Have KNOPPIX CD will Travel: No Worries

There is much to be concerned about nowadays when it comes to personal and business travel with Laptops and other digital devices.

The obvious concerns include the potential for Laptop theft and theft of sensitive/personal data.  Another concern is the potential for delays at Airport and border checkpoints while Laptops are searched for incriminating data. 

To the extent that there is sufficient room for interpretation and potential for abuse of legal authority for determining when it is appropriate to initiate a search/seizure of Laptop property, the U.S. Senate is proposing legislation of the "Travelers Privacy Protection Act" to restrict the right of US customs to search or seize laptops, iPods and other digital devices.

There are ways to mitigate your personal risk when travelling.  One option is to not store sensitive data whatsoever on your Laptop.  Another is to simply not bring your laptop along when travelling.  The latter is not ideal especially for business travelers.

I have found the safest, fool-proof way to travel yet with a Laptop is to remove its hard drive and leave it at home.  Set up the Laptop's bios to boot from CD and bring along a CD/DVD of Knoppix.   Knoppix is a Linux distribution which can be run directly from CD.  Nothing gets stored on the CD and everything runs in memory 'read-only' from RAM disk.  When you shutdown, all data in RAM is gone.

Thus, you can boot up Knoppix and either use NoMachine NX or RDP thin clients to reach your corporate office Desktop or home gateway PC when needed.  Both of these client applications are found on the CD.  I prefer using NX as the entire session is tunnel-encrypted and exceptionally fast over even the slowest 56-K dial-up connection.

So, be smart, when equipped with a Laptop with no hard drive, you can simply declare the device has no data drive on it whatsoever.  If there is no data drive then there is no need to search, thus no delays in travel, no worries.

--Dietrich
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