficiency with which they are now doing this.

I have long believed that in the United States there are two places where civil liberties do not exist– tax court and the airport.

In the former, the IRS has the full authority to put the habeas grabbus on whatever assets they feel like with a ‘presumed guilty until you go broke proving your innocence’  burden of proof.

Airports though, in my opinion, are even more draconian.

Under the catch-all auspices of anti-terrorism, the government’s border and airport security agencies have been dealt an enormous amount of authority to go along with their intimidation tactics; thanks to a recent ruling by US Court of Appeals, border agents have nearly unlimited latitude over personal effects, including laptops:

“The authority of the United States to search the baggage of arriving international travelers is based on its inherent sovereign authority to protect its territorial integrity. By reason of that authority, it is entitled to require that whoever seeks entry must establish the right to enter and to bring into the country whatever he may carry. . .  Therefore, we are satisfied that reasonable suspicion is not needed for customs officials to search a laptop or other personal electronic storage devices at the border. “

Subsequent to this ruling, US Customs and Border Protection issued its own policy regarding search authority:

• Officers may, without reasonable suspicion, detain documents, electronic devices, or copies thereof for a ‘reasonable’ period of time to perform a thorough border search, which may take place on-site or at an off-site location;
• In the event that contents are unreadable or encrypted, officers may enlist the support of other agencies for translation and/or decryption assistance;
• Content that may constitute trade secret, commercial information, or even attorney-client privilege are still subject to search and seizure.

The singular exception to this rule is ‘sealed letter-class mail’, the international equivalent of First Class– sealed letters that are presently within an international postal system (NOT including private carriers like FedEx or DHL) cannot be searched or seized without a warrant or consent.

I will also be discussing some savvy encryption solutions in future letters; in the meantime, though, be mindful of what you bring along during international voyages– except for the ‘mail loophole’ I mentioned above, just about anything you bring into the country can be searched and seized without reasonable suspicion.