Taking your laptop into the US? Be sure to hide all your data first

From the Guardian -

A US court has ruled that border agents can search your laptop, or any other electronic device including mobile phones and PDAs, when you're entering the country. They can take your computer and download its entire contents, or keep it for several days. Actually the US is not alone - British customs agents search laptops for pornography. And there are reports such searches happen at other borders, too.

So how do you protect yourself?

While you can go through all sorts of protecting your data via passwords and encryption (www.pgp.com or www.truecrypt.org), ultimately the best defense is to delete questionable or confidential data. Border patrol agents can't read what is not there.

If you don't want to delete the data, you can consider transferring them to those small memory cards that you can keep in your wallet where they will likely go unnoticed.

Source article here.