A business magazine I was just perusing (CIO 11/1/14) has a brief article directed at businesspeople who fly in and out of the US.  It says that the courts have upheld the right of the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)to seize and read any information on any kind of electronic medium one might be bringing into the US.  No warrant or probable cause is required for them to seize the instruments.

The article goes on to state that the CBP can hold the article for 5 days, and the ICE for 30 days.

The article addresses the danger to the businessperson of proprietary information being leaked out, and suggests that information should always be store in a cloud type computing system like drop box, etc., instead of in hard drives, etc.

Sounds like good advice for gals who travel abroad as well.

Encryption seems logical until you enter a place like the UK, and they demand your encryption key.  If you refuse to provide the key, they consider you guilty of hiding whatever crime they decide your computer contains: sedition, child porn, etc.

Encryption is forbidden in certain countries such as China.  US security agencies consider some encryption software to be critical to national defense, and forbid you to take the software to China, Cuba, N. Korea etc. in the first place.

Uploading your data to cloud storage is a way around both of the above, just be sure it's encrypted locally before you store it in the cloud.  Otherwise you're loading all your data, in the clear, into a one-stop-shop for the NSA/FBI/CIA to rifle through.

Mailing your data to yourself on a flash card or a hard drive is one way to bypass many of the issues, but also means the storage is out of your control for a period of time, and may be destroyed/lost in transit.

That being said, I've crossed borders nearly 100 times for business and vacation, yet have never had devices taken or physically scanned.

We were never asked to show what was on our laptops or IPads. We went to first world countries and 3/4 world countries. Non of the Commies China, Russia or Vietnam checked.

Backed everything to the cloud when we could.

searching electronic devises.  I would delete anything adult related & use an overwrite program like CC Cleaner to scub the hard drive.    

As soon as I get on line, I can access TER & ad sites or my email.  

I run multiple seurity programs including CCC.  I might get caught someday with some porn but not the full record of it.

Encryption is your friend.

CCcleaner is a joke. It's just clearing browsing history and downloads. It doesn't overwrite whatever is stored on the hard drive.

Today's headlines.  Took down Silk Road 2.0.  Fine with me, protects us all from terrorism & violent crime run amock.  Hopefully the kind of resources spent on legitimate LE won't be wasted on misguided suppression of the human spirit, including ours.

The best way not to be caught with any suspicious files is to not have any suspicious files on your computer in the first place.  Upload everything like that to a trustworthy cloud storage provider, delete the copies of such files from your computer, and remove the tracks from your computer.

For cloud storage, I like to use Mega.  It is more secure than Drop Box (for technical reasons beyond the scope of this discussion), they are outside the USA, and as a side note they give you more free storage space.  Their web address is mega.co.nz    Also if you are real paranoid, manually encrypt your files yourself with secure password before uploading them anywhere.   There is software to do that.

Use a program called ccleaner to clean all your tracks on your computer.  It gets rid of browsing history, deleted files, things like that.  There is a nasty file on your computer called index.dat which stores a permanent record of every website you've ever visited and windows will never let you delete it.  The good news is ccleaner wipes out that file too.

If you want to step it up another notch, use self encrypting hard drives which can only be read by the computer that gave it the command to self encrypt.  Other computers will not be able to produce the same decryption key.  If you do this, then pulling out the drive and trying to read it on another computer will yield no data at all from that drive.  Combine this with a BIOS level password on your laptop such that you need to enter that password before the hard drive is accessible.  A good laptop should support both of these features. If you want to step it up another notch, your laptop should have biometric identification to do that task, like a fingerprint reader, not a typed in password.  Good business grade laptop computers have these kinds of features.

Another quick and easy trick you can use is to just use a remote desktop connection to another computer in a secure place where your data is really stored, do this from your laptop so that there is never any data at all on the laptop, aside from the remote desktop software.

You are right.  I'm not dumb enough to save nasty stuff on my hard drive.  But erasing only removes the first letter of the file...  eventually it will be overwritten but there are recovery programs which can recover DELETED files.  The point is to run an overwrite cleaner program which will remove the deleted files & overwrite them to Dept of Defense standards.  I wouldn't do this the last day beforetravelings as a wiped drive is likely more suspicious than a normal one with lots of surfing tracks.  
I keep my normal computer clean & do my adult surfing elsewhere.