"Motorola moto g play 2024 Smartphone, Android 14 Operating System, Termux, And cryptsetup: Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) Encryption/Decryption And The ext4 Filesystem Without Using root Access, Without Using proot-distro, And Without Using QEMU": https://old.reddit.com/r/MotoG/comments/1jkl0f8/motorola_mot... (old.reddit.com/r/MotoG/comments/1jkl0f8/motorola_moto_g_play_2024_smartphone_android_14/)
the same phone, but with nothing usefull or important on it, no apps with personal info
banking done through email sign in.....everything done through email sign in
switching my email to webmail sign in, so there will be nothing on the device at all
just random pics, sd card,music, meaningless files for jobs
plus there is no password or encryption, want it?
have it.......sims got a pass code though
"Locking down" is almost always a bad approach when it comes to border crossings. You have very little rights at the border, so keeping your phone locked and refusing to divulge the 20 characters password isn't really an option. Even without the threat of detaining you, they can refuse entry (if you're not a citizen/permanent resident), or seize your $1000 phone/laptop. Far better to wipe your phone and restore from backup after you've crossed the border. The article does make a good point that you should seed your wiped phone with signs of activity so it doesn't look freshly wiped.
And maybe remove business critical or private data from "well known" online accounts or cloud services well known to US or from US or the one they might force you to give them access to - or the account where it might be trivial for them to show you have an account and then they might demand access. I know the article says they won't ask you for cloud accounts but I mean who the hell knows (esp. in today's USA), they might as well ask you to give access to iCloud Backup/restore because as you said they have close to or exactly zero rights there.
It's my experience that once you get sent to secondary they have already decided to fuck you, they are just deciding which flimsy excuse they will use to do it. My totally non-legal conjecture (and livid experience) is if you are a citizen they will play mind games with you in secondary or a holding cell for hours to a day or so and then eventually reluctantly release you after muttering threats about revoking your passport and/or not letting you in.
Does anyone more knowledgable know if US citizen 5th amendment rights still applies at the border, i.e. I can't legally be compelled to unlock my phone at the US border? Law is not my area of expertise at all. (The article might have addressed this but it's behind a paywall.)
The ACLU has authoritative advice [1]. The article about electronic device searches [2] explains that the government claims the right to search devices without a warrant at the border.
> U.S. citizens cannot be denied entry to the United States for refusing to provide passwords or unlocking devices. Refusal to do so might lead to delay, additional questioning, and/or officers seizing your device for further inspection. [...] If an officer searches and/or confiscates your laptop or cell phone, get a receipt for your property.
If your device leaves your sight for any length of time and later returned, consider it compromised. It is now to no longer be considered a friendly device. If you're paranoid enough that is
First, it's the fourth amendment that protects against unreasonable search. Fifth amendment is protection against self-incrimination.
My understanding is that fourth amendment protections effectively do not apply at the border [1] because the border is inherently a reasonable place to search people.
In regards to being compelled to unlock your phone, CBP maintains the position [2] that in order to uphold their duties they're inherently able to compel you. Anecdotally, if you don't unlock your device, they may (a) confiscate it (and possibly apply all sorts of cracking tech to it), or (b) refuse you entry. That said, a random law firm [3] cites that you can withhold a password-based lock, but CBP can compel you to provide biometric unlocking [3].
To me, this is a case of https://xkcd.com/538/ ; you may have a legal basis to refuse, but in the current iteration of the administration I find it unlikely that it would be a positive experience if you were to stand on it. (Not that CBP is going to beat you with a pipe wrench, but if they want in your phone, they're gonna get in your phone.)
Your link was specifically about the borders, not necessarily about airports. This link is specific to airports. (I came across this link from your link. Just providing the direct link)
(US citizen, attorney, detained for 90 minutes as punishment for asserting his rights and refusing to unlock his work phone, which contained privileged attorney-client communications).
I used to do this but these days I’m petrified of the restore being imperfect in some way.
I use the he.net app for TOTP. Will I get those back in working order?
I have a billion photos I want to keep — were they properly backed up to iCloud?
My mail settings are a pita to recreate. Will those come back?
Are passwords stored in the Secure Enclave? Could I lose those?
When I sign back into iCloud am I going to be able to use a username and password, or is it going to require me to approve the login on my laptop — which I left at home — as a second factor?
WhatsApp, Signal — how much is tied to my physical phone and/or any key material unique to the OS — material that is irretrievably lost, by design, when it is wiped.
I think really the long term answer is to stop using an opaque, closed source iPhone. Maybe some time in the next five years one will emerge that competes with Apple’s quality? Until then, every border crossing is going to risk handing over a huge part of my life to ICE because I can’t risk losing anything in a backup/restore hysteresis loop.
Post.: Another future direction would be for iOS and apps to recognise this as a common use case and provide guarantees about what is and what isn’t restorable after a wipe.
There’s also a conflict here between wiping data so that it is irretrievable and wiping data to later retrieve it. If you wipe with the intent to retrieve I can believe that immigration will just detain you until you restore your phone so that it can be searched.
Your phone could become damaged and inoperable every day. From dropping it in the toilet, being stolen, a house fire, etc. If you're "petrified" of losing your data, it's worth the work to ensure your data backup procedures are adequate.
You’re right, but also I know I have enough backed up to survive a catastrophe. What I don’t want to do is to test my backup in a non catastrophe situation and invalidate all my TOTP, WhatsApp history, mail settings etc. just because I wanted to test disaster recovery.
It feels like buying a fire safe (phone and app backups) without any kind of understanding if it works then burning your house down to see if it works. I want a fire safe (phone and app backups) that is up-front with guarantees it works!
I should have said this by the way: for a long time I did wipe my phone when crossing borders, learning the hard way all the little details that don’t quite work properly when doing a restore from backups.
Analogies only go so far. Going to the store, buying gasoline and rags and a lighter and then committing arson and burning my house down is maybe a little bit different from sitting down for a few hours with my laptop connected to my phone.
Yes. You can restore your icloud backup to another target iphone without wiping the source iphone, as long as the target iphone has enough storage capacity.
I've spent the last month and a half building an encyrpted backup system I could sleep peacefully with, independent of tech giants that secretly compromise you. I'm almost there but it's not easy for a lot of reasons you mention and more.
Ultimately it's not enough for individuals to spend this effort for themselves. We need a self-managed option that is nearly as turnkey as iCloud. A distro with it built from the outset.
IMO if you are so concerned about it, then just buy a second phone, and leave the "first" phone at a family member, or at least someone that you trust. If something fails to restore, just call them to read you the OTP code or whatever.
This is an issue I face- I have a collection of thermal cameras that use apps to control them- after every install onto a phone, they then reach out t oa server to authenticate.
Here's the issue- though I have a few older phones- these apps are 32 bit ones, so no modern phone after Android 13 will run them. And they are all now not on the app store anymore,as they all came out about around 2016. i did use a APK extractor to pull the APKs to store them - but the native backup functionality wouldn't capture that authorization in the future, I might rob myself of my ability to use some extremely expensive, and long-term invested capable hardware, by backing up and restoring-
I suspect a full image would solve this problem, but I don't think one can do that outside of things like TWRP- but that requires unlocking the bootloader, and if you do that it wipes your device- AND is more vulnerable to Custom's usage of Cellebrite and etc, to my undertanding.
I don't have this issue with laptops ,as I can fully image them and wipe and restore ahavend have a perfect replica/ no issues. But my thermal cameras do not run off of PC and th eform factor wouldn't work if they did
> I’m petrified of the restore being imperfect in some way.
A lot of this is from anchoring important things to your phone. I practice, and strong recommend, avoiding that as much as possible. Your phone should be entirely disposable. If you drop it in the ocean, would you care (other than the monetary loss)? If yes, find way to detach those things from the phone. There should be nothing important on a phone.
My company gives burner phones and laptops for employees and salespeople traveling to countries with agressive borders. USA is on the list, together with Israel, Iran and a few others I can't remember now.
fascinating! Where are you from? I'm in the US and for employees going into China, best practice has been to issue them burner phones and laptops for the trip for decades at this point.
I've been to Shanghai multiple times. Every time the border check was quick, efficient and uneventful. Unlike JFK where it's a 2h wait almost every time wiht 'random' extra security.
A dual password "Hidden OS" feature like Veracrypt offers, or at least used to offer would be best. If implemented correctly the existence of the hidden OS can't be proven, and a dummy password would log into a dummy OS. I don't think it exists for phones, but is surely a gap in the market.
if they're really out to target you and they've got you under investigation, then maybe they know what your primary email account is and that your phone isn't signed in to it. but the advice here is for the traveller who just doesn't want to be hassled at the border by the guard who wants to flex their power.
This 100x, last time I crossed a border I shutdown my phone and because my phone was off the border guard considered that suspicious. Also apparently not using google maps is considered suspicious even if you're in an area you've lived your entire life.
I would definitely come across as suspicious to any border inspection. I have no Google apps, I have no social media apps. I have very few apps at all. I definitely qualify as someone that would be the type to wipe their phone. Also, my photos would definitely look like something someone staged to show activity, as the vast majority of my photos are of my fur babies. I don't do selfies, so that would be sus too. My browser history would also appear to them to be wiped, because I simply do not browse the web on the phone. I doubt it would be a quick conversation of me convincing them I'm really just that boring.
So be it. I used to say that the reason I valued my privacy was not that I did not trust my government _today_, it was the fact that data would be available to every potential authoritarian government _tomorrow_.
Welp, today has become tomorrow, and yeah, I'd _absolutely_ rather just have my devices seized than have the contents of my phone dumped into a database that can be searched without a warrant, for the next 15 years.
Rights (like the 4th amendment) that are not exercised are not upheld. I'm sure the threat of having one's devices stolen (let's be clear, that's what this is), is enough to deter many people. For myself, my next course of action would be to contact the ACLU and sue the government for violating the 4th amendment.
Having your $1000 device stolen by the government as an acceptable outcome is something only a fatcat on HN with their cushy salary would be able to tolerate. I'm not a FAANG employee, and don't make that kind of salary. Loosing a $1k anything would not be something I could just shrug my shoulders and just turn around and immediately replace it.
Even if you do sue the gov't, it'll be at least a year before any kind of resolution that results in the return of that device. Them keeping my phone would be one thing, but if they also kept my laptop, I'd be screwed. My laptop is much more than $1k, and there's no free laptop with contract cell service I could use to replace it. Now I'd be without a means of working.
These kinds of situations make me really yearn for the days of replacing the internal hard drive of a laptop. I could swap out my daily use drive for a travel drive, which would be much less of a hassle than the options on offer for modern laptops.
My Lenovo from last year still has non-soldered NVMe drives. I would probably just install Windows on a separate partition and set it to boot to that, then install a few games and set my Chrome homepage. I bet CBP won't be mucking around with bootloader settings looking for Linux, and even so it would be pretty trivial to just remove GRUB from the EFI partition for the travel days.
This is something no on discusses but I've wondered heavily- GRUB can be made to not show a menu and then boot up Windows automatically, in like a second or two with no one the wiser. [There is an obnoxious welcome to grub message that pops up now but I see a public project out there that solves this very easily called GRUB shusher]
I don't know if other bootloaders outside GRUB have a silent/hidden start option, as well in a similar vein that would require you to hit a key in that first second to get the menu to appear, or else it just boots up normally
I wonder about the other approach, just going into the BIOS nad changing the order so Windows boots first, which should be doable in some setups. Lock the BIOS with a password, and you're in not bad shape. (Not sure if Secure Boot being enabled could also help here - probably couldn't hurt)
Any examples of the silent GRUB setup? Sounds interesting.
I left a comment about Veracrypt offering the Hidden OS feature, with two passwords - one for the dummy OS and one for the real OS. However it doesn't seem to be supported anymore on Windows 11 or modern hardware, the option is greyed out on my laptop with no explanation.
My approach would be to rename the Grub EFI image to something silly like "HP Windows Recovery", then set Windows to boot first. Someone could smash F11 then select the recovery option to make sure it was really recovery... but the average Keystone Kop at CBP would probably not figure this out. In fact, I think they would just turn the machine on, see it start to boot Windows, shrug, and turn it off again. If they image the machine, they can find that it has Linux with forensics, but I really struggle to imagine anyone caring enough to chase me down after the fact.
I am a US citizen though. The only real goal for me at CBP is to avoid secondary at all. I'm not worried at all about them coming for me after I leave the airport. If that sort of stuff starts to happen... I am screwed anyway. They can find records of everything I've said by just compelling US companies to disclose it to them.
>Welp, today has become tomorrow, and yeah, I'd _absolutely_ rather just have my devices seized than have the contents of my phone dumped into a database that can be searched without a warrant, for the next 15 years.
You're totally ignoring the option of wiping your phone prior to crossing, and avoiding both fates.
>Rights (like the 4th amendment) that are not exercised are not upheld. I'm sure the threat of having one's devices stolen (let's be clear, that's what this is), is enough to deter many people. For myself, my next course of action would be to contact the ACLU and sue the government for violating the 4th amendment.
This already has been litigated, and the courts have affirmed CBP can deny entry or seize your phone. By all means, try to affect change by writing to your senator or whatever, but displays of civil disobedience is mostly pointless. ACLU won't even take on your case because it's been settled, and the chance of it being overturned is slim.
"US expected a big travel year, but overseas visitors — angered by Trump — are heading elsewhere": https://apnews.com/article/tourism-us-travel-trump-visitors-... (apnews.com/article/tourism-us-travel-trump-visitors-international-14c31b490fd382d09ad5cae625ddc937)
I stopped going when they introduced fingerprinting. This is not just a point of principle. While it is not known whether fingerprints are unique (as is often claimed), it is known that the information that is stored about fingerprints and which is used as the basis for matching records is not unique. The equivalent of hash collisions exist. Fingerprints are great as corroborative evidence, but if they are used as the means to find a suspect, you don't want your fingerprints in the system when Cletus Thugfester (the actual perpetrator) has matching prints that are not in the system. Far too likely that you'd get hauled across the Atlantic on this basis, then have to deal with the "justice" system over there.
No, that's the distinction I am drawing. That match was on the basis of the information recorded for computer comparison. Basically it records certain features such as the ends of lines. It does not record the whole fingerprint. It is know that these records are not unique. We don't know the same for the full fingerprint.
Same. I wish I had visited the US back in the days, especially pre-9/11 times when flying was super hassle free and people were optimistic about the future.
Sadly I was still quite young. Oh well, there are many other beautiful countries in the Americas. And especially south-America is substantially cheaper.
I'm surprised they'd let you do so in the claim luggage, but in this case it was carry-on. The story goes my mother just walked through customs and got on the plane with it.
Yeah carry on got the stupid liquid ban that's still around, but I don't think much if anything got banned from checked luggage after 9/11. Just the standard stuff like batteries and other things that could have issues in an unpressurized non temperature controlled hold.
Even carry on got a lot better than it used to be in the days right after that. Like I'm pretty sure they had banned lighters for a bit (and a lot of people assume they still are) but they're explicitly allowed and I throw mine right into the scanner bin every time I fly. Not even being able to carry in a sealed bottle of water and having to take your shoes off is stupid, but about the extent of what's left. No more keeping all liquids (what even counts as a liquid?) in a ziplock bag and having to take it out, and even laptops can stay in with the new scanners they're rolling out
I've carried on an inflatable life vest with an active CO2 cartridge and that's also listed as fine. Though it did get flagged and secondary screened because it was in my bag, even though they don't say you have to leave it out.
In general the more you fly if you pay attention, you can pretty much know what will trigger it if you put it in your bag. Metal water bottle in the bag? Your bag is getting pulled, every time. I've even told them right where to look lol. Left out and it goes right through.
it's kind of funny, my mini bottle of spray sunscreen got flagged, but carrying through a fullsize BP 95 v-lock tv camera battery did not, and it uses the large battery cells that are roughtly the size of a roll of silver dollars.
My government has issued a travel warning statement aimed at those traveling to the US. Much like the statements given for Ukraine pre-war, Russia, some chaotic African nations of nations in the Middle-East.
OK, I'll bite. I'm a dual citizen of the U.S. and a neighbouring country whose sovereignty has been threatened recently and live in that country. Our daughter goes to school in the U.S., though, so travel to the U.S. for performances & to schlep her stuff to/from school at the beginning and end of the year is non-optional.
People have all sorts of reasons to have to travel to U.S. So I very much appreciate the advice rendered in TFA because the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments are considered optional at the U.S. border.
I remember looking at a friend's bookshelves and noticing a travel guide to the Soviet Union. It had a short chapter on what to expect when crossing the border and the fact you might be followed by the security services.
Travel to the USSR was different, at least towards the end. Partly because they didn't have the surveillance technology we are used to. Partly because of widespread corruption. And partly because they didn't want to scare away visitors bringing in hard currency.
As far as I understand, the key point was visa processing. If they considered you suspicious (maybe because you were a reporter or a religious worker), they might flag you for surveillance. Otherwise they didn't really care. The expectation was that you would exchange currency in the black market, because the official rates were terrible. And that you might make some money by selling western goods. If you were part of a tour group, the chances are your official Intourist guide was involved in this.
A duress password that booted into an innocuous "safe mode" without access to your full browser and chat history would be a whole lot less likely to get you into more trouble than one which wipes the phone...
Unfortunately your phone may get backdoored in that scenario anyway if it's known to have that feature.
In graphene and most Android phones with unlocked flashing, easily achieved in a few minutes. (Special recovery. It's hard to catch if done right.)
There's no way around the wipe at least and better hope the bugger installed is not persistent in some firmware.
I really want to respond to the dead comment under this.
Setting a duress password is not tedious.
AFAIK the justification for them to say "don't rely on adblockers for security/privacy" is that you can be more easily fingerprinted and those adblock lists are a moving target, vs. having better sandbox capabilities in the browser.
The rest is conjecture I don't have the motivation to debate at the moment.
As for the rest of the article... just get a second phone if this is a major concern, or wipe the phone and have it be perfectly clean when you go through customs. The only thing you need to remember is the password + a single TOTP backup code (write that one down maybe) to restore your cloud password safe (which you should have) then you can get access to all your other data from there.
More easily fingerprinted by which blocked script or request?
(Personally I prefer a whitelist on these.)
If they rely on phoning home, such as a comparison of requests on different access, that's some top notch log analysis. Expensive too, compared to just running JS.
This would be useful beyond getting in and out of customs too. For instance, most people don't want to carry around a work phone and a personal phone, so we end up mixing two personas on one device, and it gets awful. For instance I keep two 2fa apps, one for work stuff and one for personal stuff. It would be so much easier if I could have a separate login that showed just my work apps. Like ... wouldn't it be nice to only have to see work slacks when you log in using a work persona?
Recent enough Androids have this "Work Profile" feature. You get two app stores, and work apps get little "work" overlay. There are separate lock settings and sound/notification settings for work profiles too - I think this means you can have simple pincode for personal stuff and more complex for work one. And you can turn off all work apps at once with a single button press. And if your admin gives "remote wipe" command, only work apps are wiped.
Sadly this is automatic, which means regular people can't use it. You workspace admin got to enable MDM, and then phone will prompt you if you want a work profile when you try to install it.
Android 15 has a "Private Space" feature that can be somewhat hidden and used to sandbox apps/data. It will prompt for a secondary unlock if you know where to look.
"Private" in marketing terms only. Border agents have access to it all. If you refuse to turn over all of your passcodes and passwords for the access they're after (including social media profiles), they can detain you and seize your device.
Border Patrol is a step above most law enforcement when it comes to authority. The Fourth Amendment doesn't apply in the 100 mile border zone, or at least SCOTUS ruled Congress hasn't defined what happens if it is violated by border patrol (Egbert v Boule).
Side note: The sibling comments talk about creating a work profile which is different in that it still lives within the same user account and is not fully isolated.
Yes, a duress account would be highly needed in these times. I'd even go as a whole partition and the whole thing enclaved so it's nearly impossible to know if there's another partition.
Veracrypt. It's successor, keeps this feature - of allowing for a truly hidden OS- but there's a HUGE flaw everyone missed- it requires your laptop to be setup as MBR-= which only allows for 4 partitions, and you can't have more than like 2 TB of filespace on it total.
We need a similar solution for UEFI- that allows for truly hidden, foolproof hidden OS installs.
On Android you could add a second user which gets its own passcode and set of apps/accounts. If they know what they're doing they could see there are multiple users on the lock screen, but it may be enough.
The US is hardly the only country where this is the case and locking down your phone is almost entirely pointless (see xkcd #538).
If you're concerned about having it searched, don't bring your primary phone. Go to a phone shop, buy an old phone, put your SIM card in it, and use that instead.
Going 538 on a US citizen would be a massive escalation. I'm not saying it's impossible, but if it ever comes up, I'll roll the dice on not unlocking my phone.
If you're worried about being beaten until you divulge your info, it's not like a burner phone is going to save you. They'll extract the login info for all your online accounts.
Anything stored in secure storage would also be wiped.
Apple Pay cards and so forth, anything with 2FA codes, in Sweden we use "BankID" which is largely using a private key in secure storage and a pin to "sign" and "identify" people, you would be destroying those things in an unrecoverable way.
Also, restoring a phone takes a seriously long time (8-10hrs?) and some things might not restore. Music you might have saved for example.
Also, your restore process might be using the internet (which is also an issue), but if it's not: then you're bringing your backups with you most likely, so they're forfeit.
> Also, restoring a phone takes a seriously long time (8-10hrs?) and some things might not restore
2FA is a pain to recover, but it shouldn't that _that_ long to restore a backup unless you don't have decent internet access. All of my important data and apps usually take maybe 2 hours to get back (including flashing the OS), 3 if you include 2FA recovery.
Local backups is kind of an interesting risk/reward situation. My phone usually spends most of its time downloading apps from Google Play when recovering, the data recovery itself is very quick. Just backing up the APKs (which do not contain anything interesting) would probably cut down my backup recovery time to less than half an hour. Of course, my pictures and music are all stored in self-hosted cloud services, if you care to keep a local copy then things will take longer.
> but it shouldn't that _that_ long to restore a backup unless you don't have decent internet access.
1) We're talking about people who are most likely going to be using 4/5G and Hotel Wifi. The US anyway is far behind on bandwidth, I get symmetrical 1G for "free" in Sweden, last time I was in the US it was $60/mo for 60MBit.
2) Phones have as much as 1TiB of storage, even at the speed of storage that'll take a hot minute.
Getting the 2FA codes set up while not having access to those 2FA codes is going to be interesting.
It all depends on the security pyramid you have, and how much risk are you okay with. I store all my passwords in Dropbox .kdbx file, but I need these always in case of emergency, even from a different device. So I must not enable 2FA on Dropbox. The password to it (and the .kdbx file) lives only in my memory. I hope not to get hit in the head.
Entering with a completely clean phone is suspicious. To any border patrol agent intent on abusing their power, that screams "I'm trying to hide something and want to be detained for an unspecified amount of time".
If you're trying to protect your data, probably better to set up a secondary, plaubile profile, and restore from backup after crossing the border. Or to take a burner phone and buy a completely new one inside the US after crossing.
Maybe it's suspicious in Silicon Valley, but I know plenty of people who make minimal use of their phone. In Japan, flip phones are supposed to still be fairly popular.
I've got an old blackberry lying around somewhere. Even though that helps with "can you communicate at all with people not in shouting distance", there's a lot of stuff that just presumes you have the ability to install an app or visit a website — and that blackberry is so old that its web browser can't handle current standard HTTPS encryption.
I think the main thing to decide ahead of time is: will you unlock a phone on request, or are you willing to lose the powered-down phone or be denied entry if you refuse? Most of your decisions flow from there.
If unlocked and it leaves your sight, ALL your messages and photos and documents will be stored forever and are available warrantless in probably every country in the world.
As a US citizen it is still a bit useful. You cannot be denied entry (CBP has told me they would deny me entry, but in the end they just threaten to revoke your passport which is also a lie). If they have decided they want to search your phone, they will tell you that you just have to answer the questions and they will let you out in time to catch your next flight or whatever. The truth is they are vicious liars, as I have found out, once they are that suspicious you have already missed your connection. Once you are in secondary they are usually going to fuck you no matter what so might as well assert your rights.
As things currently stand, this wouldn't qualify for denaturalization. Even the Trump proposals have been to do it for fraudulently obtaining citizenship (e.g. lying about a criminal record), not general crimes, and certainly not for non-crimes like annoying CBP.
It seems like they are claiming that “not saying you intended to protest” is essentially lying on the initial visa application, thus fraud and grounds for revocation of residence and deportation
So, if CBP confiscated someone’s laptop or phone (because they don’t want to unlock it), then break into it, and find social media posts against genocide, and/or against the Trump administration… given how they’ve acted, who knows what they’d do
I'm deeply displeased with their treatment of legal residents here, but denaturalizing a citizen is about a million times more severe than deporting a legal resident alien. The executive has pretty much unlimited authority to decide which non-citizens are allowed to enter or stay within the country, and has for a long time, whereas that's not the case with denaturalization.
Not sure about denaturalization, but this is getting pretty extreme already (USCIS, effective immediately, is screening immigrants for criticism of Israel):
It is, but this is still far less severe than denaturalizing a citizen. The executive has pretty much total discretion over which non-citizens they allow into the country. That power isn't anything new, it just wasn't abused like this before. Denaturalization for anything besides fraudulently obtaining citizenship would be a serious change, not just applying existing power in ugly ways.
They have always been assholes. I was detained by CBP back in 1997 returning from Europe (through O'Hare airport), even though all my papers were in order (I am a natural-born citizen and I had my passport) because I was overheard speaking Spanish (I was returning from a study-abroad trip to Spain). Someone actually demanded to know where in Mexico I was born, even though, as I said, I had my passport, state ID, and birth cert all right there with me. They just dumped me in a waiting room for 90m (long enough to miss my flight), then told me to go with no explanation or apology. On the way out someone laughed and told me they didn't know why I was detained but I "looked like a terrorist" (I had a full beard at the time). Mind you, this was before 9/11 so I'm sure it's worse now.
> they just threaten to revoke your passport which is also a lie
Insofar as the current regime has little or no respect for the rule of law, particularly due process, I can imagine them revoking someone's passport. The Secretary of State could certify that you have engaged in activities abroad that are opposed to U.S. foreign policy. On paper, the conditions for revocation are rather narrow. In practice with an adverse administration and a largely captured judicial branch, who knows? Either way, personally I don't care. No warrant - no looksies.
US customs on mail parcels cannot
1) compel you to unlock your device
2) threaten you with deportation for non-compliance
not to mention that there are rooms and people trained in every airport to scan your phone as a routine component of their daily function WHEREAS customs on mail are 90% concerned about duties and 10% concerned about smuggling. 0% on what kinda sms you send to your buddies
No but it gives them far more time to plug your phone into a device that dumps the device for decryption later, as well as attempting any kind of security backdoors/exploits, or even clone the SIM card.
> Data copied from devices during advanced searches at entry points into the U.S. gets saved for 15 years in a database searchable by thousands of CBP employees without a warrant.
This is incredibly sketchy. As a non-American (Canadian), I think I’d probably just prefer to be refused entry to the US at that point.
Hopefully not, Canada likes to peak into US records for stuff like a DUI from years ago from some guy who slept in his car at the bar so he would not drive home drunk, resulting in a policeman arresting him and then him being barred from the usual process of entering Canada.
Canada ending their intelligence sharing with the US would be a big win for citizens in the US and Canada. They basically rely on sharing records with a government with a very hostile and notoriously flawed justice system (that in practice results in quite racist results) and then using it to judge US citizens, which favors other immigrants from countries with weak or less flawed criminal systems or ones that do not share information with Canada.
FWIW I wiped my phone entering the country and they ushered me right through anyway. Still, I was very concerned about finding texts from other people and getting them in trouble. I think the fear is the point more than the practicality as it stands.
Who came for you? You want to go to the US (or any other country) and therefore you align with their rules.
Nobody forces you to go there, and especially play secret agent. If you go, you know that what you have can be searched so have nothing, or have something that is not controversial.
The same applies to all the countries in the world.
What does this has to do with the topic of trying to be clever with the border police with some tricks to conceal information? (as opposed to not having it in the first place)
It has to do with your argument of "if you don't like it, don't go there". Also, you specifically asked "who came for you" so it's direct answer to your question.
Exactly. If I plan to visit a country where green shirts are illegal, I'm not going to pack my green shirts into a secret hidden luggage compartment, smug in the knowledge that I'm so clever. I'm going to either not visit or not bring my green shirts.
Same for this. Whether we like it or not, some stuff on your phone are now considered contraband at the US border. Either don't bring them or don't visit.
Well, considering that the US considers some political beliefs and journalism crimes, "don't go there with incriminating devices" implies restrictions on free speech and journalistic freedom. Also, privacy is not only for hiding crimes. Equating privacy with criminality is a great way to get undermine people's rights further. It's perfectly ok to think that some random TSA agent shouldn't be seeing my family photos etc. when I have done nothing wrong.
If you believe these rights are not important, that's your own opinion. But I think it's perfectly valid to criticize attacks on human rights.
Bluntly: fuck that. I'm many generations deep in this country, and when I travel to visit other places, I have the right to return here to the home where I was born. No part of our Constitution says I have to kiss law enforcement's butt to be permitted to come back to my house. I understand that they're trying to do their job, but the government also needs to understand that I'm not interested in participating in dragnet searches.
I feel no moral or legal obligation to let them search through all my stuff just because of their policies, which don't seem at all compliant with our highest laws and ideals.
The common sense would be don't go to countries where you risk being immediately sent home or to a slave colony in El Salvador for writing something mean about its president.
I used to travel to the US once a month for years and years (from Europe or Asia). It was either for business, or for vacation with the family. The larger the airport, the shittier the border but at least this was a moment to go through and that's all.
Now, as a French, I seriously consider being detained for something trivial and getting into a net of bureaucracy which would certainly extend my stay in the US. And I will not do that.
My grown-up children are suggesting vacation in New York and some other places, we will go to Asia instead where I was lucky enough to have only good experiences (especially in some countries). Nobody will care in the US but this is one less person to visit.
I would love the Americans to continue visiting us as nothing changed for them but I can totally understand that they will slow down as well, expecting unpleasantries.
Some of the college students with revoked visas just happened to be in the vicinity of a protest (near commute to their apartment ) against Israel killing so many civilians, and then there’s the batch who had speeding tickets. They are hellbent on deporting criminals of any level and thought criminals to meet quota. So I would not trust anything to be benign when viewed by US agents.
So did I - and I kinda liked the place (not the border police, it seemed as if they hated me and hated the fact that I was coming to spend money there).
Agreed. As a citizen, most interactions with border control are unpleasant. The only positive experience I've ever had was at a quiet border crossing in Maine where I met what was probably the country's only friendly CBP agent.
Indeed. I'm a dual citizen - U.S. and that country to the north that Dear Leader keeps threatening. I have to cross the border relatively often and have noticed shift in tone in the last few months. Instead of asking me where I'm going, they have been asking me "where do you want to go." It's inconsequential, really; and they've never truly harassed me. It's just a subtle power flex that seems new, as if they would really prefer to deny me entry.
Would you elaborate why? (without being vague) I assume it's not common sense just because you did it?
Issues with border patrol can happen in any country. If they have bad mood, or you suddenly decided to piss them off, they will do their best to make your life harder. The US is not the best or worst to that matter. People who chose working as border patrol are not the smartest people out there (otherwise it is unlikely they would choose working at border patrol).
So I understand all precautions but saying its "common sense" not traveling there is a huge stretch IMHO.
Thank you for the links. The first case is a woman who get her visa cancelled, then she engaged in some shady scheme to get entry permit, which was spotted by ICE. In ANY other country it will likely cause detention.
Rest of articles state vague cases of travelers being sent back home at US border. Again nothing new here, at every country it up to border enforcement to make final decision regarding entry. Its nothing but regular "treatment".
If you don't want this - that's certainly your choice, but I really would like to hear about cases where legitimate travelers are thrown into detention centers and kept there for weeks. Something tells me there is no such stories, but I would still like to see the evidence.
"With more than 300 student visas revoked, international scholars worry as the government expands reasons for deportation": https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/09/us/us-immigration-student-vis... (www.cnn.com/2025/04/09/us/us-immigration-student-visas-revoked/index.html)
Yeah it’s bullshit, but it’s still true that you can minimize the suspicion. Not having any kind of phone these days is likely very rare for people entering a US border crossing, a clean but used phone not so much. The goal is to blend in.
Almost everyone reading this doesn't need to worry about this. And if you are one of the few that do need to worry - just don't travel to the US for now.
Not sure about CBP specifically, but many countries already use specialized tools to break into phones and silently install backdoors — Cellebrite comes to mind.
As my favorite blogger puts it: "If the data is important, it's not stored in only one place. If there's no backup, it wasn't important." With that in mind, wiping the device and filling the gallery with high-resolution images of genitals covered in excrement remains one of the more effective passive defense strategies.
Jokes aside, it's depressing that crossing borders often means giving up fundamental digital privacy — and that we've largely normalized this. The idea that any government agent can dig through your phone without a warrant just because you're crossing a line on a map is dystopian at best.
This (along with healthcare) are examples for the "both parties are the same" refrain.
Neither side wants or advocates for the status quo (for US citizens to lose their rights at the border) but neither side is doing anything about it. They could easily eliminate the "constitution-free zone" exemption at borders and airports, but from what I can see, no lawmakers are talking about it.
If anyone starts, it's pretty easy to trot out some story about how CBP caught a drug smuggler or human trafficker or terrorist because of the searches and then the matter is quickly silenced.
To be fair, Canadian border agents have been looking at some travelers' phones for years. A typical scenario might be: "So why are you entering Canada?" ; "Visiting friends, on holiday" (traveler carrying a suitcase full of tattoo equipment); "Ok let's look at your phone" ; "Interesting, in this SMS thread from yesterday your friend says 'looking forward to you starting work in the tattoo studio'". Entry denied.
The situation at the U.S. border re phone privacy is exceptionally good. In most countries this isn't a live issue because you have no such rights and everyone would laugh at you for asserting them. There are exceptions, perhaps Germany?
In Britain they'll throw you in prison for refusing to give them your phone password, and if you do they'll throw you in prison for the wrongthink tweets they find on your phone.
Should Americans be subject to search-for-no-reason at their own border? No, and I hope that as these border issues work their way through the legal system this will get sorted out. Please note that the CBP can say whatever they want about you having to give them a phone password, but you don't have to. They might keep your phone for a while and fuck around with it.
I gave the example of the U.K., a dystopian privacy violator. The U.K. is in Europe.
The entirety of Europe would not come close to making a majority of countries. Even if I grant you the "entirety of Europe", I bet I'm still right that most (i.e., more than half) of countries reserve the right to search your device at the border, and will compel you to give the password.
In the U.S., I believe you are covered by your 5th Amendment self-incrimination protections. I have some recollection that there are situations where authorities will compel you, like if you're not the one being accused of the crime.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadThanks in advance.
> U.S. citizens cannot be denied entry to the United States for refusing to provide passwords or unlocking devices. Refusal to do so might lead to delay, additional questioning, and/or officers seizing your device for further inspection. [...] If an officer searches and/or confiscates your laptop or cell phone, get a receipt for your property.
[1]: https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/what-do-when-encounter...
[2]: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/can-border-agen...
First, it's the fourth amendment that protects against unreasonable search. Fifth amendment is protection against self-incrimination.
My understanding is that fourth amendment protections effectively do not apply at the border [1] because the border is inherently a reasonable place to search people.
In regards to being compelled to unlock your phone, CBP maintains the position [2] that in order to uphold their duties they're inherently able to compel you. Anecdotally, if you don't unlock your device, they may (a) confiscate it (and possibly apply all sorts of cracking tech to it), or (b) refuse you entry. That said, a random law firm [3] cites that you can withhold a password-based lock, but CBP can compel you to provide biometric unlocking [3].
To me, this is a case of https://xkcd.com/538/ ; you may have a legal basis to refuse, but in the current iteration of the administration I find it unlikely that it would be a positive experience if you were to stand on it. (Not that CBP is going to beat you with a pipe wrench, but if they want in your phone, they're gonna get in your phone.)
[1] https://law.justia.com/constitution/us/amendment-04/19-borde... [2] https://www.cbp.gov/travel/cbp-search-authority/border-searc... [3] https://borderslawfirm.com/border-search-computers/
IIRC there is a radius around every international airport where such warrantless searches are legal.
https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/what-do-when-encounter...
I.e., this warning example from this week,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43618754 ("Lawyer for U-M protester detained at airport after spring break trip with family (freep.com)")
(US citizen, attorney, detained for 90 minutes as punishment for asserting his rights and refusing to unlock his work phone, which contained privileged attorney-client communications).
I use the he.net app for TOTP. Will I get those back in working order?
I have a billion photos I want to keep — were they properly backed up to iCloud?
My mail settings are a pita to recreate. Will those come back?
Are passwords stored in the Secure Enclave? Could I lose those?
When I sign back into iCloud am I going to be able to use a username and password, or is it going to require me to approve the login on my laptop — which I left at home — as a second factor?
WhatsApp, Signal — how much is tied to my physical phone and/or any key material unique to the OS — material that is irretrievably lost, by design, when it is wiped.
I think really the long term answer is to stop using an opaque, closed source iPhone. Maybe some time in the next five years one will emerge that competes with Apple’s quality? Until then, every border crossing is going to risk handing over a huge part of my life to ICE because I can’t risk losing anything in a backup/restore hysteresis loop.
Post.: Another future direction would be for iOS and apps to recognise this as a common use case and provide guarantees about what is and what isn’t restorable after a wipe.
There’s also a conflict here between wiping data so that it is irretrievable and wiping data to later retrieve it. If you wipe with the intent to retrieve I can believe that immigration will just detain you until you restore your phone so that it can be searched.
It feels like buying a fire safe (phone and app backups) without any kind of understanding if it works then burning your house down to see if it works. I want a fire safe (phone and app backups) that is up-front with guarantees it works!
I should have said this by the way: for a long time I did wipe my phone when crossing borders, learning the hard way all the little details that don’t quite work properly when doing a restore from backups.
It's quite easy to restore an icloud backup to a different phone or even ipad for testing purposes, if one were reliant on icloud to hold their data.
Isn't that actually one of the things you want to do to validate the backup process?
Better to figure out in a non disaster scenario where you have alternatives.
It's not like my backup of my ~/Photos directory where I can copy to a USB and md5sum the files on a separate computer and check the match.
Ultimately it's not enough for individuals to spend this effort for themselves. We need a self-managed option that is nearly as turnkey as iCloud. A distro with it built from the outset.
This is an issue I face- I have a collection of thermal cameras that use apps to control them- after every install onto a phone, they then reach out t oa server to authenticate.
Here's the issue- though I have a few older phones- these apps are 32 bit ones, so no modern phone after Android 13 will run them. And they are all now not on the app store anymore,as they all came out about around 2016. i did use a APK extractor to pull the APKs to store them - but the native backup functionality wouldn't capture that authorization in the future, I might rob myself of my ability to use some extremely expensive, and long-term invested capable hardware, by backing up and restoring-
I suspect a full image would solve this problem, but I don't think one can do that outside of things like TWRP- but that requires unlocking the bootloader, and if you do that it wipes your device- AND is more vulnerable to Custom's usage of Cellebrite and etc, to my undertanding.
I don't have this issue with laptops ,as I can fully image them and wipe and restore ahavend have a perfect replica/ no issues. But my thermal cameras do not run off of PC and th eform factor wouldn't work if they did
A lot of this is from anchoring important things to your phone. I practice, and strong recommend, avoiding that as much as possible. Your phone should be entirely disposable. If you drop it in the ocean, would you care (other than the monetary loss)? If yes, find way to detach those things from the phone. There should be nothing important on a phone.
It’s a mantra but it’s incorrect: You’re supposed to list your “online accounts” to the border agent in the US.
China not anymore. You can now easily travel there without visa.
Turkey is still too aggressive and risky, but at least you don't have to wait 6 hrs at their border anymore.
> wipe your phone and restore from backup
If they can compel you to divulge the password, then they can compel you to restore from backup in front of them.
if they're really out to target you and they've got you under investigation, then maybe they know what your primary email account is and that your phone isn't signed in to it. but the advice here is for the traveller who just doesn't want to be hassled at the border by the guard who wants to flex their power.
Of course, if your backup is to a US-based cloud service, they already have full access to it.
So be it. I used to say that the reason I valued my privacy was not that I did not trust my government _today_, it was the fact that data would be available to every potential authoritarian government _tomorrow_.
Welp, today has become tomorrow, and yeah, I'd _absolutely_ rather just have my devices seized than have the contents of my phone dumped into a database that can be searched without a warrant, for the next 15 years.
Rights (like the 4th amendment) that are not exercised are not upheld. I'm sure the threat of having one's devices stolen (let's be clear, that's what this is), is enough to deter many people. For myself, my next course of action would be to contact the ACLU and sue the government for violating the 4th amendment.
Even if you do sue the gov't, it'll be at least a year before any kind of resolution that results in the return of that device. Them keeping my phone would be one thing, but if they also kept my laptop, I'd be screwed. My laptop is much more than $1k, and there's no free laptop with contract cell service I could use to replace it. Now I'd be without a means of working.
These kinds of situations make me really yearn for the days of replacing the internal hard drive of a laptop. I could swap out my daily use drive for a travel drive, which would be much less of a hassle than the options on offer for modern laptops.
I don't know if other bootloaders outside GRUB have a silent/hidden start option, as well in a similar vein that would require you to hit a key in that first second to get the menu to appear, or else it just boots up normally
I wonder about the other approach, just going into the BIOS nad changing the order so Windows boots first, which should be doable in some setups. Lock the BIOS with a password, and you're in not bad shape. (Not sure if Secure Boot being enabled could also help here - probably couldn't hurt)
I left a comment about Veracrypt offering the Hidden OS feature, with two passwords - one for the dummy OS and one for the real OS. However it doesn't seem to be supported anymore on Windows 11 or modern hardware, the option is greyed out on my laptop with no explanation.
I am a US citizen though. The only real goal for me at CBP is to avoid secondary at all. I'm not worried at all about them coming for me after I leave the airport. If that sort of stuff starts to happen... I am screwed anyway. They can find records of everything I've said by just compelling US companies to disclose it to them.
I'd suggest that if $1K is a big deal to lose, one should not spend such an ungodly amount on a phone.
Perfectly adequate phones can be had for $100-$200. I couldn't imagine wasting more than that on a phone.
You're totally ignoring the option of wiping your phone prior to crossing, and avoiding both fates.
>Rights (like the 4th amendment) that are not exercised are not upheld. I'm sure the threat of having one's devices stolen (let's be clear, that's what this is), is enough to deter many people. For myself, my next course of action would be to contact the ACLU and sue the government for violating the 4th amendment.
This already has been litigated, and the courts have affirmed CBP can deny entry or seize your phone. By all means, try to affect change by writing to your senator or whatever, but displays of civil disobedience is mostly pointless. ACLU won't even take on your case because it's been settled, and the chance of it being overturned is slim.
Only reason I would is tourism, and I like my vacations harassment & risk of detainment free
Sadly I was still quite young. Oh well, there are many other beautiful countries in the Americas. And especially south-America is substantially cheaper.
Even carry on got a lot better than it used to be in the days right after that. Like I'm pretty sure they had banned lighters for a bit (and a lot of people assume they still are) but they're explicitly allowed and I throw mine right into the scanner bin every time I fly. Not even being able to carry in a sealed bottle of water and having to take your shoes off is stupid, but about the extent of what's left. No more keeping all liquids (what even counts as a liquid?) in a ziplock bag and having to take it out, and even laptops can stay in with the new scanners they're rolling out
I've carried on an inflatable life vest with an active CO2 cartridge and that's also listed as fine. Though it did get flagged and secondary screened because it was in my bag, even though they don't say you have to leave it out.
In general the more you fly if you pay attention, you can pretty much know what will trigger it if you put it in your bag. Metal water bottle in the bag? Your bag is getting pulled, every time. I've even told them right where to look lol. Left out and it goes right through.
People have all sorts of reasons to have to travel to U.S. So I very much appreciate the advice rendered in TFA because the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments are considered optional at the U.S. border.
And what do we have in 2025?
I don't think it was a Lonely Planet https://www.bbc.com/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/AP5ln7N8TRGkf...
As far as I understand, the key point was visa processing. If they considered you suspicious (maybe because you were a reporter or a religious worker), they might flag you for surveillance. Otherwise they didn't really care. The expectation was that you would exchange currency in the black market, because the official rates were terrible. And that you might make some money by selling western goods. If you were part of a tour group, the chances are your official Intourist guide was involved in this.
(Although as per the article, a fully wiped account looks suspicious -- it would need some innocuous apps or apps with no login info, etc.)
There was a lot of talk about duress passcodes several years ago, but I don't think any phones ever got it. Sure would be nice to have
[1] https://grapheneos.org/features#duress
There's no way around the wipe at least and better hope the bugger installed is not persistent in some firmware.
Setting a duress password is not tedious.
AFAIK the justification for them to say "don't rely on adblockers for security/privacy" is that you can be more easily fingerprinted and those adblock lists are a moving target, vs. having better sandbox capabilities in the browser.
The rest is conjecture I don't have the motivation to debate at the moment.
As for the rest of the article... just get a second phone if this is a major concern, or wipe the phone and have it be perfectly clean when you go through customs. The only thing you need to remember is the password + a single TOTP backup code (write that one down maybe) to restore your cloud password safe (which you should have) then you can get access to all your other data from there.
If they rely on phoning home, such as a comparison of requests on different access, that's some top notch log analysis. Expensive too, compared to just running JS.
Sadly this is automatic, which means regular people can't use it. You workspace admin got to enable MDM, and then phone will prompt you if you want a work profile when you try to install it.
Sadly it doesn't seem to work on all phones.
it works on most flagships nowadays, so if you've got an okay phone, you're likely good
https://informationsecurity.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toru...
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/can-border-agen...
Side note: The sibling comments talk about creating a work profile which is different in that it still lives within the same user account and is not fully isolated.
We need a similar solution for UEFI- that allows for truly hidden, foolproof hidden OS installs.
If you're concerned about having it searched, don't bring your primary phone. Go to a phone shop, buy an old phone, put your SIM card in it, and use that instead.
If you're worried about being beaten until you divulge your info, it's not like a burner phone is going to save you. They'll extract the login info for all your online accounts.
Apple Pay cards and so forth, anything with 2FA codes, in Sweden we use "BankID" which is largely using a private key in secure storage and a pin to "sign" and "identify" people, you would be destroying those things in an unrecoverable way.
Also, restoring a phone takes a seriously long time (8-10hrs?) and some things might not restore. Music you might have saved for example.
Also, your restore process might be using the internet (which is also an issue), but if it's not: then you're bringing your backups with you most likely, so they're forfeit.
2FA is a pain to recover, but it shouldn't that _that_ long to restore a backup unless you don't have decent internet access. All of my important data and apps usually take maybe 2 hours to get back (including flashing the OS), 3 if you include 2FA recovery.
Local backups is kind of an interesting risk/reward situation. My phone usually spends most of its time downloading apps from Google Play when recovering, the data recovery itself is very quick. Just backing up the APKs (which do not contain anything interesting) would probably cut down my backup recovery time to less than half an hour. Of course, my pictures and music are all stored in self-hosted cloud services, if you care to keep a local copy then things will take longer.
1) We're talking about people who are most likely going to be using 4/5G and Hotel Wifi. The US anyway is far behind on bandwidth, I get symmetrical 1G for "free" in Sweden, last time I was in the US it was $60/mo for 60MBit.
2) Phones have as much as 1TiB of storage, even at the speed of storage that'll take a hot minute.
Getting the 2FA codes set up while not having access to those 2FA codes is going to be interesting.
It all depends on the security pyramid you have, and how much risk are you okay with. I store all my passwords in Dropbox .kdbx file, but I need these always in case of emergency, even from a different device. So I must not enable 2FA on Dropbox. The password to it (and the .kdbx file) lives only in my memory. I hope not to get hit in the head.
If you're trying to protect your data, probably better to set up a secondary, plaubile profile, and restore from backup after crossing the border. Or to take a burner phone and buy a completely new one inside the US after crossing.
Oh, and if I don't have (bring) a phone at all?
I've got an old blackberry lying around somewhere. Even though that helps with "can you communicate at all with people not in shouting distance", there's a lot of stuff that just presumes you have the ability to install an app or visit a website — and that blackberry is so old that its web browser can't handle current standard HTTPS encryption.
Also, it is terribly unhelpful and uninformative.
Schneier’s blog post on this has tons of useful information in the comments: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/04/cell-phone-op...
The EFF wrote the canonical guide to this in 2017: https://www.eff.org/wp/digital-privacy-us-border-2017. I don’t know if it has been updated, but there is a lot that’s useful there.
I think the main thing to decide ahead of time is: will you unlock a phone on request, or are you willing to lose the powered-down phone or be denied entry if you refuse? Most of your decisions flow from there.
If unlocked and it leaves your sight, ALL your messages and photos and documents will be stored forever and are available warrantless in probably every country in the world.
I wonder what could happen to citizens who weren’t born in the US
Given what we’ve seen recently. Could it be possible they would refer these people to the state department to revoke their citizenships?
But next week it could all be different.
It seems like they are claiming that “not saying you intended to protest” is essentially lying on the initial visa application, thus fraud and grounds for revocation of residence and deportation
So, if CBP confiscated someone’s laptop or phone (because they don’t want to unlock it), then break into it, and find social media posts against genocide, and/or against the Trump administration… given how they’ve acted, who knows what they’d do
https://www.reddit.com/r/UnitedNations/comments/1jw8gyv/all_...
Insofar as the current regime has little or no respect for the rule of law, particularly due process, I can imagine them revoking someone's passport. The Secretary of State could certify that you have engaged in activities abroad that are opposed to U.S. foreign policy. On paper, the conditions for revocation are rather narrow. In practice with an adverse administration and a largely captured judicial branch, who knows? Either way, personally I don't care. No warrant - no looksies.
here's some: mail it
not to mention that there are rooms and people trained in every airport to scan your phone as a routine component of their daily function WHEREAS customs on mail are 90% concerned about duties and 10% concerned about smuggling. 0% on what kinda sms you send to your buddies
This is incredibly sketchy. As a non-American (Canadian), I think I’d probably just prefer to be refused entry to the US at that point.
Canada ending their intelligence sharing with the US would be a big win for citizens in the US and Canada. They basically rely on sharing records with a government with a very hostile and notoriously flawed justice system (that in practice results in quite racist results) and then using it to judge US citizens, which favors other immigrants from countries with weak or less flawed criminal systems or ones that do not share information with Canada.
The amount of bad advice here is staggering. You are not James Bond or some kind of ninja Seals secret agent.
You are a nobody attempting to enter a country, and you will be pissing off the border police.
Have some common sense.
Nobody forces you to go there, and especially play secret agent. If you go, you know that what you have can be searched so have nothing, or have something that is not controversial.
The same applies to all the countries in the world.
Extraordinary rendition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition
Coups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
Otherwise yes, you are right - they are bullies.
They will try to bully us in many other ways but this has nothing to do with the devices and how to hide stuff.
Same for this. Whether we like it or not, some stuff on your phone are now considered contraband at the US border. Either don't bring them or don't visit.
If you believe these rights are not important, that's your own opinion. But I think it's perfectly valid to criticize attacks on human rights.
So either I go or I don't go. If I go and comply I am fine. If I go and do not comply I am in trouble. If I go and try to sneak stuff I am in trouble.
I am not sure where this is complicated. We are not talking about ethics, but about some crazy ideas to hide stuff. This is irresponsible and dumb.
The source is here: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-nie...
I feel no moral or legal obligation to let them search through all my stuff just because of their policies, which don't seem at all compliant with our highest laws and ideals.
The common sense would be don't go to countries where you risk being immediately sent home or to a slave colony in El Salvador for writing something mean about its president.
Its sad but people taking these other measures are rolling dice every time they go. Negotiating the leopard.
my biggest worry entering and leaving my own country is that my bag was lost, or theres a queue.
Now, as a French, I seriously consider being detained for something trivial and getting into a net of bureaucracy which would certainly extend my stay in the US. And I will not do that.
My grown-up children are suggesting vacation in New York and some other places, we will go to Asia instead where I was lucky enough to have only good experiences (especially in some countries). Nobody will care in the US but this is one less person to visit.
I would love the Americans to continue visiting us as nothing changed for them but I can totally understand that they will slow down as well, expecting unpleasantries.
Issues with border patrol can happen in any country. If they have bad mood, or you suddenly decided to piss them off, they will do their best to make your life harder. The US is not the best or worst to that matter. People who chose working as border patrol are not the smartest people out there (otherwise it is unlikely they would choose working at border patrol).
So I understand all precautions but saying its "common sense" not traveling there is a huge stretch IMHO.
I don't want that in my life. As simple as that.
https://www.dw.com/en/german-nationals-us-immigration-detain...
https://lamag.com/latravel/detained-at-the-border-what-forei...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/tufts-student-grabbed-off-...
I really don't want this kind of nonsense in my life. Why would I visit a country that thinks this kind of treatment is okay?
Rest of articles state vague cases of travelers being sent back home at US border. Again nothing new here, at every country it up to border enforcement to make final decision regarding entry. Its nothing but regular "treatment".
If you don't want this - that's certainly your choice, but I really would like to hear about cases where legitimate travelers are thrown into detention centers and kept there for weeks. Something tells me there is no such stories, but I would still like to see the evidence.
Too old phone? Suspicious. Too empty phone? Suspicious...
As my favorite blogger puts it: "If the data is important, it's not stored in only one place. If there's no backup, it wasn't important." With that in mind, wiping the device and filling the gallery with high-resolution images of genitals covered in excrement remains one of the more effective passive defense strategies.
Jokes aside, it's depressing that crossing borders often means giving up fundamental digital privacy — and that we've largely normalized this. The idea that any government agent can dig through your phone without a warrant just because you're crossing a line on a map is dystopian at best.
I would not call that passive defense, that's a full on attack on the stomach.
This (along with healthcare) are examples for the "both parties are the same" refrain.
Neither side wants or advocates for the status quo (for US citizens to lose their rights at the border) but neither side is doing anything about it. They could easily eliminate the "constitution-free zone" exemption at borders and airports, but from what I can see, no lawmakers are talking about it.
https://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/travel-voyage/edd-ean-eng.html
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra...
Should Americans be subject to search-for-no-reason at their own border? No, and I hope that as these border issues work their way through the legal system this will get sorted out. Please note that the CBP can say whatever they want about you having to give them a phone password, but you don't have to. They might keep your phone for a while and fuck around with it.
The entirety of Europe would not come close to making a majority of countries. Even if I grant you the "entirety of Europe", I bet I'm still right that most (i.e., more than half) of countries reserve the right to search your device at the border, and will compel you to give the password.
For instances where the authorities wish to suspect you of a crime, looks like France was prepared to compel you to give a password in 2022: https://www.fairtrials.org/articles/news/french-court-rules-...
EU-wide, 2024: https://www.politico.eu/article/police-can-access-mobile-pho...
In the U.S., I believe you are covered by your 5th Amendment self-incrimination protections. I have some recollection that there are situations where authorities will compel you, like if you're not the one being accused of the crime.