3.2 Electronic Device: Any device that may contain information in an electronic or digital form, such as computers, tablets, disks, drives, tapes, flash drives, SIM cards, global positioning systems, unmanned aircraft systems, vehicle infotainment systems, smart watches, mobile phones and other communication devices, cameras, music and other media players.
3.3 Basic Search: Any border search of an electronic device that does not qualify as an advanced search as described in section 3.4, in which an officer conducts a review or analysis of information residing in electronic or digital form on the device. A basic search may include documenting information observed on the device during the search that relates to immigration, customs, or other law enforcement actions in CBP systems.
3.4 Advanced Search: An advanced search is any search in which an officer connects equipment, wired or wireless, to copy and/or analyze the contents of an electronic device. Use of external equipment (including a CBP standalone computer) merely to make the contents of the device available for inspection (including, for example, to bypass a password, overcome encryption, translate content, view files contained in an external drive or other electronic device lacking a screen, or charge a device) does not constitute an advanced search. Documenting notes and observations, as noted in section 3.3, does not constitute an advanced search.
5.1.4 An officer may perform an advanced search of an electronic device only in instances in which there is reasonable suspicion of activity in violation of the laws enforced or administered by CBP or, in the absence of individualized reasonable suspicion when there is a national security concern. All advanced searches require supervisory approval at the Grade 14 level or higher (or a manager with comparable responsibilities). In cases where the inspecting officer and approving supervisor rely on the presence of a national security concern, without reasonable suspicion, to conduct an advanced search, approval from the Director, Field Operations; Chief Patrol Agent; Director, Air Operations; Director, Marine Operations; Special Agent in Charge; or their delegate, is required prior to conducting the search. In compelling circumstances where operational considerations prevent prior approval, notification shall be made as soon as possible. Notification must include an explanation of the national security concern, the compelling circumstances that precluded prior approval, the relevant facts and information supporting the search, and the results of the search.
5.1.5 All searches of electronic devices will be documented in appropriate CBP systems. Officers will document any supervisory approvals required under this Directive and, in the case of an advanced search, the factors establishing reasonable suspicion of a violation of a law enforced or administered by CBP or a national security concern, as well as relevant observations, impressions, and actions taken, as appropriate.
5.1.6 Searches of electronic devices should be conducted in the presence of the individual whose information is being examined unless there are national security, law enforcement, officer safety, or other operational considerations that make it inappropriate to permit the individual to remain present. Permitting an individual to remain present during a search does not necessarily mean that the individual shall observe the search itself. If permitting an individual to observe the search could reveal law enforcement techniques or potentially compromise other operational considerations, the individual will not be permitted to observe the search itself"
For me, it isn't the lack of warrant (I am a UK Citizen but I expect we have similar problems here), it is the lack of transparency and accountability.
If was arrested on suspicion of something, I can get legal assistance and I can know what I am suspected of and why before any of my property (or in this case, potentially very private and sensitive information) could be taken. If the arrest is manifestly wrongful or not based on any evidence, then I expect it would be easy enough to resist investigation.
On the other hand, having someone at the border who can justify an arbitrary search on the basis that "they might suspect of something", without having to clearly justify that basis and that if they then take property (or information), potentially copy it completely opaquely and then have zero accountability if that is misused is extremely frustrating but I guess you need to lobby your lawmakers to make the system fairer and to ensure legal protections of privileged information is completely upheld - period.
This is actually exactly why I avoid this advice: wiping your phone, and setting it back up later, is a pain in the ass. Especially when you're meant to be on vacation, or exhausted from returning from one. And if it's a pain in the ass, it likely won't get done. The below isn't perfect, but minimizing legal things that CBP can make a case of doesn't have to be all-or-nothing
At this point recommending the minimum that normal people will actually follow feels more effective: photos, main messaging app, and password database.
Photos are backed up; normal people use Google photos, my partner and I use a NAS, but everyone should have a "Free up space" / "Delete photos that are backed-up from device" option. This makes it easy and gets you space for more vacation photos
Main messaging app can be Telegram, Whatsapp, or (in my case) Element. Deleting it from your phone won't cost you your messaging history, but gets your most sensitive chats out of any potential spotlight
I can handle a password database, but "Chrome saves my passwords" means signing out of Chrome is all normal people have to do
A password database seems like the exact thing I don't want on my phone in this case. Or at least only a vault with stuff I absolutely need and can't live without.
"I can handle" being more along the lines of "Most people use Chrome to sync passwords, I can find my own solution"
I mention it because it's something I absolutely want in day-to-day use on my phone, and that I agree with it being one of the few things I'd make a point of not having with me when crossing the US border with
Normal people can sign out of Chrome, I can set up a delayed email (with an encrypted database) before I leave, or put it on a uSD card in my checked baggage, or any number of low-effort but not-on-my-phone workarounds
Yeah, people are unfortunately not informed on just how much power border agents wield. Not only in the US, but in many (most I'd believe) other countries, too. I've worked on cases (intel side) where the law-enforcement side would just wait for the surveillance objects to cross the border, as that's where they could do most data collection with the least hassle.
If for whatever reason you think you're being investigated or surveilled (who knows for what these days, could be enough to just associate with the various protest groups / orgs), you can just assume that the border will be where they'll try to clone / download your data (phones, laptops, whatever)
UK is crazy for this. Border police can detain anyone they like for literally no reason and if they do you have no right to lawyer or no right to silence. Your devices can also be taken and you must hand over any passwords.
I know the UK is an authoritarian state and not really comparable to the US, but as a Brit it's kinda weird hearing Americans complain about flock cameras and arbitrary border searches – these are common place things in the UK and no one cares (well, apart from me and maybe one or two others).
Summary is they can’t detain people for no reason, they can detain people for specific offences relating to immigration and citizenship, customs and excise and also the normal stuff any regular police officer can arrest people for.
I’m no apologist for how much state authority they have, but it’s not as bad as you’re making out.
Welcome to the "democratic" regimes of US, UK, Russia and Turkey. Arbitrary border searches, interrogations and imprisonment, if you are on the wrong end of the political spectrum.
> these are common place things in the UK and no one cares
That seems like a YP not an MP. Just because you and your fellow countrymen gave up long ago is not the problem of those fighting to not lose those rights now. Except maybe you guys make it easier as an example of for the government to show as an example of other countries are already doing it. Thanks for that.
The fight might be a losing cause, but at least it is being fought as long as it can be fought instead of just laying down and accepting it like the UK seems to have done.
> Americans complain about flock cameras and arbitrary border searches – these are common place things in the UK
We complain about those things because we can clearly see that "the UK is an authoritarian state" because they are common place in the UK.
> no one cares
More like people pretend to not care for fear of being locked up for seemly arbitrary reasons, which seems to happen quite a lot over there based on the news reports, because "the UK is an authoritarian state".
It's not illegal in the UK to say you don't like the cameras everywhere. But if you ask UK people, they seem to actually like them. It's a different culture I guess.
> It's not illegal in the UK to say you don't like the cameras everywhere.
That is exactly how authoritarian state looks like.
"It's not illegal in the <our-authoritarian-state> to do <something-our-authoritarian-state-does-not-like>" (but if you do, you'll be f.ucked. Probably. Because it is not illegal).
You'd be far more likely to get away with it in the US, if you can get past security and the efforts to corral you into "free speech zones". Many people did exactly that.
I'm lucky to live in a country (Poland) where border agents can either let you in, arrest you if there is an arrest warrant, or detain but only with a lawful basis for detention (as in, you are posing a threat to others) and detention may be used only when other measures have proved pointless or ineffective.
This makes returning to the country nice and pleasant. The border agents never ask you creepy questions like: Where are you going? Where will you be staying? What do you intend to do? (it's what US border agents ask their citizens). They just say hi and let you in.
If you are part of the EU and move to countries that are also part or at least have strong ties your experience on the border can still differ a whole lot.
I've been traveling during high alert corona times where you had to carry extra corona related paperwork or at least that was the official message, but at the border no one even asked for your passport. There were a lot more people at the border but a lot less interest in getting close.
Then at more normal times border agents wanted to know nearly everything about what was in the car. Sometimes you have to drive through a scanner and sometimes they just wish you a happy day or not even talk to you.
It's mostly chance, but no one ever wanted my phone, so far.
This is completely counter to my recent-ish experience. Over the last two years I've entered Poland... 14 times? and over time, the experience has gotten more intrusive.
> Where are you going? Where will you be staying? What do you intend to do? (it's what US border agents ask their citizens)
Recently you don't even have to get your passport out of the bag, nevermind talking to anybody - you just stroll through the gate. They know who you are via facial recognition (which is creepy in its own right).
But how would you know that, tovarisch mayor, your metoditchka was written a long time ago.
Polish border agents told me (Ukrainian, first time to Poland) to speak to them in polish language when they were checking my documents some years ago, so YMMV.
Polish police and border agents are absolutely disgusting. They come straight from the soviet union. Avoid at all cost. I certainly wont be going back to poland any time soon. At least not by air.
Its funny for a country obsessed with efficiency, the US border agents ask questions that are completely pointless and never verified and simply a waste of time.
The questions are more a means of judging whether you're nervous or behaving suspiciously. The actual answers are irrelevant unless they're especially bizarre.
Not really as those aren't situational. If you start asking someone ordinary questions and they appear especially nervous then it's probably that they have something to hide and combined with other things (e.g. big heavy coat in hot weather) might tip off the security people.
Many people are nervous because they have poor local language skills.
Nerves are not a measure of someone's guilt of anything. Life is a bit more complicated than that. Im sure we are aware of many world leaders who lie quite confidently and your trap would never catch them.
I agree - it's not a perfect test, but it is easy to implement and costs nothing extra. I suppose it's more likely to catch those people who have been coerced into carrying something illicit rather than experienced smugglers who do it all the time.
It's not used to establish guilt, but to establish whether the person is worth further examination, so false positives (e.g. due to language difficulties) would just lead to either further interviewing or searching.
There's not really any good reason to not do it as the questions are not overly intrusive.
Your statement it costs nothing is completely untrue.
Firstly the staff would need training to effectively ask the right questions and interpret the responses.
Asking the public questions cost time. If you have two lines and one does the required checks and the other also asks questions and conversations happen, the later will be slower.
It doesn't seem to me as though it would require a huge amount of extra training - they're just ordinary questions about where someone is going and the reason for the trip.
It might take slightly longer, but the questions are usually asked at the same time as passport checks are performed so I doubt it takes much longer at all.
Are you sure that US border agents ask this? I don't recall ever being asked this when reentering the US as a citizen. They may ask where I went, but never where I'm going within the US or what I'm doing there. Not sure if my experience isn't representative?
I dream of a future where the disk image in my laptop both functions as an operating system, but can also be decrypted into secret files. We'll keep the extra entropy in a pile of AI slop next to the other piles of AI slop. That way, under scrutiny, it just looks like an OS full of AI slop.
Do you have to be careful not to use it in a way that clobbers the hidden secrets, or do they shift around while you work so that they're always recoverable?
This is in line with what I was discussing with my friends recently. Governments across the world weaponised their border protection for all their invasive data collection citing terrorism and other threats. This more or less started post 9/11, and used that as the reason. Now, the AI agents and their hacking is exactly going to be used as an excuse to introduce the real ID verification they've been trying to implement for a while now
Too bad phones aren't easy to do a full back up of, wipe, then restore after you are past the border agents. Or can keep all user data on a microSD card that you remove and secure before the search.
Explain how? I've yet to find something reliable like this. At best you can have a decent number of apps automatically reinstalled to the original state, but not all, and most settings don't transfer, etc. And that requires root access, which most people don't have afaik.
I used to do this kind of thing with TiBackup when Android phones were easy to play with and experimentation was more common.
I'd back up the phone to an SD card and/or send the backup offsite over the network.
After that, I could nuke whatever I wanted -- or factory reset it, switch to a different OS (we often called them "ROMs" back then), play with that for a bit, switch back and forth, or whatever.
When the time was right, I'd use TiBackup to restore the backup. It didn't even have to be the same phone. Apps and data were restored to where they had been. Home screens looked the same. Settings and preferences went back to how they were. The same web stuff remained in browser cache, alongside the same cookies.
There were occasional outliers that didn't come back perfectly, of course, but broadly speaking: It worked very well. Those outliers were few and easy to deal with.
This required root access. But for a time (years), that was easy.
(I will never accept any defense of any proclamations that we must be restricted from doing whatever the fuck we want with the hardware that we own. If I can do things with a desktop PC, then I should also be able to do those same things with a pocket computer.)
You can buy an android which can easily be rooted if you want
They might start restricting what you can do in your PC. Let's keep both free to modify in any way we want without comparison.
Yes, I also used Ti[tanium?] Backup, and now use NeoBackup. Those still don't quite hit the spot for me of a full and reliable backup. It's close in many ways, but I've found system settings to be largely nontransferable, and many times apps would just seem to break or crash after restoring. So I have no idea how people do anything close to it without root, although I suppose it's possible at this point if you use a Google account and apps they probably have something.
> If I can do things with a desktop PC, then I should also be able to do those same things with a pocket computer.
I understand the sentiment behind this argument, but please stop making the argument for freedom to do computing on own devices by making a comparison between desktop PC and pocket computers (mobile devices).
I believe that the bad-faith actors are just gonna force same state of things on desktop PCs as well moving forward, instead of enabling freedom of compute on mobile devices.
Elsewhere in this very thread I talk about how we need a modern solution for full true image backup for phones; I'm also an example of somebody who could use it, as I have phones where if I was to back up and wipe them I would lose the ability to use some extremely expensive old thermal cameras that work by attaching to them, - if I wiped and reinstalled, even having the apps, they require reaching out to servers for initial authentication that no longer exists. A full image backup would solve this.
Rooting is now far more difficult unfortunately, and isn't even available mostly; but I don't see a real method to do a full proper image backup of phones today.
I'd like to think that the old TiBackup method would have worked for your cameras. It tried to save the applications along with their data -- including old, online auth data. Almost all of my stuff Just Worked after using it.
At very least it was way, way better than the wink-and-a-smirk, blind, opaque, vague-handwaving "Your phone is backed up on Google servers!" process that we have these days, wherein: As a practical matter, if I can't touch the backup to examine it, or exercise it at my whim, then that backup doesn't meaningfully exist.
But as I understand it: Your problem is deeper, and riskier. You can't goof around with these existing phones in any way. If you poke at one and the closed-source black-box app decides that it is unhappy, then that means that there is one fewer phone in the world that can do the things you need to do with your cameras.
Maybe the best answer for you is to leave those phones alone, and get another phone you can hack on for the express purpose of trying to to get the camera working on it. This takes the risk out of the loop.
Maybe that means something that passively monitors data over the USB connection and putting together a new app that operates the camera in the same way.
Or perhaps beginning that process would allow recognition: Maybe it's already using a bog-standard protocol on the wire to talk to the camera and it's NBD to download another app that works with your cameras on any new, random phone.
Maybe it instead involves a patch for your existing app's APK that bypasses the authentication step, and this can then be used on a different phone.
Whatever form this liberation takes, it is the kind of thing that a person of adequate skill, or with the right kind of wit and a good LLM, or all of these together, can almost certainly solve. (It might even be easy.)
You can declaratively manage your phone with something like github.com/devindudeman/nix-android so you'd point at a decoy config file and rebuild before crossing the border and then point at the up-to-no-good config file once across.
Of course you do have to be able to reference those files somehow, so they have to be online, but if there are no references to them on the device then the border folks would have to somehow know about them and be able to access them in order to link you and your device to the declared configs. There are a lot of ways to hide such a thing.
It is really intriguing, though my small attempt at using nix with home manager on pc failed, so I'm not so confident on getting it working well on android. Especially considering that I do a decent number of apk mods
The challenge is that if you make it easy to restore, then security matters so much or a random person out there is going to restore your entire phone on another device. Privacy needs strong security, and strong security often involves great inconvenience which most people don't want to deal with.
Use hardware attestation with recovery phrase only as a backup. Your phone authenticates itself to the server using its hardware keys, the server sends all the files over a secure connection and your phone restores them. Easier to restore than most cloud based solutions because you don't even need to sign in.
Attackers would need to know you're using that specific recovery system, get your server address, have a zero day or backdoor on the security chip and they might also need to disassemble your phone. That's a FBI level capability not CBP, it would take days and be impossible to hide. Unless they hack your server but that's a risk with every type of backup.
My point is that anyone that can do what you are saying already knows how to travel with their devices securely. I'm talking about regular non techies.
> “In [Fiscal Year] 2025, out of the over 419 million travelers CBP processed at ports of entry, CBP only searched the electronic devices of 55,318 international travelers,” the agency wrote, or 0.0013%.
The harassment is targeted at critics & opponents of the current regime. The message is very clear: Be afraid of us. Be very afraid
There are 33 days remaining until election day. Vote out all the incumbents.
"The previous administration is only doing what the last administration did!" seems to be the rallying cry of the Trump administrations.
If Obama and Biden really did suck that much, and if Trump's the savior that they claim, he should be doing less of it, not more.
Of course, that's blatantly ignoring the whole premise of Trump - a wannabe dictator implementing totalitarianism for the far-right in exchange for an opportunity to use the presidency for his personal gain in direct violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution - but that would be the improvement, not just the targeting of people you don't like with the same tactics.
I will be curious to see statistics from past years. I'm wondering if this is a new thing. I'm pretty sure US customs and border patrol have always had this power. I think basically every country exercises this power
"It has always been this way, this is normal" is the typical first response to tyranny. It puts you on their side, which is fine if that's where you want to be. Just be aware of it. If you think it's wrong, you definitely don't want to be taking the side of "it's normal," because whether or not it's normal is irrelevant when your government is doing immoral and tyrannical behavior in your name.
Sure but that means November will have no impact on what CPB does. It’s always happened and will continue to happen just like stock trading with insider information will continue to happen regardless of November results.
It’s disingenuous to imply that November will have an effect on either of those topics.
I guess the question is whether the reporting is politically motivated because someone doesn’t like the current admin or grounded in historical fact.
I get what you’re saying and agree. But if there is no statistically significant jump in the number from historical data for previous administrations then I can conclude that the reporting is politically motivated.
Only new-ish because cell phones are now not only ubiquitous but also contains troves of typically private information. Historically, individuals didn't have their entire lives, financial details, personal details, etc on their bodies when traveling. The border exception to the 4th was used primarily for enforcing customs/trade regulations. That carve out is now used to harass citizens.
Not to blame the victim, but maybe we should not be keeping so much personal information about our lives on a device that is at risk like this. A border patrol agent who gains access to my phone is going to be pretty disappointed to find basically nothing about me on it.
It has always been this way; but for the hundreds of years before computers that fit in the palm of your hand that have your entire life on them, it was to ensure you weren’t bringing dangerous goods or produce into the country. It was a physical search of physical items.
The issue now is that my entire life is literally on my phone.
Now, within 100 miles of the border, should CBP choose to, they can search me without a warrant and search everything in my phone, and even retain it if they’d like. If I want to challenge that, I need tens of thousands of dollars and time.
This is the very definition of an unreasonable search; but to change that we have to change the politicians and change the judiciary. It’s up to us, but until we get it changed, we may as well consider the 4th amendment a dead letter, and that means trouble for all of us.
Wikipedia's map is wrong. The "border" includes international airports. There is very little of the population that is not within 100 miles of this "border."
The map also does not show Hawai'i, which would be one green blob, there is no part of Hawai'i not 100 miles from the border. All of the New England states are similarly small enough to be completely covered, even by the erroneous picture of the physical border.
You basically get a few, mostly uninhabited spots out in the West that aren't covered.
> It has always been this way; but for the hundreds of years before computers that fit in the palm of your hand that have your entire life on them
Or, maybe it might help to stop putting our entire lives on our phones.
If a border patrol agent coerces access to my phone, they're not going to find much. A few default apps, Lyft, an a music player. They're not going to find any social media, any photo album full of personal pictures, any banking apps or really anything that helps them understand what kind of person I am. I'm not going to like them going through it, but the blast radius is limited.
And that's me, a regular Joe, not wanted by Interpol. If you're at high risk, you should already have normalized this "app minimalism" mentality.
Why should people give up their right to free expression and being secure in their papers simply because you have voluntarily given up that right in advance?
I agree with both of those things! I'm just suggesting a precaution. People SHOULD be able to cross the road without getting run over, but we look both ways as a precaution. We shouldn't have to, but we do.
If I don’t want the Man to mess with me I can be locally defensive, but it’s also good to keep an eye on the power we allow the Man. Working both ends concedes neither.
This is probably true of everyone's phone. Most phones will have a comprehensive profile of who you are, where you live, where you frequent, who you associate with, and what you like to do. Along with specifics even you don't realize.
I've been hearing about the US searching phones for many years, but not a single time for any other (non-dictatorship) country. The advice for travelling to the US in my circles is "wipe your device, install some believable bullshit, restore from backup when you're through". Not for any other "normal" country.
You're getting downvoted because you didn't anticipate and properly defend yourself against angry people who don't understand the is/aught fallacy. They mistake "is this true?" for "this should be true". Actually, it's not even the is/aught fallacy, it's something weirder. I have yet to figure it out. Still working on that one.
It is pretty certain that not every country exercises this power, though it seems that a few other English-speaking countries also do this.
During the last quarter of century, in many hundreds of border controls through many countries of Europe and Asia, including in places with tight security like Israel, I have never seen any case of searching for information in any belongings of the travelers, like computers or smartphones or even notebooks or the like.
Israel is a country that long before 9/11 had extremely effective methods for testing travelers at border control, and unlike the Americans they kept their methods unchanged after 9/11. Unlike USA, they have never relied on technical means, like X-ray scanners or SSD/HDD searching, but they have relied on trained humans who interviewed the travelers and assessed whether they lie about their purpose or not.
« unlike the Americans they kept their methods unchanged after 9/11 »
That's a good one :) It shows a couple things, like:
• a certain independence from Uncle Sam (like they displayed when they bombed the USS Liberty in 1967)
• that their own population was already sufficiently propagandized into paranoia mode (fear and loathing of “evil muslims”) in order to never make peace and keep the hate up
• and of course that they knew there was nothing to worry about wrt the 9/11 hoax
Unfortunately you have made it about politics, so half the people won't listen to you, and half will agree without understanding the problem of the situation.
Surely you understand that making it about "Trump" implies you can fix it by voting, which you can't, because the laws were there under Democrat administrations too.
As soon as you say "Trump man bad" then the underlying discussion that needs to be had is lost.
It is obviously political, but the same practices happened under Biden and Obama. It is very clearly a both-sides issue, and I'm not sure how voting for dems is supposed to help.
Not OP, but I wouldn't so sure to read that intent into it. There are plenty of people on the left that are critical of the dems. We can both be critical of this practice under Obama as well as under Trump. Voting out incumbents, to me, would mean getting rid of all the officials that have been complacent in this practice, on both sides.
Technically the law applies to '100 miles of a port of entry' [1] so they can use it to come into your home too, obviously selective homes. Most population of US lives within '100 miles of a port of entry' [2]
They cannot enter a home without probable cause or a warrant. And outside of an actual port of entry, say at a random checkpoint they set up, they can only check IDs and look into cars the same as regular police. To perform an actual search of a vehicle in those circumstances still requires a warrant. From your first link at the cbp.gov website:
>Border Patrol checkpoints do not give Border Patrol Agents carte blanche to automatically search persons and their vehicles, other than in the manner described above. To conduct a legal search under the Fourth Amendment, the agents must develop particularly probable cause to conduct a lawful search. Probable cause can be developed from agent observations, records checks, non-intrusive canine sniffs, and other established means. Motorist's may consent to a search but are not required to do so.
Your quote makes clear that no warrant is required, or even likely to ever be used, as long as "agent observations," "records checks," and "canine sniffs" are an option.
I'm sure that "other established means" are a very restrictive requirement if they fail to have an "observation."
If you vote out all the incumbents then you encourage them to ignore you. You will vote against them whether they support, ignore, or oppose what you want. Also, removing the people who agree with you makes it harder to form a majority for your cause.
this 100-mile border rule has been on the books for a while long before Trump. and people have been saying for a while that it could lead to fascist actions against individuals. if you give an institution the power to silence its critics it will use it eventually regardless of how 'just' it claims to be. it's not really a single-party-does-it-wrong issue, at least not since neoliberals took over the left-wing party
which is to say - you sure can vote. but if you really want to do something, there's plenty of local hacktivist groups around doing things like logging ALPRs to maps, attending townhalls to yell at pro-surveillance councilmembers and the like
my experience with those groups is that anybody who's remotely tech savvy and/or a spreadsheet whiz is a godsend. I was one of two people in a 30+ person group who knew how to, for eg, set up breakout rooms, keep virtual attendees engaged, automate email sends, etc. if there's one thing movement organizers are generally bad at it's knowing how to use the technical tools to actually stay organized
you can also be the person who gets them to move off of Google and onto at-least Proton (though ideally something like Cryptpad). anybody with a halfway-competent understanding of OpSec could've prevented a lot of the things that led to the doxxing of individuals and people leaving the movement due to harassment
<Good luck with that vote.>
I know plenty of people who won't vote because of an attitude like this, this is one of the reasons we, in America, are in the political nightmare we're in. yes, we only get one vote apiece, but that vote must be cast to defeat the poisonous stain that has infected the GOP. If you disagree, at least vote for the Constitution.
Are you suggesting the other side didnt get to dispute that Biden won? There were literally a 100 lawsuits, all of them lost except like 1 on some random technical issue that had zero impact to the results.
Except this time, the regime in charge taking public action to tamper and interfere with elections, including threats of intimidation at polling stations. Red state governments are outright gloating that they're gerrymandering their districts based on party lines to retain power.
Even if Dems take the House and Senate, this can't be called a fair election.
What do you mean you don't get to question how fair the elections are? The sitting president of the entire country has questioned and investigated them. No one has stopped questioning and investigating them. People literally stormed the capital over it and had effectively zero real long term consequences in the overwhelming majority of cases. Dozens and dozens of lawsuits, none of which amounted to anything, even when they were in front of Trump appointee judges.
The precedent, if anything, is that we will tolerate people upending the whole public discourse and portions of the government for years over nonsense that never had any evidence of anything occurring on a level that would impact the elections.
Meanwhile, Trump has spent the entire administration trying to restrict the ability for demographics that won't vote for him from being able to vote. Openly. Sometimes honestly, but mostly also blaming all of it on the election he lost and claiming it's to stop the voter fraud that never actually occurred.
The precedent that was set is that questioning the election can become dogma for a political party no matter if there is absolutely zero evidence of what they are saying happened.
While I can't really object to voting out all the incumbents, let's be realistic -- that is not going to change the fact that when you cross a border you are going to be subject to having your belongings searched, and that this search will be very targeted, applying to less than a fraction of a percent of border crossers. It does not matter which nation you are entering, it's been this way for at least 100 years. The idea that border crossings are just places where you are waved through is a libertarian fantasy.
It is worth pointing out that both when you enter a prison and when you enter a country, you are subject to getting searched. My parents now avoid traveling through the UK because they have been searched even though they are just transiting through the airport.
"Critics and opponents of the current regime" who travel overseas includes far more than 55k people every single day.
A more honest way of interpreting that data is: "even if you are a vocal critic of the current regime, it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever search your phone at the border."
Do border guards in most countries require a warrant to search you? Rhetorical question.
In the UK, HMRC can search your house without a warrant if they have 'reasonable suspicion' that goods that are 'liable to forfeiture' are likely to be moved or destroyed. See Customs and Excise Management Act 1979, section 161. Anything seized can be used against you in court. In 2014, HMRC described this power as 'frequently used'.[0] CBP doesn't have that power and it's unthinkable they'd be given it.
Why is the far more limited CBP power (which it shares with almost every border force in the world) mentioned here every 2 weeks or so, while HMRC's very broad power to search your house is ignored?
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
These are all Supreme Court cases that were specifically about the 4th amendment and happened in the last 10 years.
The 4th amendment is over 200 years old and yet requires constant supervision by the Supreme Court to define the word reasonable or to police the lower courts understanding of precedent.
So you are wrong, with whatever presumption you are making that the word "unreasonable" is well defined.
I defy you to read my post without understanding a single lick of it. It is remarkable how far away from the point you landed.
The entire point of my post -- nay, the entire point of the jury system in the United States -- is that until a jury is empaneled, the word "reasonable" may as well have no meaning whatsoever. No one is ever going to define that word short of a jury. You may think you know what is reasonable, they may think they have set forth reasonability in the law, but the only judge that's ever going to make an applicable decision on the word is a juror.
The Supreme Court may decide whether a reasonable jury could have come to a certain conclusion (about whether something was reasonable) but the Supreme Court is also not the place to look for this definition.
I’m always confused when people say this. It’s vague as heck! That one little word in there, “unreasonable,” makes it completely up for interpretation.
I have some astoundingly bad news for you about the entire system of trial by jury which is that virtually the entire thing depends on twelve average people defining the word "reasonable" in the context of your offense.
I wonder if there's a way for "targets" of CBP to easily maintain phones that can be toggled between their "real work" profile and some boring anodyne "CBP-safe" profile?
Locking/disabling the phone, I think, only creates suspicion as we've seen in a previous case not long ago. But if phones can have a cloud back-ups, shouldn't it be possible to have TWO different "back-ups" that can be chosen at will?
#1. The download and restore backup method would work for people in general- except it doesn't capture what people would need. Exmaple: I have some thermal cameras that rely on old 32 bit apps that do not run on anything android 12 onwards- If i wipe those old phones, and restore- the apps often wanted to reach out to a server for initial activation- they would fail upon reinstall and i'd be out of the apps that are required to control my cameras and related equipment,which is worth several thousand, and has no equivalent spec wise and form factor today in 2026. And it'd be all dead weight and rendered useless.
( competitors today do not compete now- for example try finding a 640*480 30 hz or better form factor thermal camera that attaches to phones - they dont exist anymore)
\The solution is full imaging- but there isnt a real way to fully image phones and restore backups today. There used to be it seems- but not really with the latest stuff at the time of this post
.
On another note:Veracrypt- The weakness of truecrypt and veracrypt,
Their strongest counter, the hidden OS option only worked if you converted your computer to MBR, which means you can't have a hard drive too large. Making a UEFI hidden OS has not been done yet, but all computers are this now.
And the Hidden Volume option- isn't 'as' useful, and of course, your OS might make a copy and put it somewhere, you have to be careful. As a example: Any time I open a file, using the software tool Everything to search and confirm this- you can easily see Windows makes copies and temp files and whatnot in randomly named locations- that's the sort of software and OS behavior that will screw people over.( The year of the Linux desktop isn't here yet..)
Solution:We need fully image-backup capable Phones. I mean fully. Not just backing up some apps- as this refuses to backup apps you have that are no longer on app stores, or that Play Protect doesn't like, etc.
We need to be able to fully image a device, a forensic image backup, for phones that people can use, then encrypt and upload so they are good if they lose a phone.
Next- Plausible deniability is a way forward- but you need multiple profiles, that are cryptographically indistinguishable, along with the phone being hardened so GreyKey /Cellebrite won't be able to exploit a way in. This needs to be built this way from the ground up ideally, eventually.
There has been research about making devices that treat all block space the same way so you can't tell if someone has 1, or 50 profiles or partitions, etc- and even stuff that overlaps. Often it needs to be fixed size partitions, but it is apparently NOT impossible to create.
I am aware of Shufflecake attempting to make a solution for Linux, and yes, a Hidden OS option that is forensic- invisible.
But nothing has come out yet - and especially, nothing in this vein for phones.
It would be nice to see the day where, if you travel to a hostile country, you can tell them you have just one profile, and if they ask, you could theoretically mention a 2nd, and then show it- but you might have 3 more - and they'd all be immune to forensic inspection if the system is built right.(Yes, there's often issues you have to be careful of ,like setting this up so you dont destroy data when in other profiles, but that's not as important)
This is how you solve this problem in the long run-make computing devices impossible to analyze, but standardized.
No, the market simply is producing quantities of low end thermals now, resolution isn't quite where it was at. This includes ones produced by European, Chinese and Israeli companies, over the past decade.
ITAR does not prohibit owning or importing tech like this, just exporting ( which would require export licenses, etc)- but the US part of the market is not competitive, the best tech now in this field available to consumers- is foreign , as of now- so ITAR has lost importance in terms of preventing high end tech from getting out - we don't have the high end tech at this time, nor are developing on the cutting edge.
We tech guys keep thinking of tech solutions, but as someone who reluctantly has to cross a border of an even more hostile country every now and then, you have to remember that border agents are not stupid and will mark you as suspicious if your open profile does not look real enough or there are traces of encryption on the device. Being paranoid about security is a huge red flag.
The only thing you can do is travel with a clean device on which you maintain a completely innocuous social presence, such as chats with parents and non-foreign friends, and some social media with normie activity. Even that would not be enough if you're an activist or otherwise personally targeted, as your real accounts are already known in that case and your only option is not to travel at all, but it reduces your chances of getting in trouble (or arrested, depending on the target country). Though it still won't help in the long run as security services collect and organize more and more data about everyone.
The full image backup solution solves that, as you never have to travel with your stuff and can upload and download it-
But also, things like the hidden OS, or shufflecake - they're building these so they're would be no traces.
Which is why I said this sort of thing needs to be standardized - if every phone or device naturally gets extremely high levels of security, and it's built in by default to all of them- it's not unusual anymore, is suspicious. And stems the overall ongoing data collection on everyone that you highlighted.
I remember going down a rabbit hole of Youtube border security videos (like the TV show "Cops" but for customs and the border) and was shocked at how much power they have. It doesn't seem to be uniquely American either as the show takes place in Canada and Australia as well.
They'll go through everything: phones, journals, mail. They'll straight up call people in someone's phone and question them if they think it's relevant.
I don't like this. I think about a year ago when there was a big push for chat control in the EU, almost like an instinct, I started working on ways to be more soverign with my data.
I'm just a regular guy who really has nothing to hide, but that doesn't mean I need to be complacent with just allowing a future I don't like be propped up in front of my eyes.
What I've come to realize is there is really no safer place for your data and communications than just your own home. At the very least, I would like a judge to review the evidence of my alledged wrong doing before the government can raid my castle and get what they need.
Why do I, as a regular citizen feel the need to invoke and create my own protections on personal data and communications?
There's something deep inside me that feels the need to be prepared for this odd future where the government feels they have the right to access everything. It's deeply troubling on many fronts.
> I'm just a regular guy who really has nothing to hide
Yeah, you do.
Post your nudes.
Post your full financial details.
Post your whole medical history.
Post every crime you might have committed, even as a juvenile.
Post all your credit cards and bank account details.
Hmmmm, so you ARE hiding those, eh? Quit framing this as "nothing to hide", because we ALL have things we hide... Not because they're illegal or anything, but because it protects us.
Sorry, but its not 'I have nothing to hide so who cares'...it's 'I have nothing to hide, and you also have absolutely no right to access my data and I will make that as hard as I possibly can.'
This is different than arguing 'I have nothing to hide and also because of that you get free reign to everything'?
But really, I don't take nudes cause why?, my financials are remarkably average, I have no medical history that I care about people knowing (broke my hand once), I've haven't broken any law's, I don't use credit cards...?
That doesn't mean you are allowed to access my devices on whims, track my daily movements relentlessly.
So why does the government get to do all of those things? Especially when they've already demonstrated that they're not very good at using them to achieve the stated goal of improving security.
Exactly and if they can't keep FBI data locked down how are they going to keep what they harvest from the plebes. You really want your insurer, landlord, employer, bank knowing all this?
We live in a world where McDonald's is using AI to dynamically price hamburgers. Every piece of information about your life is something you might want to hide just to avoid being screwed over harder financially than you otherwise would.
You medical history will be used to avoid hiring you to keep health insurance costs down, even if it's illegal. Your gambling or alcohol addiction will be used to target you with for gambling or alcohol advertisements even if they made that illegal. Your financial status will be used to mark up prices of things you need to buy, like how airlines used to show higher prices when you connected with an iPhone.
> I'm just a regular guy who really has nothing to hide
I think you are wrong. We all have things to hide.
A joke between friends taken out of context. Your angry messages to a spouse or parent after a fight happened between you and them could be used out of context also. And what about your YouTube history and playlist or your web history...
> just your own home
Your home can be searched and all your devices at home can be seized as well. Granted it's probably a higher threshold than having everything on your phone but it's no a panacea either.
>Your home can be searched and all your devices at home can be seized as well.
You need a warrant to search my home. That's my whole point. Warrantless access is the issue.
Get a warrant, and I will happily show you anything you want. Nothing will be found because at the end of the tunnel, I actually have nothing to hide, I'm just a regular guy is my point.
I disagree with this framing. Privacy is never been about having something to hide. There's a big difference between having something to hide and it just not being someone else's business. It also implies a kind of light criminality imo.
I don't hide my bank details it's just none of your business.
This is me exercising personal control, preventing misuse and exploitation, and protecting the little dignity I have left this centry.
> “In [Fiscal Year] 2025, out of the over 419 million travelers CBP processed at ports of entry, CBP only searched the electronic devices of 55,318 international travelers,” the agency wrote, or 0.0013%.
And...
> In Fiscal Year 2020, CBP processed more than 238 million travelers at U.S. ports of entry. During that same period of time, CBP conducted 32,038 border searches of electronic devices, representing less than .014 percent of arriving international travelers.[1]
In other words, now it's as likely[0] to get your phone searched as in 2020. It's interesting how the media shapes people's perspective, isn't it?
Good thing nobody is working on automation that could pump those numbers. Oh, wait, they are.
How is your argument any different than Stalin killing only X people that he was suspicious of or the KGB only being able to target N people due to not having more manpower?
I think 0.001% is too high. These are not accidental; these are intentional. That you personally haven't been targeted is only limited by the ability of them to do more, which is continually changing
You have the right to say that, but if you do, then in the best case they will seize the phone for a few months to send it to a lab for analysis. In the worst case, they will detain the person and have a judge order the person to stay detained until the person hands over the password.
The more free they have to tell you you are, the less free you actually are. In the DPRK they drill it into you constantly. In China, a few times a day. In the USA, only once a day.
I don't travel with any of my shit anymore, I take my old phone/laptop with nothing but music, separate debit/credit cards, tickets/itenerary, and whatever other little things. No contacts, no icloud, no saved passwords, etc. Been doing it for over a decade.
TSA once gave me SSSS for 5 years after they tried making me answer a survey that asked me to prioritize things like "health", "safety", "privacy" as a ranked list and I refused to do that. Fuck em and anyone dumb enough to work for them. I was already used to showing up 4 hours early because they always make me take every single synth/sequencer/etc out so they can swipe it down to check for terrorism particles
I also get groped every single time because my dick shows up on the scanner. So goddamned worthless
I responded to comments on this thread or on other threads but just in case you think this is a US thing only, it is not.
The UK border agents (technically counter-terrorism) can stop you at the border, force you into a room, ask for your passwords to all your devices and you don't have the right to refuse.
You also don't have the right to have a lawyer be in a room with you and you are compelled to answer all their questions and finally they do not need to tell you why they stopped you.
Then, if you are lucky they return your devices 7 days later after they have been through everything or they can keep them forever if they find something suspicious.
American society should have done something about the excessive power these agents have had for a long time at the border and in the travel authority. The things they would ask, and their attitudes and behavior were almost like drug induced paranoia with confabulations.
Neighboring the country in Canada, the US seemed like shorthand for USSR when it came to the border and travel. This sort of policy will make the US unpopular and inhospitable for conferences or any other important gatherings that it's taken for granted.
Carry a burner old phone and ship your actual. Be prepared to smash the phone or otherwise brutalize it if they demand to search it, then let them have at it.
Smash the phone? That's terrible advice. For just about everybody, destroying the phone is probably going to get them in a lot more trouble than the contents ever would.
If you don't cooperate they can hold you for a while and make all kinds of threats but, if you are a citizen, ultimately they cannot deny you entry.
If I were truly paranoid, I'd probably travel with flip phone and an iPad with typical (non-sensitive) apps on it and a remote desktop client that I could use to connect to my computer back home. Make sure the remote desktop client isn't installed on the iPad during border crossings.
> The agent took the phone away and only returned after approximately 45 minutes, during which Kennedy believes that data on the phone was copied. He was then released with no charges.
Does the owner, Mr. Kennedy has actual knowledge/proof if the phone was copied, or this is a guess? Might be missing from the article.
I know the focus is on him getting searched and all, but I think what’s important is the auto-tagging or flagging of people based on something like a post made online or similar. This is far worse as it implicates mass surveillance, mass AI use to automate what should be done after due diligence, and how that obviously can and will he used politically as opposed to criminally.
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 12.2 ms ] thread3.2 Electronic Device: Any device that may contain information in an electronic or digital form, such as computers, tablets, disks, drives, tapes, flash drives, SIM cards, global positioning systems, unmanned aircraft systems, vehicle infotainment systems, smart watches, mobile phones and other communication devices, cameras, music and other media players.
3.3 Basic Search: Any border search of an electronic device that does not qualify as an advanced search as described in section 3.4, in which an officer conducts a review or analysis of information residing in electronic or digital form on the device. A basic search may include documenting information observed on the device during the search that relates to immigration, customs, or other law enforcement actions in CBP systems.
3.4 Advanced Search: An advanced search is any search in which an officer connects equipment, wired or wireless, to copy and/or analyze the contents of an electronic device. Use of external equipment (including a CBP standalone computer) merely to make the contents of the device available for inspection (including, for example, to bypass a password, overcome encryption, translate content, view files contained in an external drive or other electronic device lacking a screen, or charge a device) does not constitute an advanced search. Documenting notes and observations, as noted in section 3.3, does not constitute an advanced search.
5.1.4 An officer may perform an advanced search of an electronic device only in instances in which there is reasonable suspicion of activity in violation of the laws enforced or administered by CBP or, in the absence of individualized reasonable suspicion when there is a national security concern. All advanced searches require supervisory approval at the Grade 14 level or higher (or a manager with comparable responsibilities). In cases where the inspecting officer and approving supervisor rely on the presence of a national security concern, without reasonable suspicion, to conduct an advanced search, approval from the Director, Field Operations; Chief Patrol Agent; Director, Air Operations; Director, Marine Operations; Special Agent in Charge; or their delegate, is required prior to conducting the search. In compelling circumstances where operational considerations prevent prior approval, notification shall be made as soon as possible. Notification must include an explanation of the national security concern, the compelling circumstances that precluded prior approval, the relevant facts and information supporting the search, and the results of the search.
5.1.5 All searches of electronic devices will be documented in appropriate CBP systems. Officers will document any supervisory approvals required under this Directive and, in the case of an advanced search, the factors establishing reasonable suspicion of a violation of a law enforced or administered by CBP or a national security concern, as well as relevant observations, impressions, and actions taken, as appropriate.
5.1.6 Searches of electronic devices should be conducted in the presence of the individual whose information is being examined unless there are national security, law enforcement, officer safety, or other operational considerations that make it inappropriate to permit the individual to remain present. Permitting an individual to remain present during a search does not necessarily mean that the individual shall observe the search itself. If permitting an individual to observe the search could reveal law enforcement techniques or potentially compromise other operational considerations, the individual will not be permitted to observe the search itself"
If was arrested on suspicion of something, I can get legal assistance and I can know what I am suspected of and why before any of my property (or in this case, potentially very private and sensitive information) could be taken. If the arrest is manifestly wrongful or not based on any evidence, then I expect it would be easy enough to resist investigation.
On the other hand, having someone at the border who can justify an arbitrary search on the basis that "they might suspect of something", without having to clearly justify that basis and that if they then take property (or information), potentially copy it completely opaquely and then have zero accountability if that is misused is extremely frustrating but I guess you need to lobby your lawmakers to make the system fairer and to ensure legal protections of privileged information is completely upheld - period.
Wipe your phone and factory reset before you cross the border, then restore afterward.
At this point recommending the minimum that normal people will actually follow feels more effective: photos, main messaging app, and password database.
Photos are backed up; normal people use Google photos, my partner and I use a NAS, but everyone should have a "Free up space" / "Delete photos that are backed-up from device" option. This makes it easy and gets you space for more vacation photos
Main messaging app can be Telegram, Whatsapp, or (in my case) Element. Deleting it from your phone won't cost you your messaging history, but gets your most sensitive chats out of any potential spotlight
I can handle a password database, but "Chrome saves my passwords" means signing out of Chrome is all normal people have to do
I mention it because it's something I absolutely want in day-to-day use on my phone, and that I agree with it being one of the few things I'd make a point of not having with me when crossing the US border with
Normal people can sign out of Chrome, I can set up a delayed email (with an encrypted database) before I leave, or put it on a uSD card in my checked baggage, or any number of low-effort but not-on-my-phone workarounds
If for whatever reason you think you're being investigated or surveilled (who knows for what these days, could be enough to just associate with the various protest groups / orgs), you can just assume that the border will be where they'll try to clone / download your data (phones, laptops, whatever)
I know the UK is an authoritarian state and not really comparable to the US, but as a Brit it's kinda weird hearing Americans complain about flock cameras and arbitrary border searches – these are common place things in the UK and no one cares (well, apart from me and maybe one or two others).
Summary is they can’t detain people for no reason, they can detain people for specific offences relating to immigration and citizenship, customs and excise and also the normal stuff any regular police officer can arrest people for.
I’m no apologist for how much state authority they have, but it’s not as bad as you’re making out.
That seems like a YP not an MP. Just because you and your fellow countrymen gave up long ago is not the problem of those fighting to not lose those rights now. Except maybe you guys make it easier as an example of for the government to show as an example of other countries are already doing it. Thanks for that.
The fight might be a losing cause, but at least it is being fought as long as it can be fought instead of just laying down and accepting it like the UK seems to have done.
We complain about those things because we can clearly see that "the UK is an authoritarian state" because they are common place in the UK.
> no one cares
More like people pretend to not care for fear of being locked up for seemly arbitrary reasons, which seems to happen quite a lot over there based on the news reports, because "the UK is an authoritarian state".
That is exactly how authoritarian state looks like.
"It's not illegal in the <our-authoritarian-state> to do <something-our-authoritarian-state-does-not-like>" (but if you do, you'll be f.ucked. Probably. Because it is not illegal).
Punishing someone for saying they don't like cameras seems like it'd be perfectly on brand for the UK at this point.
If you go to the US inauguration and yell "hashtag not my president!" you'll get arrested too.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-tru...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-tru...
This makes returning to the country nice and pleasant. The border agents never ask you creepy questions like: Where are you going? Where will you be staying? What do you intend to do? (it's what US border agents ask their citizens). They just say hi and let you in.
I've been traveling during high alert corona times where you had to carry extra corona related paperwork or at least that was the official message, but at the border no one even asked for your passport. There were a lot more people at the border but a lot less interest in getting close.
Then at more normal times border agents wanted to know nearly everything about what was in the car. Sometimes you have to drive through a scanner and sometimes they just wish you a happy day or not even talk to you.
It's mostly chance, but no one ever wanted my phone, so far.
Recently you don't even have to get your passport out of the bag, nevermind talking to anybody - you just stroll through the gate. They know who you are via facial recognition (which is creepy in its own right). But how would you know that, tovarisch mayor, your metoditchka was written a long time ago.
Nerves are not a measure of someone's guilt of anything. Life is a bit more complicated than that. Im sure we are aware of many world leaders who lie quite confidently and your trap would never catch them.
It's not used to establish guilt, but to establish whether the person is worth further examination, so false positives (e.g. due to language difficulties) would just lead to either further interviewing or searching.
There's not really any good reason to not do it as the questions are not overly intrusive.
Firstly the staff would need training to effectively ask the right questions and interpret the responses.
Asking the public questions cost time. If you have two lines and one does the required checks and the other also asks questions and conversations happen, the later will be slower.
Slower lines means more staff are required.
It might take slightly longer, but the questions are usually asked at the same time as passport checks are performed so I doubt it takes much longer at all.
The question is how the fuck did everybody devolve into invertebrates and let it become that way
If you're not pissed at all the laws that treat you like a bitch, you should at least be pissed at how the ruling class is immune to those laws.
This law actually predates the discovery of evolution by some decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_evolutionary_though...
I recently wrote a short blog post about exactly this worry. Link if anyone's interested https://www.vinoth.net/internet-for-humans/
In a dark body cavity?
I'd back up the phone to an SD card and/or send the backup offsite over the network.
After that, I could nuke whatever I wanted -- or factory reset it, switch to a different OS (we often called them "ROMs" back then), play with that for a bit, switch back and forth, or whatever.
When the time was right, I'd use TiBackup to restore the backup. It didn't even have to be the same phone. Apps and data were restored to where they had been. Home screens looked the same. Settings and preferences went back to how they were. The same web stuff remained in browser cache, alongside the same cookies.
There were occasional outliers that didn't come back perfectly, of course, but broadly speaking: It worked very well. Those outliers were few and easy to deal with.
This required root access. But for a time (years), that was easy.
(I will never accept any defense of any proclamations that we must be restricted from doing whatever the fuck we want with the hardware that we own. If I can do things with a desktop PC, then I should also be able to do those same things with a pocket computer.)
I understand the sentiment behind this argument, but please stop making the argument for freedom to do computing on own devices by making a comparison between desktop PC and pocket computers (mobile devices).
I believe that the bad-faith actors are just gonna force same state of things on desktop PCs as well moving forward, instead of enabling freedom of compute on mobile devices.
Rooting is now far more difficult unfortunately, and isn't even available mostly; but I don't see a real method to do a full proper image backup of phones today.
At very least it was way, way better than the wink-and-a-smirk, blind, opaque, vague-handwaving "Your phone is backed up on Google servers!" process that we have these days, wherein: As a practical matter, if I can't touch the backup to examine it, or exercise it at my whim, then that backup doesn't meaningfully exist.
But as I understand it: Your problem is deeper, and riskier. You can't goof around with these existing phones in any way. If you poke at one and the closed-source black-box app decides that it is unhappy, then that means that there is one fewer phone in the world that can do the things you need to do with your cameras.
Maybe the best answer for you is to leave those phones alone, and get another phone you can hack on for the express purpose of trying to to get the camera working on it. This takes the risk out of the loop.
Maybe that means something that passively monitors data over the USB connection and putting together a new app that operates the camera in the same way.
Or perhaps beginning that process would allow recognition: Maybe it's already using a bog-standard protocol on the wire to talk to the camera and it's NBD to download another app that works with your cameras on any new, random phone.
Maybe it instead involves a patch for your existing app's APK that bypasses the authentication step, and this can then be used on a different phone.
Whatever form this liberation takes, it is the kind of thing that a person of adequate skill, or with the right kind of wit and a good LLM, or all of these together, can almost certainly solve. (It might even be easy.)
Of course you do have to be able to reference those files somehow, so they have to be online, but if there are no references to them on the device then the border folks would have to somehow know about them and be able to access them in order to link you and your device to the declared configs. There are a lot of ways to hide such a thing.
https://imgur.com/gallery/history-of-telephone-pre-2000-6YCg...
Attackers would need to know you're using that specific recovery system, get your server address, have a zero day or backdoor on the security chip and they might also need to disassemble your phone. That's a FBI level capability not CBP, it would take days and be impossible to hide. Unless they hack your server but that's a risk with every type of backup.
The harassment is targeted at critics & opponents of the current regime. The message is very clear: Be afraid of us. Be very afraid
There are 33 days remaining until election day. Vote out all the incumbents.
If Obama and Biden really did suck that much, and if Trump's the savior that they claim, he should be doing less of it, not more.
Of course, that's blatantly ignoring the whole premise of Trump - a wannabe dictator implementing totalitarianism for the far-right in exchange for an opportunity to use the presidency for his personal gain in direct violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution - but that would be the improvement, not just the targeting of people you don't like with the same tactics.
It’s disingenuous to imply that November will have an effect on either of those topics.
I get what you’re saying and agree. But if there is no statistically significant jump in the number from historical data for previous administrations then I can conclude that the reporting is politically motivated.
The issue now is that my entire life is literally on my phone.
The issue now is that there is a 100-mile ‘border search exception’ in place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
Now, within 100 miles of the border, should CBP choose to, they can search me without a warrant and search everything in my phone, and even retain it if they’d like. If I want to challenge that, I need tens of thousands of dollars and time.
This is the very definition of an unreasonable search; but to change that we have to change the politicians and change the judiciary. It’s up to us, but until we get it changed, we may as well consider the 4th amendment a dead letter, and that means trouble for all of us.
The map also does not show Hawai'i, which would be one green blob, there is no part of Hawai'i not 100 miles from the border. All of the New England states are similarly small enough to be completely covered, even by the erroneous picture of the physical border.
You basically get a few, mostly uninhabited spots out in the West that aren't covered.
Or, maybe it might help to stop putting our entire lives on our phones.
If a border patrol agent coerces access to my phone, they're not going to find much. A few default apps, Lyft, an a music player. They're not going to find any social media, any photo album full of personal pictures, any banking apps or really anything that helps them understand what kind of person I am. I'm not going to like them going through it, but the blast radius is limited.
And that's me, a regular Joe, not wanted by Interpol. If you're at high risk, you should already have normalized this "app minimalism" mentality.
People SHOULD be allowed to put their entire lives on phones if they want to.
People SHOULD NOT have to worry about governments using that against them.
However:
> The issue now is that my entire life is literally on my phone.
Is something you should fix. And not because of border searches.
I do most online stuff from a PC.
The USA is definitely not thevonly one. Great Britain has also an extensive history of tyranical privacy-violating border crossing.
As is Israel and Russia.
The point is, the deeper you look, the better you understand how wide-spread the practice is.
There's a much simpler advice:
"Don't."
For some reason, HN commenters constantly struggle with this (simple) concept.
During the last quarter of century, in many hundreds of border controls through many countries of Europe and Asia, including in places with tight security like Israel, I have never seen any case of searching for information in any belongings of the travelers, like computers or smartphones or even notebooks or the like.
Israel is a country that long before 9/11 had extremely effective methods for testing travelers at border control, and unlike the Americans they kept their methods unchanged after 9/11. Unlike USA, they have never relied on technical means, like X-ray scanners or SSD/HDD searching, but they have relied on trained humans who interviewed the travelers and assessed whether they lie about their purpose or not.
"I have never seen" is very different from "it doesn't happen".
I'm pretty sure in many countries, border control agents do their worst stuff out of sight of the public.
That's a good one :) It shows a couple things, like:
• a certain independence from Uncle Sam (like they displayed when they bombed the USS Liberty in 1967)
• that their own population was already sufficiently propagandized into paranoia mode (fear and loathing of “evil muslims”) in order to never make peace and keep the hate up
• and of course that they knew there was nothing to worry about wrt the 9/11 hoax
These stats aren't also capturing who gets stopped and why, which is pretty important, especially given the current government.
As soon as you say "Trump man bad" then the underlying discussion that needs to be had is lost.
[1] https://www.help.cbp.gov/s/article/Article-1253?language=en_...
[2] https://www.southernborder.org/100_mile_border_enforcement_z...
>Border Patrol checkpoints do not give Border Patrol Agents carte blanche to automatically search persons and their vehicles, other than in the manner described above. To conduct a legal search under the Fourth Amendment, the agents must develop particularly probable cause to conduct a lawful search. Probable cause can be developed from agent observations, records checks, non-intrusive canine sniffs, and other established means. Motorist's may consent to a search but are not required to do so.
I'm sure that "other established means" are a very restrictive requirement if they fail to have an "observation."
If you vote out all the incumbents then you encourage them to ignore you. You will vote against them whether they support, ignore, or oppose what you want. Also, removing the people who agree with you makes it harder to form a majority for your cause.
which is to say - you sure can vote. but if you really want to do something, there's plenty of local hacktivist groups around doing things like logging ALPRs to maps, attending townhalls to yell at pro-surveillance councilmembers and the like
my experience with those groups is that anybody who's remotely tech savvy and/or a spreadsheet whiz is a godsend. I was one of two people in a 30+ person group who knew how to, for eg, set up breakout rooms, keep virtual attendees engaged, automate email sends, etc. if there's one thing movement organizers are generally bad at it's knowing how to use the technical tools to actually stay organized
you can also be the person who gets them to move off of Google and onto at-least Proton (though ideally something like Cryptpad). anybody with a halfway-competent understanding of OpSec could've prevented a lot of the things that led to the doxxing of individuals and people leaving the movement due to harassment
Good luck with that vote.
What about having UN observers on the ground to ensure fair elections, like the countries this administration is so found of?
Some states had quite a deep dive, forensic audits, the whole thing. https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-wisconsin-presidential-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Maricopa_County_president...
The 2020 election was probably the most scrutinized in history. How is that not being able to question a fair election?
Even if Dems take the House and Senate, this can't be called a fair election.
The precedent, if anything, is that we will tolerate people upending the whole public discourse and portions of the government for years over nonsense that never had any evidence of anything occurring on a level that would impact the elections.
Meanwhile, Trump has spent the entire administration trying to restrict the ability for demographics that won't vote for him from being able to vote. Openly. Sometimes honestly, but mostly also blaming all of it on the election he lost and claiming it's to stop the voter fraud that never actually occurred.
The precedent that was set is that questioning the election can become dogma for a political party no matter if there is absolutely zero evidence of what they are saying happened.
It is worth pointing out that both when you enter a prison and when you enter a country, you are subject to getting searched. My parents now avoid traveling through the UK because they have been searched even though they are just transiting through the airport.
A more honest way of interpreting that data is: "even if you are a vocal critic of the current regime, it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever search your phone at the border."
In the UK, HMRC can search your house without a warrant if they have 'reasonable suspicion' that goods that are 'liable to forfeiture' are likely to be moved or destroyed. See Customs and Excise Management Act 1979, section 161. Anything seized can be used against you in court. In 2014, HMRC described this power as 'frequently used'.[0] CBP doesn't have that power and it's unthinkable they'd be given it.
Why is the far more limited CBP power (which it shares with almost every border force in the world) mentioned here every 2 weeks or so, while HMRC's very broad power to search your house is ignored?
[0] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7e1bbae5274...
It's self explanatory.
Carpenter v. United States (5-4)
Collins v. Virginia (8-1)
Barnes v. Felix (9-0)
These are all Supreme Court cases that were specifically about the 4th amendment and happened in the last 10 years.
The 4th amendment is over 200 years old and yet requires constant supervision by the Supreme Court to define the word reasonable or to police the lower courts understanding of precedent.
So you are wrong, with whatever presumption you are making that the word "unreasonable" is well defined.
The entire point of my post -- nay, the entire point of the jury system in the United States -- is that until a jury is empaneled, the word "reasonable" may as well have no meaning whatsoever. No one is ever going to define that word short of a jury. You may think you know what is reasonable, they may think they have set forth reasonability in the law, but the only judge that's ever going to make an applicable decision on the word is a juror.
The Supreme Court may decide whether a reasonable jury could have come to a certain conclusion (about whether something was reasonable) but the Supreme Court is also not the place to look for this definition.
Good luck in your studies.
Locking/disabling the phone, I think, only creates suspicion as we've seen in a previous case not long ago. But if phones can have a cloud back-ups, shouldn't it be possible to have TWO different "back-ups" that can be chosen at will?
#1. The download and restore backup method would work for people in general- except it doesn't capture what people would need. Exmaple: I have some thermal cameras that rely on old 32 bit apps that do not run on anything android 12 onwards- If i wipe those old phones, and restore- the apps often wanted to reach out to a server for initial activation- they would fail upon reinstall and i'd be out of the apps that are required to control my cameras and related equipment,which is worth several thousand, and has no equivalent spec wise and form factor today in 2026. And it'd be all dead weight and rendered useless.
( competitors today do not compete now- for example try finding a 640*480 30 hz or better form factor thermal camera that attaches to phones - they dont exist anymore)
\The solution is full imaging- but there isnt a real way to fully image phones and restore backups today. There used to be it seems- but not really with the latest stuff at the time of this post
.
On another note:Veracrypt- The weakness of truecrypt and veracrypt, Their strongest counter, the hidden OS option only worked if you converted your computer to MBR, which means you can't have a hard drive too large. Making a UEFI hidden OS has not been done yet, but all computers are this now.
And the Hidden Volume option- isn't 'as' useful, and of course, your OS might make a copy and put it somewhere, you have to be careful. As a example: Any time I open a file, using the software tool Everything to search and confirm this- you can easily see Windows makes copies and temp files and whatnot in randomly named locations- that's the sort of software and OS behavior that will screw people over.( The year of the Linux desktop isn't here yet..)
Solution:We need fully image-backup capable Phones. I mean fully. Not just backing up some apps- as this refuses to backup apps you have that are no longer on app stores, or that Play Protect doesn't like, etc. We need to be able to fully image a device, a forensic image backup, for phones that people can use, then encrypt and upload so they are good if they lose a phone.
Next- Plausible deniability is a way forward- but you need multiple profiles, that are cryptographically indistinguishable, along with the phone being hardened so GreyKey /Cellebrite won't be able to exploit a way in. This needs to be built this way from the ground up ideally, eventually.
There has been research about making devices that treat all block space the same way so you can't tell if someone has 1, or 50 profiles or partitions, etc- and even stuff that overlaps. Often it needs to be fixed size partitions, but it is apparently NOT impossible to create. I am aware of Shufflecake attempting to make a solution for Linux, and yes, a Hidden OS option that is forensic- invisible.
But nothing has come out yet - and especially, nothing in this vein for phones.
It would be nice to see the day where, if you travel to a hostile country, you can tell them you have just one profile, and if they ask, you could theoretically mention a 2nd, and then show it- but you might have 3 more - and they'd all be immune to forensic inspection if the system is built right.(Yes, there's often issues you have to be careful of ,like setting this up so you dont destroy data when in other profiles, but that's not as important)
This is how you solve this problem in the long run-make computing devices impossible to analyze, but standardized.
...or, returning to one.
Huh. ITAR?
The only thing you can do is travel with a clean device on which you maintain a completely innocuous social presence, such as chats with parents and non-foreign friends, and some social media with normie activity. Even that would not be enough if you're an activist or otherwise personally targeted, as your real accounts are already known in that case and your only option is not to travel at all, but it reduces your chances of getting in trouble (or arrested, depending on the target country). Though it still won't help in the long run as security services collect and organize more and more data about everyone.
But also, things like the hidden OS, or shufflecake - they're building these so they're would be no traces. Which is why I said this sort of thing needs to be standardized - if every phone or device naturally gets extremely high levels of security, and it's built in by default to all of them- it's not unusual anymore, is suspicious. And stems the overall ongoing data collection on everyone that you highlighted.
They'll go through everything: phones, journals, mail. They'll straight up call people in someone's phone and question them if they think it's relevant.
I'm just a regular guy who really has nothing to hide, but that doesn't mean I need to be complacent with just allowing a future I don't like be propped up in front of my eyes.
What I've come to realize is there is really no safer place for your data and communications than just your own home. At the very least, I would like a judge to review the evidence of my alledged wrong doing before the government can raid my castle and get what they need.
Why do I, as a regular citizen feel the need to invoke and create my own protections on personal data and communications?
There's something deep inside me that feels the need to be prepared for this odd future where the government feels they have the right to access everything. It's deeply troubling on many fronts.
Yeah, you do.
Post your nudes.
Post your full financial details.
Post your whole medical history.
Post every crime you might have committed, even as a juvenile.
Post all your credit cards and bank account details.
Hmmmm, so you ARE hiding those, eh? Quit framing this as "nothing to hide", because we ALL have things we hide... Not because they're illegal or anything, but because it protects us.
This is different than arguing 'I have nothing to hide and also because of that you get free reign to everything'?
But really, I don't take nudes cause why?, my financials are remarkably average, I have no medical history that I care about people knowing (broke my hand once), I've haven't broken any law's, I don't use credit cards...?
That doesn't mean you are allowed to access my devices on whims, track my daily movements relentlessly.
You medical history will be used to avoid hiring you to keep health insurance costs down, even if it's illegal. Your gambling or alcohol addiction will be used to target you with for gambling or alcohol advertisements even if they made that illegal. Your financial status will be used to mark up prices of things you need to buy, like how airlines used to show higher prices when you connected with an iPhone.
I think you are wrong. We all have things to hide.
A joke between friends taken out of context. Your angry messages to a spouse or parent after a fight happened between you and them could be used out of context also. And what about your YouTube history and playlist or your web history...
> just your own home
Your home can be searched and all your devices at home can be seized as well. Granted it's probably a higher threshold than having everything on your phone but it's no a panacea either.
You need a warrant to search my home. That's my whole point. Warrantless access is the issue.
Get a warrant, and I will happily show you anything you want. Nothing will be found because at the end of the tunnel, I actually have nothing to hide, I'm just a regular guy is my point.
"Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, and I will find something in them which will hang him."
I don't hide my bank details it's just none of your business.
This is me exercising personal control, preventing misuse and exploitation, and protecting the little dignity I have left this centry.
If you’re just now getting upset about this then you need to check your political bias becise that’s the only thing that’s changed.
And...
> In Fiscal Year 2020, CBP processed more than 238 million travelers at U.S. ports of entry. During that same period of time, CBP conducted 32,038 border searches of electronic devices, representing less than .014 percent of arriving international travelers.[1]
In other words, now it's as likely[0] to get your phone searched as in 2020. It's interesting how the media shapes people's perspective, isn't it?
[0]: 0.001% less likely, so just marginal error.
[1]: https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistic... not sure it reports 2020's data here though.
If there is a spurious zero, .013% is a 7% change from 0.014%, not 0.001%.
How is your argument any different than Stalin killing only X people that he was suspicious of or the KGB only being able to target N people due to not having more manpower?
I think 0.001% is too high. These are not accidental; these are intentional. That you personally haven't been targeted is only limited by the ability of them to do more, which is continually changing
Amazing development from idea, vision and lyrics to the current status quo.
TSA once gave me SSSS for 5 years after they tried making me answer a survey that asked me to prioritize things like "health", "safety", "privacy" as a ranked list and I refused to do that. Fuck em and anyone dumb enough to work for them. I was already used to showing up 4 hours early because they always make me take every single synth/sequencer/etc out so they can swipe it down to check for terrorism particles
I also get groped every single time because my dick shows up on the scanner. So goddamned worthless
The UK border agents (technically counter-terrorism) can stop you at the border, force you into a room, ask for your passwords to all your devices and you don't have the right to refuse.
You also don't have the right to have a lawyer be in a room with you and you are compelled to answer all their questions and finally they do not need to tell you why they stopped you.
Then, if you are lucky they return your devices 7 days later after they have been through everything or they can keep them forever if they find something suspicious.
This guy (who is a British citizen) went through it last year and talks about the whole procedure: https://youtu.be/991kRp8KUmo?si=-5S1uLE7K9KG_gNj
Neighboring the country in Canada, the US seemed like shorthand for USSR when it came to the border and travel. This sort of policy will make the US unpopular and inhospitable for conferences or any other important gatherings that it's taken for granted.
If you don't cooperate they can hold you for a while and make all kinds of threats but, if you are a citizen, ultimately they cannot deny you entry.
If I were truly paranoid, I'd probably travel with flip phone and an iPad with typical (non-sensitive) apps on it and a remote desktop client that I could use to connect to my computer back home. Make sure the remote desktop client isn't installed on the iPad during border crossings.
> The agent took the phone away and only returned after approximately 45 minutes, during which Kennedy believes that data on the phone was copied. He was then released with no charges.
Does the owner, Mr. Kennedy has actual knowledge/proof if the phone was copied, or this is a guess? Might be missing from the article.