Don’t piss off the lady (or man) at the airport.
Yes, that’s the moral of the story. Glad you were able to deftly avoid the other conclusions one might have drawn from the report.
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A reasonably secure password should be rather difficult to crack. If the storage devices were actually encrypted and the device powered down, it shouldn’t have been a simple matter to ‘crack’ the password.
Leaving aside the vagaries of words like “reasonable” and “rather difficult” I saw nothing in the article stating the hard drive was encrypted or whether it was powered on or off. Granted he also “thinks” his password was cracked. There’s nothing in the article that speaks to any sort of analysis on how his files were accessed if they were.
That said, it still sounds like you are conflating cracking a password and breaking encryption.
Its more likely an image was taken of its storage device, for later processing. Its probably just in an archive somewhere.
It may be that I’m conflating these because a user password itself offers very little security if someone is in possession of the hardware. And passwords are usually (also) used to unlock encryption (say, at boot). So I assume in this sort of context that the password in question is related to unlocking an encrypted device rather than just a password to a user account on the machine.
Probably. This sort of behaviour is just insane though.
Even if you don’t give a damn for civil rights etc., indiscriminately hoovering up information means that you have way too much noise to effectively use this now unwieldy pile of data, whether it’s to ‘preserve democracy’ or get rid of troublemakers etc.
So just logistically this seems stupid to me.
And, of course, in terms of worrying about increasingly dystopian societies, it’s incredibly frightening to me
You could offload your personal stuff to a cheap external drive, scrub the computer/reinstall, and then just take the now empty computer with you; when you get home, put the personal stuff back.
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Name’s Hague, trades in software weapons, check. Disk sizes greater than 2^62 blocks FTW, right? Or an unlocking scheme involving fitting the mobile into a womens’ jeans pocket (error: the wrong womens’. Reload paper on 10e’s.) Start henna-ing the password on the agent’s finger, then charge to finish… [ducks a cafe’ loveseat]
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Or just pipe random noise into a multigig file and adding a .hc (the Veracrypt file extension)
A few of these are the digital equivalent of burying a bunch of screws and bolts in the field of your family farm to frustrate feds 
If he’s not an activist, it might be CP related
I take it you’re not a Neil Gaiman fan.
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Chromebooks are cheap, make it easy to do a factory reset in a couple minutes, and serve as effective burner laptops. Of course Google will see everything, but that shouldn’t be a problem if you’re not actually doing bad stuff, but just want something where you can recover easily if inept agents screw it up, or that you can easily write off as a loss if you do lose it during the trip.
Of course, if you need to use some specialized software like AutoCAD or something while traveling, that might not be an option. It wouldn’t work for what I do on a day-to-day basis, but while traveling I don’t need all that stuff.
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You can backup your system, encrypt the image, then upload it to a cloud service you like. Wipe your device, then when you cross the border, download the image, decrypt it, and reinstall. Is it a pain in the ass? Yup. But what’s worse? That or a pissed off underpaid dweeb rifling through your entire history to find something that he can portray as wrong?
“Hey look, they went to this Arabic sounding website 56 times!”
“…yes i sometimes visit aljazeera for news”
“TERRORIST!”
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