[0]: https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/what-do-when-encounter...

on another note: lets talk about how one would go about keeping ones privacy intact aka having a party in the capitol.

1. will they be able to get into my cryptrooted pinephone / hdd in those 5 days? 2. if not will this only make them more angry and privacy penetrating?

I still don't want to get my phone taken on an US airport and returned an hour later with God knows how many viruses that even Apple wouldn't be able to detect on my iPhone.

It's not about having something to hide. It's about not liking it when people poke their noses in your business without you being a criminal. And no I don't think installing backdoors on each device "to catch the criminals more easily" is a solution at all.

1. Any malicious person savvy enough to pull off a crime of interest to the Feds is smart enough to provide a wiped or burner phone to DHS/ICE, and they have to know this. So, what is the point in doing this if not to target law abiding citizens.

2. USGOV has a spotty track record of keeping this information secure. A foreign actor is likely to access this info eventually. As one former government official once joked many years ago - concerning Chinese hacking - "Well, its probably more secure in the CCP's data center, so I wouldn't worry."

This is the problem when a non-technical generation makes the rules and regs. Luddites ought not be permitted to ascend the GS ranks.

So now when I travel I just bring my “travel” phone with no sensitive data on it.

I think that's just as weird a development and worthy of "WTH?" as this topic.

It's a great overview of digital privacy and protection laws in the US, how they came about, and what protections they actually offer. The short answer is "very few" and the long answer is "never ever ever turn over your data short of a court order and even then try to fight it."

Then with Third Party Doctrine, most of the few/limited privacy/warrant rules go out the window.

Also, I'm not a lawyer.

Phones will often contain data that can facilitate theft and fraud if ending up in the wrong hands. If they're able to copy everything, including private data from all apps that could be quite bad. For example many countries now use apps to login to online banking, with private keys for the login stored in the app. Will that be copied? Will it ever be found out if one of the 3000 government officials with access to this data sold it on darknet markets?

Maybe some months after your travel you suddenly wake up one day to find all your money transferred from your bank account to some account in Nigeria.

Our rights and freedoms do not come without struggle. And they sure do not last without somebody constantly defending them. And it’s only bravado to assume that we can stand against the might of federal agents as individuals without dedicated organizations fighting for us.

Please donate to ACLU - as much as you can.

It makes the NSAs Utah data center to have other applications like parallel reconstruction.

No one's private data should be taken without a legitimate cause, no matter their nationality.

Citizens are suspects. Tourists are terrorists. Everyone is a potential criminal in the land of the free.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/295...

I put up a fuss and almost missed my flight, but they took both my laptop and cellphone into a back room with about 5-8 other people on my flight. Made me unlock of course.

Here is the pamphlet they let me take… saved and documented. They take down hardware addresses and more, and would not allow lawyers on the scene or for me to witness their search. Here are all the pages of the pamphlet:

https://imgur.com/a/qNovC83

As a tech worker and privacy advocate for all I was rightfully not thrilled. I still need to buy new hardware, I had no idea this was the case as far as data storage and 15 years but figured they probably upload malware and all that fun stuff. Neat. I have been a citizen my whole life.

Reading through the comments now, I am glad I learned a little. If they pull the stunt again I will happily deny and wait however long and just rebook a flight and maybe hire a lawyer. It’s a gross abuse of power.

I recently had a long discussion with CBP about my Canadian passport showing a US birthplace. Under a repealed section of the INA my US nationality lapsed some half a century ago and I suspect a call was made to the Port Manager. Since then my entries have not discussed this point which leads me to suspect their system has been updated.

The current question is your plate number (already displayed by the camera). You need written permission from the vehicle owner to cross the border, even if the owner is family.

Border officers may also have quotas for more thorough examinations.

I remember a lawyer on radio saying that they take "naked" laptops across the border.

Most definitely DO NOT cross ANY border with anything that in the most remote possibility would trigger the interest of customs.

To sanitise a phone or tablet, fill it with dashcam video, encrypt and factory reset. Then set it up with a fresh Google or Apple ID.

Maybe leave your sim card at home.

Having repartitioned a tablet, I discovered that there is a massive amount of hardware data in partitions that most people are totally unaware of.

Of course the official response is what you would expect:

“CBP officials declined, however, to answer questions about how many Americans’ phone records are in the database, how many searches have been run or how long the practice has gone on, saying it has made no additional statistics available “due to law enforcement sensitivities and national security implications.””

https://gizmodo.com/border-agent-demands-nasa-scientist-unlo...

Much of it's quite silly in the era of technology and current society scales anyways where most the nonsense they could be concerned about being on your personal phone in terms of data can be conducted right inside the border without ever leaving. So the excuses for cloning phones and archiving data outside of another loophole that let's them spy on US citizens are pretty limited. Anything on your phone they could be concerned about can be archived, encrypted, and tucked away somewhere on the internet that's far less tracable. So what information do you really need? Outside of the really stupid criminals (who will eventually learn to be more sophisticated and evade these approaches), what do you expect to catch?

Preventing this practice should be a no brainer.

In other words: this isn't a technical challenge, either you comply and give them your private stuff, or you're not going anywhere. Maybe you can con them into giving a 'public' part of the phone and pretending that's all there is, but again, that's social engineering and not a technical challenge.

I've heard of "border" being applied to anywhere 100 miles from an _airport_, but can't find the reference, which would cover like 99% of the country.

When you are disturbed by having your phone searched, what is happening is that the balance has shifted a bit against your favor, and you subconsciously realize that your position is not as safe as it once was. But it was never truly safe, just stable in a certain point and time. The fact that you are not a criminal is irrelevant, because respecting or not respecting the law is very relative. The mental separation between the criminal and the law-abider is fictional in that both are just on a spectrum of usefulness and loyalty to the State.

You'd be amazed at how many dumb things smart criminals/people can do. Maintaining proper OpSec is hard. It only takes one mistake to give the LEOs a string to pull to unravel the whole sweater.

Everything else, I tend to feel the same way as you. Just wanted to mention the OpSec part

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-09-16/chines...

Now take off your shoes and walk through the scanner.

It's not a technical problem.

It's the old rule known to governments all over the world - there is no such thing as an innocent citizen, there is only a citizen who you haven't investigated enough. Call me cynical but storing ALL of your digital data allows the agencies to basically find something, anything, that will allow them to further blackmail you into complying. Even the most innocent person will have something that can be misconstrued as criminal, from jokes about tax evasion to pictures of your toddler in a pool - threaten going to trial if the person doesn't do X, and most people will comply, not because they aren't innocent, but because the might of the American justice system is such that you really don't want to fuck with it on the receiving end.

This isn't even remotely true. See for example the recent Anom honeypot[1]. Criminals do more or less the same things that ordinary citizens do, and often have strictly worse security practices because they believe "ordinary" things are weaker. This makes them great targets for snake oil.

That being said, I agree with (2). It's simply an unnecessary risk to keep this much data around for this long.

[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7veg8/anom-app-source-code-...

edit: It was the Signal founder. https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/04/21/signal-hacks-cell...

IIRC, I've read they can only hold your phone for 30 days or something like that, then they have to return it to you. They can delay an American citizen, but they can't deny entry.

Ever since then, I travel with a travel phone, make sure my photos are backed up when I cross a border, and shut it down before I go through border control. If they demand a password, I'll put up a little fuss and then let them take it.

In Australia it's an autogate with a face scan for citizens and PR's, you only deal with a person if it can't identify you, which is rare.

Which countries agents? You were going from US to Canada. Were they Canadian or US agents?

Once you've cleared the border, go to a coffee shop and download over their WiFi. Or not, if you're on a unlimited data plan.

That has the advantage of requiring only one phone but would definitely look like you were hiding something. So your approach of a travel phone is better.