NZ customs can now demand phone or laptop passwords

Tuesday 2 October, 2018

Image by  ev on Unsplash

The New Zealand Customs Service this week received new powers at the country’s borders, including the ability demand a password off a passenger to search their “electronic device”.

Customs officers have always been able to search a passenger’s laptop or phone, but the changes to the Customs and Excise Act 2018 now specifies that passengers must hand over their password…

I can see that our good friends at veracrypt will likely be seeing an uptake in their full disk encryption technology combined with hidden operating systems. It’s like a game of cat and mouse. The essential issues are complex though: the right to privacy vs the right(?)/need to detect criminality.