As scary as it may sound, the Transportation Security Administration actually is within the law if they tell you that they are going to search the files on your laptop at an international airport.  Even without probable cause.  Simple data encryption may not be the best layer of privacy at this point either, as TSA officials can detain you or your laptop at international borders if a key is not supplied to them.  The refusal to supply that key even resulted in jail time in the UK recently.

CNet has provided a nifty guide to help you find ways to work around these limitations so that Uncle Sam will never know you’ve downloaded terabytes of BitTorrent data.  Basically, you are encouraged to not only encrypt your data, but to upload it to an online storage service such as Apple’s .Mac or Amazon’s ridiculously cheap Simple Storage Service.  Once your information is stored in that hard drive in the sky, make sure that it’s entirely deleted from your drive.  They further encourage you to wipe your drive with a fresh OS install if you want to be extra cautious, but the upload and delete solution should suffice for most users.  It sounds simple enough, but it’s a solution that you might not actually consider initially.  And what Uncle Sam doesn’t know won’t hurt him.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that most TSA screeners, are in fact, idiots.  Back in March, they caused a traveler to miss their flight simply because they refused to believe that the Macbook Air was a real laptop.  While some of them may have been trained to look for certain signs while searching through laptop data, they will never have access to your most private data once it’s been properly encrypted and uploaded.

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