travel customs-law
Traveling abroad with high end cryptography devices and software
<p>In the next months I’m going to travel abroad with my laptop and my Ledger Nano S. I’ll visit most of the EU countries, Russia, China, Brazil, U.S. and Canada. I’m an EU citizen.</p>

<p>I was wondering if I could get in trouble for bringing abroad my laptop where I have some sensitive informations encrypted with 4096 bits keys, thus File level encryption. I also have disk level encryption with bitlocker on Windows 10 and sha256 with luks on the Linux <code>/home</code> partition.</p>

<p>I would like to know which is my right to refuse to unlock my laptop or my Ledger whether I’m intimated to do so by a customs officer. </p>

<p>As far as I know as an EU citizen in the EU <em>I can refuse</em> to unlock my devices without violating any law, BTW <a href="https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/105197/traveling-abroad-with-high-end-cryptography-devices-and-software">I also posted on travel.se</a> as suggested, and according to comments and answers I'm probably wrong on this.</p>

<p>Refusing to unlock is certainly your right — pretty much like the border control has the right to refuse entry if you are not citizen of the country outside EU. You should pretty much expect that they will use that right of theirs if you use yours, and that would certainly be <em>not</em> the biggest trouble you might get.</p>

<p>If you really need to prevent access to your information I would recommend doing it smarter than refusing. For example, keep it on a hidden partition (which a tech savvy customs officer may still be able to spot though) or not on the device at all — use online/cloud services.</p>
