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What to Do Before the Government Takes Your Laptop
Monday, November 27, 2006
Vol. 8 No. 235 |
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In Today's Letter:
Comment: What to Do Before the Government Takes Your Laptop
Wealth: The Last Bull Market Still Awaits
Sovereignty: Advice from an Adventure Capitalist
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What Will You Do When the Government Demands Your Laptop?
Today's comment is by Mark Nestmann, our Privacy Expert and President of The Nestmann Group.
Dear A-Letter Reader:
Thanks to a decision from the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, U.S. Customs officials can now seize and copy the contents of any laptop carried across a U.S. border. There's no arrest, warrant or probable cause required-just a "gimme."
If you're a defense attorney, your most confidential client files may wind up in the hands of government prosecutors. If you're a political opponent of the Bush administration, your correspondence and the names and addresses of everyone you've contacted can now be used against you to support a "terror" investigation.
The ways that this new authority can be misused are too numerous to count. Basically whatever information you carry with you on your laptop including banking records, client data, you name it, now, in effect, must be shared with the U.S. government.
There is one glimmer of hope. A U.S. district judge in California recently issued a contradictory ruling on this issue, concluding that Customs has to have "reasonable suspicion" of wrongdoing in order to search your laptop. That's still a lower burden of causality than "probable cause," but a big improvement over "gimme."
The "reasonable suspicion" standard is now required before Customs agents can conduct a body cavity search, X-rays, or other invasive examinations. This ruling is only binding in Los Angeles, so if you're crossing the border anywhere else Customs officials can presumably still apply the "gimme" standard. I suspect that the matter won't be resolved until competing appeals reach the U.S. Supreme Court in a few years.
In the meantime, what can you do to protect yourself? One suggestion is to encrypt all the data on your laptop, or even the hard disk itself, using a program like PGP Desktop 9.5 (www.pgp.com ). Just hand the encrypted laptop to the Customs official, smile, and wait.
Unfortunately, that may not be an ideal solution, because border officials are also demanding that travelers decrypt any information on their laptop before they're permitted to cross the border. And even if they don't detain you, they just might hold on to the laptop and try to encrypt it themselves.
A better idea might be to copy everything on your hard drive to a USB stick and send it via a courier service to your international destination. (Encrypt the data, of course, before you send it.) Then securely "wipe" any confidential information off your hard drive, along with the "free space," again using a program like PGP Desktop 9.5. You could also send the entire laptop via a courier service, but that could be expensive and laptops are easily damaged in transit. Plus, there's no assurance that it wouldn't be covertly inspected.
If you carry your laptop through Customs, be sure to sanitize it. The ideal solution would to encrypt and copy your data, send it to your destination and then use a utility like Killdisk (www.killdisk.com) to securely wipe everything on your hard drive. Then reinstall the operating system according to the instructions in Killdisk or whatever utility you use for this purpose. (There are other possible "sanitation" solutions but none as good as this one.) If Customs asks you to inspect your laptop, let them-they won't find anything but the operating system and standard system files.
Yes, it's a hassle, but that's what life has come to here in the "land of the free."
MARK NESTMANN, Privacy Expert
On behalf of The Sovereign Society
assetpro@nestmann.com
www.nestmann.com
P.S. Click here for more ways to protect your files and your assets.
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Your Life is an Open Book...If
- You've given out your SSN to anyone in the past 6 months...
- You belong to any church or organization...
- You hold 50% or more of your assets in any U.S. bank...
You're an easy target for unjust lawsuits, asset forfeitures and identity theft.
I'll show you 109 ways to protect your privacy and property rights - and secure your wealth - using the secrets of the United States Witness Protection Program...
LINK: http://www.isecureonline.com/reports/190SSWPP/E190GB35/
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The Last Bull Market
Over the last several weeks I've been writing about the death of stock-market values in the world today.
Almost daily, world markets are hitting new all-time or six-year highs. In fact, most European and U.S. large-cap benchmarks now trade at their highest levels since the second year of the 2000-2002 bear market. But only one region in the world has not participated, still languishing from the blows inflicted by the bear-market last February: The Gulf states.
According to Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI), the Gulf markets of Dubai, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Oman are down by almost 50% since peaking earlier in February. And over the last four weeks alone, several Gulf bourses have resumed their downward spiral, including a 15% plunge in the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia's market has nosedived since peaking in February, down a dizzy 64%.
Normally, meltdowns like this would definitely draw portfolio flows from distressed-based investors like myself.
I think we're almost at the point of maximum pessimism in the Gulf. The main problem I have with this region is the lack of trading volume. In smaller markets like Bahrain and Oman, trading volumes are now below $10 million dollars a day -- terribly illiquid. Basically, if you buy stocks in the Gulf now, you'd better be planted there for a long time because liquidity is poor.
On the plus side, the region does harbor strong economic performance. Trade balances are mostly in surplus territory at a combined $200 billion dollars, or nearly 30% of the region's GDP. Plus, in October, Moody's upgraded the sovereign bond ratings of the six Gulf states. Excluding Saudi Arabian equities, valuations in the region now trade at a very respectable 13 times trailing earnings, below the emerging markets average and about 40% less than major markets, including the S&P 500 Index and the Dow.
If you want to play in the Gulf, I suggest a specialized offshore mutual fund dedicated to a basket of these markets. In 2007, I'll be sharing my pick for the world's best-performing regional fund in the Gulf in Global Mutual Fund Investor (GMFI).
ERIC ROSEMAN, Investment Director
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Advice from an Adventure Capitalist
One of my favorite investment gurus, and one of the more impressive, successful, and interesting speakers at last week's New Orleans Investment Conference, is famed investor and author Jim Rogers.
During 1990-1992, Jimmy (as he's known to his friends) took a motorcycle trip of over 100,000 miles around the world, crossing six continents and setting a Guinness World Record. His best selling book, Investment Biker: On the Road with Jim Rogers, was a result of that trip.
Not satisfied with surviving that outing, he set out again on January 1, 1999, with Paige Parker on a 116-country, 152,000-mile overland trip to chronicle the world during three years spanning the turn of the millennium, which resulted in another book, Adventure Capitalist.
Earlier in his career, he was co-founder with George Soros of the wildly successful Quantum Fund, a global-investment partnership that gained more than 4,000%. At age 37, having made a purported billion dollars, he retired, but kept busy by serving as professor of finance at Columbia University Graduate School of Business and, in 1989 and 1990, as moderator of WCBS's "The Dreyfus Roundtable" and FNN's "The Profit Motive with Jim Rogers."
What is his best advice today? "The single best advice I can give you of any kind," he said, "is to teach your children and grandchildren Chinese. It's going to the most important language in their lifetime." He has a three year old girl who is already learning to speak Mandarin. Jim hired a Chinese nanny, and instructed her to never speak anything but Mandarin to his daughter.
China is going to become the world's leading economy and nation, and is on the way. They want what we have and they're willing to work to get it. It's staggering to see. So, he said, "buy China." Invest, and when there are setbacks, don't worry, just invest more.
Second, he urged the audience to sell all bonds, and particularly get out of the U.S. dollar. The dollar is and has been the world's reserve currency, he noted. "As recently as 1987 we were a creditor nation, and today we owe the rest of the world over $10 trillion. And our foreign debt is increasing at the rate of $1 trillion every 15 months." The U.S. federal debt is out of control.
Personally, I'm in complete agreement with all three of Jim Rogers' recommendations. Get out of the dollar, invest in natural resources, and diversify into China.
I highly recommend that you immediately buy and read Jim Rogers' latest book, Hot Commodities: How Anyone Can Invest Profitably in the World's Best Market. You can find it on Amazon.com.
JOHN PUGSLEY, Chairman
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LINK: http://www.isecureonline.com/reports/190SVAR/E190GB28/
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