I won't be taking my laptop across the border - Page 2

I don't think so history shows us that governments have an infinite capacity for conspiracy. Most conspiracy theories rely heavily upon the assumption that a large group of people are capable of keeping their traps shut. That's not very realistic. That's not to say people don't try and do underhanded, secret dealings. I just don't think they get away with it all that often. I believe that more often that not, what some people think of as conspiracy is really just a series of poor decisions that, in hindsight, look like a plot.

I just think it's a slippery slope to label something as a conspiracy. It ascribes motivations that may never have been present, and it also leads down the path to ideas like secret governments and new world orders. I just don't think the world is nearly as organized as conspiracy theories would lead us to believe.

We should get a movement going were everyone traveling across the US boarder encrypt their laptops. This would force the issue one way or another. it force them to stop for the cost or bring about legal action.


Not that I agree with YT on much but she does have a point here about how our government is going and Nazis. I am for one against socialism in any form just because of shit like this the government is just too big. Don't kid your selves boys and girls both the Neo-cons and the Nazis are socialistic in nature. They are both corporatist in their ideals, which is a form of socialism.

Yet another problem with the policy is that it's not going to trap the smart bad guys. It's possible some dumbass would-be terrorists will get nabbed, but anyone with a little computer savvy would be able to protect his or her computer. All you really have to do is partition your hard drive and use a couple of layers of encryption. On the upper level of encryption, you save stuff that isn't sensitive or incriminating. You save all your secret stuff on a partitioned drive with a second level of encryption. It's possible to make that partition invisible to other people, so the officials get the impression that they're looking at everything that's on your computer, especially if you "reluctantly" give over your login information to that upper level of data. Meanwhile, all the ultra secret stuff remains hidden.

This isn't even that hard to do, but it is hard to detect. Hell, you can find directions on how to do this with a simple google search. For example, Lifehacker has a post about it.

I would just like to state, for the record (so there's no confusion about this in the future), that I am completely and unequivocally opposed to laptop death camps. If I hear about laptop death camps, I stand with yt.

I read about this a while ago, and while obviously I think its messed up, I did read that the very easy work around that business travelers have been using is to ship it to themselves prior to leaving. Obnoxiously annoying, but better than having all of your business files lost to the feds for an undetermined amount of time. As for personal use, Caps idea sounds interesting. Luckily for me, I'm too poor to cross international borders right now anyway.

A successful conspiracy depends on the majority of people believing it is impossible when it is merely highly unlikely. The crazier I sound trying to explain it, and the less likely it all seems, the greater the odds of success. Which sounds crazy. Which is the point. It doesn't matter if people keep their mouths shut or not if nobody believes what they're saying, because people with more perceived credibility than them will dismiss it as crazy, and everyone else will believe them, because perceived credibility is on their side. I'll stop because this is, necessarily, an infinite loop of a paragraph. As is the nature of such things.

Most conspiracy theories are bullshit, but not all, and telling the difference is all but impossible if the conspiracy was worth a damn in the first place. If your conspiracy can be proven then you fucked up. If it can easily even be taken seriously, then you fucked up. If I sound totally crazy trying to explain what you actually did, you win.

It is advantageous, usually but not always, that as few people as possible understand the larger goal. The left hand best not know what the right hand is doing. Better still if it would never even approve of what that right hand was doing.

The only logical, concrete thing I can say is that you should never mix up the highly unlikely and the impossible. That's where conspiracy thrives, the realm of the highly unlikely. But technically possible. Or maybe it doesn't. That's the sick beauty of it.

I wish I was writer enough to phrase the above more effectively, but I'm not. I did take pains not to mention that event I obviously didn't mention, because it's not particularly germane to the discussion of the nature of conspiracy itself, and causes people to bring counter-productive pre-conceptions to the table.