
Ask HN: Laptop seized by immigration. Now what? - throwaway798798
Hi HN,<p>Submitting this post after a very stressful night. Long story short: my girlfriend went on a 10 days planned holiday trip to Israel. Before boarding, she&#x27;s been sent to a separate security check, then interview room and got heavily questioned, - strip searched (!!!) and everything - for several hours. She eventually made it (flight had been delayed for some reasons).<p>Now, why am I asking here: when she has been taken to the interview room, all her electronics has been taken away. We have no idea what they did to them. She got back some of them when landed in Israel (Phone, camera, both being obviously searched through). However, they decided to keep the laptop. At the moment of writing, we don&#x27;t know where is the laptop neither if&#x2F;when&#x2F;how we&#x27;re going to get it. We also don&#x27;t know why they kept her for so long, why they questioned her, why they took her electronics, why they didn&#x27;t give it back to her before boarding and why she couldn&#x27;t get them back for the flight.<p>Now the real question: I&#x27;m concerned about the electronics themselves. Following the theory they could have been tapped, would it be possible to reset both phone and laptop (if we ever managed to get our hand back one), google pixel phone and macbook air 2012, in a way we know they wouldn&#x27;t be compromised? Could we do some sort of bootloader reset, or anything else that would guarantee a genuine hardware&#x2F;software?<p>In addition to obvious privacy concerns, my girlfriend has some clients who required privileged confidentiality and can&#x27;t afford working on potentially compromised hardware.<p>Any advice will be highly appreciated. Thank you.
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yasp
I guess it depends how paranoid you and your girlfriend are. See
[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ypwkwk/the-nsas-
undetecta...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ypwkwk/the-nsas-undetectable-
hard-drive-hack-was-first-demonstrated-a-year-ago)

Short of physically replacing the drive, I don't think there would be much you
could do, in that particular circumstance.

~~~
throwaway798798
It's a macbook air so technically they can't do that as the hard drive is
embedded to the motherboard, right?

Also, all data are/were encrypted using Bitlocker (average strength password)
- forgot to mention the mac was running on Windows 10, work computer.

~~~
tdxgx
solder on a new drive...

------
gradschool
If you get the laptop back, you can probably sell it to security researchers
for more than the cost of replacing it. If you're going to try to secure it
yourself and continue using it, I hope your countermeasures will be effective
against a hardware keylogger.

------
heyoni
If you have find my mac you should be able to program it to reset the laptop
as soon as it comes back on...not sure what the android equivalent.

What kind of questions were they asking? Is this the TSA or dept of homeland
that took her electronics?

~~~
throwaway798798
would this type of reset be considered as acceptable security?

~~~
heyoni
Not sure what kind of reset it does, but judging by Apple's general stance on
security and preserving user privacy, I would assume it runs a proper wipe of
the hard-drive.

Also note that later models of the macbook pros with the T2 chip are
essentially always encrypted but her model wouldn't have that. Was fileVault
enabled by any chance? If so, I'm not sure I would even bother remote wiping
it...

------
catacombs
Is your girlfriend an Israeli citizen?

~~~
yasp
Related question, can you share which organization it was that performed the
pre-boarding investigation? You were flying _to_ Israel, but the strip search,
extensive questioning, and electronics seizure happened before boarding. What
entity performed the search?

~~~
throwaway798798
We're not sure which entity but they were clearly israelis. It's actually one
of the questions we wonder...

