I co-wrote a border search guide for EFF some years ago. I was very interested in finding clever technical approaches but I later ended up feeling that I hadn't given enough thought to the overall threat model questions (even though the guide did address them, perhaps even somewhat usefully).
The big picture problem is that the agents performing the searches have an enormous amount of power in terms of potentially seizing devices and potentially denying entry for non-citizens. I think they should not have this power, but the agents and courts probably don't care that I think that.
The end result (not inherently different from what we wrote in the guide) is that you may have to think both about protecting your data by technical means, and about not angering the agents more than you plan to. I was fascinated by techniques for being unable to comply (which is straightforward to achieve if you want!) but probably didn't think enough about how much this might antagonize border agents in many cases.
I definitely don't know a comprehensive big-picture solution.
> you may have to think both about protecting your data by technical means, and about not angering the agents more than you plan to
That's the same problem with technical solutions to crime.
I come from a very dangerous city and I used to have a car that needed a PIN to work. You could turn then engine on and drive but after a minute if you didn't input the PIN it would turn off without warning and start blasting the alarm. The idea being that if the car was stolen the thief would be stranded not far from home unsure about what's happening. Great technical solution but it ignores that a lot of the time the car is stolen with you in it (in a kidnapping, for example). Having the car shutoff in the middle of a highway next to a panicking guy with a gun and trying to remember a PIN is not a situation you want to be in, so I just had the PIN number written down on the dashboard, which worked very well when I was eventually kidnapped and just pointed at the piece of paper with the number.
And there's the problem that if the PIN or worse a biometric version of this becomes remotely well known you've now created an incentive for a car thief to kidnap people even if they only want the car.
Or anything else you can't easily transfer. I can't help but point at passkeys in particular (or 2FA in general).
A variant of this is the well-known scene from a previous century's movie involving extracting an eye to bypass retinal scanner.
Many cars already have internal/cabin view camera. I'd imagine it will sooner or later get detection for potential theft and kidnapping situations, where it can simply detect the driver by face and prevent driving if it doesn't recognize the invidual as one granted driving privileges.
Like when fingerprint readers were added to car doors in the 90s, and carjackers started cutting fingers off to get away...
That is a largely incorrect statement that is loosely based on a single incident, not a trend.
The single incident was an individual in Malaysia who added an after-market finger-print based engine immobilizer to his car in 2005. The attackers threatened the individual with machetes, so that he would put his finger on the sensor, and then drove off with him in the car. The attackers later cut off his finger believing it would let them restart it without him present.
In phone terms, that's the $5 wrench problem. The elaborate tech is not relevant if you can be simply coerced somehow to bypass it.
Again in phone terms, maybe bring a blank phone through that border.
Coercion was the reason from start, it's explained in the article.
"A motion filed by his defense argues the interrogation focused on child sexual abuse material as a pretext for investigating his connections to the protest movement."
So the message was simple: don't protest and you will be not harassed.
As one does. Why, six of the eleven times I've had my car stolen, it was a carjacking with myself or my family member in it.
Six of the eleven times...
Crazy.
What city was this, if you don't mind me asking?
Jesus, what country?
probably South Africa?
Also what decade.
That is insane. Where do you live?
Must be Gotham City
Joburg?
What city was this, if you don't mind me asking?
Yeah, it would have been way better not to have an alarm, and instead make it appear like the car broke down. Could even maybe somehow actually break it programmatically.
Why are you staying in this place?
(Is this in South Africa?)
Brazil maybe?
Even for Brazil, even for the most dangerous cities, that's still an insane number of kidnappings. They happen enough that you need to be aware and be careful to not be an easy target, but it's still a rare event overall.
Iceland I think
Washington most likely
I live in Washington DC, and even though carjacking is a problem here, not to a degree that people plan on it happening to them. I would be surprised if OP's situation took place in DC.
Carjackings ramped up in 2021 through 2024. They appear to be headed back down the "low and steady" of the early 00s. Looking at the numbers, DC isn't alone in this trend - Chicago was pretty bad as well.
Gee… A lot of people lost their jobs at once and crime went up? Then when the economy recovered crime went down? It’s almost like keeping people educated and employed actually does work better than more police and longer sentences.
Also the rise of stressed delivery drivers leaving their cars running, and the kiaboys social media meme / subculture contributed.
There are 2 cases routine inspections and targeted investigations.
If it's a routine inspection, being uncooperative will probably lead them to escalate. You generally want to keep things routine and boring. If they want to access your device you have to weigh the costs, just log out of everything before you fly and throw away your device after they have had access to it, it's now compromised.
If you are targeted your compliance is irrelevant and only weakens your position, the thing is at the border you don't get all of the protections you get at say a traffic stop they can search everything you have on you without warrants reasonable suspicion or anything.
I am not a lawyer but if you are a citizen they probably can't deny you entry but can probably detain you for an uncomfortable amount of time, and seize whatever they want. Your best defense is to have a burner phone and no other devices nothing they can seize that would hurt you.
For foreign nationals pretty much the same applies except they can deny you entry and ship you off to alligator Alcatraz, just don't fly to America for a few years.
Remember he is not being prosecuted for not handing over his device but for destroying the data they were trying to seize, if he just let them keep the phone he would be Scott free. I.e.the best technical defense is secure encryption with a key thats long enough and not stored on the device.
Actually for the particular case the best technical defense is to not have any data whatsoever on you.
> I am not a lawyer but if you are a citizen they probably can't deny you entry but can probably detain you for an uncomfortable amount of time, and seize whatever they want. Your best defense is to have a burner phone and no other devices nothing they can seize that would hurt you.
Even having a burner phone without any personal information on it can be deemed suspicious. It would be best for your phone to have a recently-reinstalled OS, with a few critical apps like Whatsapp or iMessage set up with a few personal messages sent. You need to be able to set those up without a password manager. Anything else needs to take place on devices that you aren't carrying with you. Fortunately enough people don't update their Facebook these days that just having an account that exists but you don't use will probably work, assuming you don't look like someone that would be obsessed with their socials.
Maybe there are USB thumb drives that operate like a YubiKey unless special setup is performed to access the storage inside? That's one way to carry data with you if you have to.
You can offer the I don't travel with my real phone because it got stolen a bunch of times excuse.
The point is even if they become suspicious all they can do is seize the burner ask you a bunch of questions etc. search you, etc they can't get access to your data. You can't get in real trouble, just majorly inconvenienced.
If you’re traveling with kids, they have all the leverage they need.
You "can't get in real trouble" but teh last time I crossed with basically nothing, they wrote a search warrant by literally fabricating almost everything in it. They wrote that an anonymous dog told an unnamed officer I had drugs, then a completely separate HSI officer signed it and a judge signed it based on complete inter-species hearsay two links removed from any named entity to face to question it.
So yeah you can be imprisoned, brought to ERs while they run up private medical bills (they told doctors I had drugs up my ass), have a search warrant executed, and then at the end of the day be chased by debt collectors for the search that turned up nothing.
How did you get charged money for that? When I go to the hospital, they make me sign a form saying I will be responsible for payment.
I refused to sign anything, they billed it to DHS, DHS refused it and put that I was the responsible party, then the hospital sold it to debt collectors under my name.
Granted I've never seen something like this where the chain includes a government agency saying "it's totally on this guy", but normally you can get good results from writing a dispute letter to the debt collection agency telling them to prove that you really owe this debt. The state of the industry normally means that they will not have gotten anything like actual proof from the hospital, just a line item in a spreadsheet... and if they can't prove it they're legally barred from contacting you about it or reporting it to credit bureaus.
(I've never done it, but I suspect you could get rid of a significant percentage of real debts like this, just on the strength of the industry's terrible record keeping practices.)
Yeah done that many times. They always just send the "spreadsheet" entry as their proofs. Sometimes they stop despite their "proofs" and just sell it to the next debt collector and everything resets. Other times they just keep doing it and then I get the CFPB involved and after a few months the regulators stop them, then they sell the debt and the new guy pursues it again.
Just something I deal with every year or two, doing the process over again every time they resell it.
Suspicious, maybe; but not criminal (like lying to a federal officer in the course of an investigation, or willfully destroying what they’re lawfully trying to search).
Probably even more suspicious if you make sketchy excuses when the truth is fine. I’d go with “I (or %COMPANY%) figure electronic devices get imaged at borders or potentially stolen abroad, so we don’t carry them when we travel.” Blame the other country you’re coming from if you want.
Although I’d just not carry a phone across a border in the first place.
Related, regarding the “hiding a partition on a thumb drive” thing (8 days ago, 287 / 166; project is cool but note that tptacek and others in the comments know what they’re talking about):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48974862
And the immortal words of James Mickens come to mind:
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
Unfortunately I agree with James Mickens. If CBP asks me to turn on and unlock my phone, I do it.
It is the same advice that cops give to young black men in “the talk”. Comply, don’t get killed, hire a lawyer and fight injustice in court.
I generally agree, I have no interest into getting into pissing matches with random CBP officers. But it's not the same situation.
You have the right to refuse to unlock your phone as far as I know. You do not have the right to refuse lawful orders. So you cant resist being arrested or being searched, or them taking your stuff but you can refuse to answer questions, you don't have to tell them anything, whether that is the best plan of course varies.
But in general you don't know what they know, where their questions are leading, what minor detail in your answers may corroborate your "guilt" or minor inconsistencies may be construed as lying and obstructing.
So you are in general better off not answering police questions.
That of course excludes questions you are legally obligated to answer. Which in the specific case of CBP interactions is most questions.
You should also always keep in mind what the consequences of your actions are don't commit a felony to avoid a misdemeanour, in the case in the article if this guy had child sexual abuse material on his phone, or chats conspiring to commit major felonies his call was probably the right one. If his phone was clean and he was being adversarial, he chose poorly.
You have to try to strike a balance between being respectful, generally agreeable and cooperative while exercising your rights.
I agree when dealing with police in general the only thing you say is “lawyer”.
With CBP, we are in a gray zone. It is hard to know what to do.
>YOU’RE STILL GONNA BE MOSSAD'ED UPON
Thanks for that, it's been a few years and I'd forgotten about this.
> just log out of everything before you fly and throw away your device after they have had access to it, it's now compromised.
I get what you are saying, but this is incredibly expensive and not really practical for most people.
> not really practical for most people
Evaluate your threat model and the chance that a wipe and reinstall of the OS will be insufficient protection.
If you were targeted, you may have some tough choices. Might as well think about them ahead of time.
I think in these situations your absolute best bet is fawning compliance. Ask precisely how high they want you to jump.
Perhaps your friendly smiling Yes-Sir-No-Sir-3-bags-Full-Sir act might just be enough to let you get on your way without anything else happening apart from a stamp in your passport.
Even the slightest hint of defiance or surliness from you to a border guard/policeman/etc - potentially at the end of a long shift, tired, angry, pissed-off or whatever - and you're straight away hugely more likely to have a bad day.
Finding strategies to "beat the system" will, I think, just be a shortcut to some other punishment/crime/taken-out-of-sight-and-given-a-proper-kicking-oh-they-resisted-and-went-for-my-gun/etc as this person found out the hard way by trying to be difficult.
I genuinely don't think there is a "get out of jail free card" or magic incantation you can say to get out of these situations apart from just smiling and being polite and not being a dick - if you get into a "who can be more annoying" competition, then the border guards/police will always win since they hold all the cards and will happily ruin your day/holiday/meetings etc by detaining you (its their job to do this after all)
There have been cases very recently in the US where the authority figures down dealing with the public are evidently in a very defensive, aggressive "us-vs-them" mindset, with an itchy trigger-finger to go with it. Don't be the person on the receiving end of a cop seeing-red because you're being a jerk.
The house always wins.
This comment irritates me. On one hand, I agree with it. On the other: how is it not just a version of “if you have nothing to hide”?
At some point, you should fight for what you consider basic human rights. Where you draw the line and how you fight is up to you.
It sounds like your attitude is to comply with whatever the authorities want.
It seems like a completely innocent person is the best one to push back on authoritarian overreach.
Am I misunderstanding something here?
There is a time and a place.
If someone jumps out at you in a dark alley and they have a weapon and they ask for your wallet, what are you going to do? Swallow your pride and give it to them, or willingly enter into a high-risk and highly-imbalanced scenario where you are at a huge disadvantage against the other person for who this is essentially zero-risk, something they do multiple times a day, and they have nothing to lose from it either way.
Sure it is legally wrong and you can stand up for your legal rights in that situation, but it's a high-risk strategy to take.
Is that particular moment, that exact moment in time, the right time to take a stand for the rule of law? Or perhaps there are other things you can do after the fact?
Up to you.
Someone stabbing you and leaving your corpse in an alley is obviously pretty bad, but getting on a no-fly list for life/prison time/beaten senseless in a backroom in some random airport in a country where you are a foreigner and don't know the language or law/etc because you wanted to prove some point to a border guard at some airport somewhere and were generally being a jerk is no joke either.
No, you're not.
And idk how people don't understand how "politeness" gets weaponized.
This video is an example
https://youtu.be/amSIcL3V5C4?is=hmlOx2t7dHg5j-lJ
Here, the only way this guy could've had a "good attitude" is if he had let the lady do whatever she wants with his service dog. This behavior is very common in situations where people feel entitled to something, but know the counterparty has the absolute right to refuse to cooperate. No matter how politely that information is conveyed, it's "rude" because they're being denied something they want.
The police don't like my attitude when I firmly say "no, sorry, I won't be unlocking my phone. I will only do what I am legally required to do."
People have a hard time understanding this because they are under the impression that they know how to be polite because they do what they think is polite. They are unaware that politeness is subjective and slippery and that people can and do use it to manipulate others into doing things they're uncomfortable with.
[Am in agreement with being conflicted about this advice]
In a normal functioning society with law enforcement that is actually accountable to it's citizens, yes - polite pushback will likely have no horrible consequences.
In a country that is either already in the depths of fascism/authoritarianism - or rapidly heading there, fighting for rights is seen as a "red flag".
See also: "On Tyranny" (Timothy Snyder) and "Do Not Obey in Advance".
It’s weird how few people understand that just being courteous/polite eases most encounters considerably.
Absolutely astonishing seeing people try the “I’m going to be as annoying as humanly possible” to the guy with the gun with the “my YouTube lawyer says I can” defense. You don’t want to have to defend your civil rights in court.
This goes doubly when at immigration where you basically don’t have rights.
This guidance also applies to: bank tellers, call takers, baristas, waiters, other people standing in line with you, the bus driver, your mom, the neighbors upstairs, the raccoon across the street, …
Politeness is the correct behavior on most walks of social life, but on this case it's a bit like the "turn the other cheek" approach, but in this case, it's turn the other butt-cheek because you're being effed in the A.
Also, you do have rights, but don't seem to really care a lot about them since, in the face of unlawful and oppressive demands by overreaching authorities, your suggestion is to be courteous with the oppressors for some reason.
"Land of the free, home of the brave"
> I genuinely don't think there is a "get out of jail free card" ...
Being rich and politically connected would probably do it.
That's not free. It simply means you can afford to buy the very expensive get-out-of-jail cards.
It's best to do that for things they have the right to do. Trying to resist being questioned or having your stuff searched is a fool's errand. They'll make it happen one way or another.
But I'd never unlock my phone for US immigration. That's my whole life on there, and they don't have the right to compel me to unlock it. Even there, be polite. You can say "no" politely.
Where this guy went wrong was actively wiping his phone. That's no good. What you do is put your phone in its most secure state (generally powering it off) before you reach the immigration desk, and then if they seize it, you have to trust its security to keep them from getting into it.
They can just ask you to unlock it for them.
They can ask, yes. And I can refuse. They can’t detain me more than temporarily, and they can’t prevent me from entering the country.
I'm afraid to leave the country precisely because I worry about difficulties upon return. I understand that as a citizen I can't be denied reentry, but I also understand they can make the process extremely difficult or uncomfortable if they want to and I have little or no recourse.
They can still make your life very difficult. They could throw you in jail for "obstructing investigation" or something similar.
Not in US, but had my phone seized by authorities and was asked to unlock it. I'm walking free, but I think what really saved me is that I genuinely complied with investigation and the only place where I drew the line was me giving away my password.
If I used my right to remain silent AND not give away the password, I'd probably be charged with something. I'm sure its very similar in many countries, including US.
It's extremely unlikely they'd jail me for obstruction. They wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on and they know it.
From CBP themselves:
"If a traveler being admitted as a U.S. citizen does not present their device in a condition that allows for examination, the U.S. citizen traveler will not be denied entry into the United States based on CBP’s inability to complete an inspection of their device. However, as noted above, their device may be subject to exclusion, detention, or other appropriate action or disposition."
Worst case would be losing the phone, which is a tradeoff I'm willing to make.
They have verbatim told me they would deny me entry into the country merely for not answering things like random questions about what work I do in the country or whether I own guns (I am a US citizen). They involved HSI and tried to get my passport revoked, they tossed me in a jail cell and vans with my hands and feet bound. They wrote lies in a search warrant, tied the source of the lies to anonymous individuals and animals that can never be held to account, and then got a judge to sign a search warrant that turned up nothing. They got doctors to write in my medical record that they think "I am a drug packer" despite never finding anything or any evidence to support it.
You will find "temporary" can be long enough to make your life extremely unpleasant, that they can do unpleasant things to your body (another lady at my point of entry was raped, sued, and lost, -- the raping was done to "probe for drugs" and held to be justified), that they can run up debt in your name (what they did to me is just travel around to different ER and tell them an emergency, then bill it to my name, and to multiple hospitals to rack up the debt), that they can put you on a list so that you have no hope of making any airport connections for many years. I don't even bother scheduling same-day international connections anymore, and I have to plan on family members and animals being taken care of for at least 72 hours in advance before I cross the US border.
You later contact a lawyer, several lawyers in fact, only to find out they've handled many of these cases, always lost, and reluctant to bother trying again.
Respectfully, you don't realize how horribly naïve you are. You are not dealing with people that follow the law, rather genuinely evil people that will do whatever they can get away with because they can get away with it and find supreme satisfaction in sadism.
Why do I get the feeling there’s more to this story....
Anyway, there’s wide gulf between not giving up the passcode to my life and not answering basic questions.
You'll hear the same "more to the story" if it happens to you, as well. Hope you never have to experience it, but if you do, you'll find the same as me. No one believes it until it happens to them, always "more to the story" or "a lie" or some such right up until they find out reality. Then they find out that "gulf" they thought they saw was a mirage.
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever"
I will ask this here again:
At what point did the German people find it morally acceptable to start killing Nazis?
At what point will the US stop accepting the boot and act to remove the tyranny stamping on our collective face?
Did they ever?
> At what point did the German people find it morally acceptable to start killing Nazis?
Late 1960s at the very earliest, and it's only been a tiny minority.
It wasn't until over a decade after the war that most Germans started to accept and internalize that the Nazis were bad guys.
There's also another war where the Germans think they're the good guys because it hasn't been a decade yet.
If it helps, the nazis themselves probably asked this very question before they started killing ... whatever the contemporary term for nazis was back than.
I don't think there was a label back then that was used the ways "Nazis" is used today.
We probably need honey pod fake OS systems that boots up if not properly handled displaying some stars & stripes as background image and having the US national anthem playing for any sound the OS is trying to play.
A phone with a backup account, unlocked with duress pin makes sense to me.
How hard would it be to admin-allow some apps to work across barriers. E.g., wallet apps work, airline tickets work, but email/socials do not.
the issue is that when a phone is unlocked, they can just plug in a USB device and scrape everything off it. The TSA agent may not be eyeballing a facebook account so much as plugging in an exfiltration software stack or malware.
> the issue is that when a phone is unlocked, they can just plug in a USB device and scrape everything off it
That's useless if the backup account and the main account use different keys for the home partition.
VeraCrypt (used to?) have this. It was called a hidden volume. One volume, but two keys, two passwords, and two different containers full of data. Technically, the second volume is written into the partition "from the back" using key 2, while the first volume is written "from the front" using key 1.
Fun fact, there's no protection against writing over data in the other volume if volume 1 + volume 2 exceed the size of the partition - and there can't be, otherwise the volume wouldn't be hidden.
Yep, and there is also no way to tell if a hidden volume exists, because a volume without a hidden volume would fill that space with random data indistinguishable from a hidden volume.
For now the courts in the US have set a different barrier for automated extraction and hand searches. For now.
Why does the USB port need to even work anyways? It could just be designed to look like a USB port but fry whatever expensive and proprietary phone hacking device they bought from some scuzzy Israeli ‘security’ company when it’s plugged in.
It has to be a once-only effect tho. If it's repeatable, they've got you for some string of felonies.
I wonder what would happen if it was every time, but you never told them it was a USB port
Of course! It charges my personal taser (which I wisely left at home on this trip out of the country).
This would unironically probably work pretty well. The bullies in airports don't have that much time to investigate a phone which "looks good".
Right, these goons are hand searching through phones specifically to find something, anything, they can use to make your life suck and detain you further.
A pin that boots into a dummy account, full of benign messages, photos, innocent web browsing, etc. is going to get you a pass. They'll flip through everything and get bored after a minute of not finding anything.
Far less likely to aggravate them than wiping your phone
I would prefer to backup and wipe my phone before travelling.
Then have some planned means of restoring the backup when it's safe to do so.
Being caught with a honeypot looks much worse than being caught with a new phone. You can always say you bought a cheap "travel" phone if asked.
It's hard to justify an iPhone Pro Max as a "cheap travel phone" though so you might actually need to buy a cheap travel phone.
Its such a shame Android's backup/restore is such a mess, even more so in GrapheneOS. I remember the era before Google and manufacturs started cracking down on bootloaders and custom ROMs - I used an app that could do effective, actually full backup and restore in single click.
Good times.
Don't forget to have the Official Social Media of the President of the United States(tm) installed, with an account following the correct list of truthtellers and rightthinkers.
Yeah, you really can’t outsmart those with physical power and authority over you. Americans have asked for, or tacitly accepted this treatment of their visitors. The only big-picture solution is to stop visiting.
> Americans have asked for, or tacitly accepted this treatment of their visitors.
Our citizens as well!
The issue is that once you are a person of interest with a real id, you become a target.
The way to outsmart them is to stay maximally anonymous.
>[Some] Americans have asked for, or tacitly accepted this treatment of their visitors.
You forgot a word.
Nobody forgot a word. "Some" is nowhere near an appropriate word to use in that sentence. All Americans share the blame in what is happening right now. All.
This comment is self-caricaturing in its complete absence of logic and unseriousness.
Are all men rapists too?
> ...complete absence of logic and unseriousness. > ...Are all men rapists too?
K.
> [most]
Your word memory is faulty as well
1. "most" is debatable
2. "Some" is a superset that includes "most"
2. Most would not use "some" in such a broad way, though could only quickly find this law school's explanation that many>some (and obviously? most>many) https://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/2014/07/commonly-confu....
I hope to meet one some day.
Unlikely, because of your priors; you already think we are odious so it isn't like you are looking for the best in (or of) us, and second why would they want to meet you if you assume the worst of them? I don't support this Administration's behavior, but I'd rather meet an American who did and have a discussion with them about it than try to convince some dude who already decided I was an asshole, based on the country I'm from.
> you already think we are odious
I had to look up the word to double-check as a non-native English speaker. A quick definition I'm working with is "Arousing or meriting strong dislike, aversion, or intense displeasure." The synonyms assumed are: evil, cruel, hostile, nasty, wicked (all from Grammarly).
The experience of "you" - Americans - for non-Americans is shaped by cultural exports, personal contacts, and interactions with available American institutions. The last of these is likely to start with the immigration policy and its execution in the form of an embassy visit to apply for a visa and later with the officers at the airport. How confident are you that these interactions cannot be described as "odious" in a significant percentage (maybe even the majority) of cases? I've never experienced it myself, but in my social circle, almost all who tried were pretty bitter about it, even when successful. There were some outright Kafkaesque situations as well. Does it come as a surprise that a completely ruined "first impression" ended up biasing them to some extent?
I think that's rather expected. I'm pretty sure the same is true for a portion of people who want to visit or immigrate to my country. I can hope it's maybe less prevalent - we're not as sure of our greatness here (still better than those others around, obviously! /s) - but I wouldn't count on it to be an entirely positive experience, either. Admitting this and trying to fix it (including, unfortunately, convincing that dude who had to deal with his fair share of assholes to get here that not everybody is an asshole) would probably be a better course of action than isolationism you seem to favor, but to each their own.
If the commenter to whom I was responded made his points about American policy or institutions (rather than all Americans), I'd wholeheartedly agree, but that isn't what was written.
I, personally, don't favor isolationism. I am a US-EU dual citizen, and support strong ties between the two. I think the world is a better place when we work together. But people like me are erased with the dumb comments about "all Americans." Honestly, this feels like one place where modern society is falling apart: the "if you're not with me 100% then you are against me 100%" attitude that social media "engagement" metrics reward.
If one's beliefs align with those who wish to strip civil rights from citizens who are different than one's own, then one is an asshole and doesn't deserve the time of day.
One can cry about being a pariah all they like, but don't be surprised when the rest of the kids don't want to play when one's unmitigated petulance and intolerance is on display.
>If one's beliefs align with those who wish to strip civil rights from citizens who are different than one's own, then one is an asshole and doesn't deserve the time of day.
Who are you talking about here? This isn't even half of voting Americans, who probably represent about 20-25% of the American population. Your argument is analogous to saying that all men are rapists, because many men have committed an act of sexual harassment. It's so shockingly Manichean that it wouldn't pass a middle-school composition assigment.
can you share the link? This?
https://www.eff.org/document/eff-border-search-pocket-guide
----
Seems the better strategy (for iOS) is come in with a plan to say yes to agents without pissing them off (like handing them an empty phone).
better to local back up, encrypt, upload to your home server etc.
Then login to a fresh iCloud account, selectively install apps, photos, and mail accounts. So it doesn't look like you're walking in suspicious.
This seems like an insane thing to have to do for visiting a supposed first world country. If phones had been around during USSR times I imagine you would have had to do the same. Personally I will rather just avoid any travel to the US, and I hope others do the same.
Security concerns you need to think about when visiting the US are absolutely no less than those when visiting China these days. Treat it like a totalitarian dictatorship with more technological means.
Honestly, I personally would be less nervous visiting China.
Maybe marginally, but I'm still not visiting any county where I would be in trouble if the government/police knew my opinions of them. That's not just the obvious ones like US, Russia and China, but also countries like Thailand, Egypt, UAE, Israel to name a few. I like seeing the world, but not that much.
In China I would expect to be kicked out for having the wrong opinion as long as I didn't cause a big fuss. In the US I'd worry about being imprisoned.
China is known to hold Canadians on the excuse of being spies… spying for them is oftentimes filming without prior approval in non coastal but still civilian regions.
But weren't they... spies?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Michael_Spavor_an...
> According to a report by The Globe and Mail in November 2023, Spavor sought a multimillion-dollar settlement against the federal government for involving him in espionage activities without his knowledge. Spavor alleged that he provided Michael Kovrig with intelligence on North Korea, which Kovrig then secretly gave to the Canadian government and its Five Eyes allies without Spavor's permission, leading to their arrest and detention
The article clearly indicates the gray area. Your comment oversimplifies that dramatically.
Americans, too. My understanding is that there are a couple of hundred Americans being detained in China now. Some of these people are expatriates who gave up their PRC citizenship for American but China still claims to have dominion over (for what that's worth), but at least some have no colorable argument at all.
I'm surprised that we don't hear more about this from the American government and media.
This has become a running joke with a couple of the people in my office who have recently visited China (from the UK).
The next 2 years will be interesting for democracy as a whole.
China actually wants people to visit them and spend money.
And although I don't agree with the CCP ideology the Shanghai subway is ridiculously impressive.
Remember most of the Chinese train infrastructure was built in the time since the Hyperloop.
I was not impressed when I was sent there on business trip, from what I remember their subways were not as big as in Beijing or other CN places and I hit there my head, obviously anything is better than HK/London. Normally I'm not claustrofobic, but in HK subway...
Something I think is funny is that a lot of Chinese police think of themselves as catching up to the US in terms of surveillance tech. Think about how many internal migrant workers China has coming to the cities for work then back out to the rural areas.
this reminds me of the fact that Adolf Hitler learned his craft by trying to emulate how the USA treated native americans
I haven't been to the US since Trump first got elected, but even before that, immigration agents often seemed oddly adversarial, whereas immigration agents in China just don't really seem to give a shit.
From what I read about them (never had the honour and pleasure of interacting with one) it seems for some time they have had too much power with almost zero accountability and consequences.
At this point I'd be less nervous about vising North Korea.
Nobody in China cares about your phone/laptop.*
*Unless you are (well) known dissident/journalisy/politician.
US is much more totalitarian than China. Lived in China for years, had multiple times various visa/residence permit issues with police and guess what, nobody cared about my electronics or was sending me to any detention, all I've got were quie helpful officers trying to find workarounds for me to deal with the situation.
Same thing on my last trin in summer 2025, we didn't stay in hotel, didn't go to register to police as you are supposed to and when crossing province border checkpoint guess what happened - they let us go to our tourist sight and told us to just register after weekend and as usual officers in police station couldn't care less, they just registered us without any issues.
You can complain about plenty things in China, there sure is a lot of bureaucracy but when you actually have to deal with them, they are pretty laidback and trying to be helpful usually.
By these standards and my experiences with registration in police stations in other two EU countries I can tell you China was the friendliest most laidback and convenient experience.
People who claim China is totalitarian dictatorship clearly never been to China and should get off their high horse, China nowadays make less trouble for their own citizens than EU hating them trying to make lives of EU citizens as inconvenient and expensive as possible.
Were you a Caucasian in China? Foreigners, particularly those from powerful Western countries, tend to get much more deferential treatment than locals.
Obviously, if you do your research you will not go as black (partly also brown) person to China/Japan/East Asia unless you have any other option (though I guess students from poor African/*stan countries don't have many options).
I would disagree with different treatment compared to locals vs whites. It's not like whites/foreigners have only benefits, good luck booking ANY hotel (I guess this improved since visa free policy) or renting an apartment as foreigner, which was a shit show or even good price in some markets in past (this was solved by online shopping). But you will get definitely different treatment as white foreigner vs "darker the skin worse the treatment" foreigner.
In the past I've felt the same way in China. At a macro level there may be a lot more restrictions there. But when it comes to day-to-day life, it seemed like people had much fewer regulations bearing down on them.
For example, you'll see farmers on the Shanghai streets come in from the countryside to sell their produce - and doing so with impunity. In, say, NYC there are vendors still, but they've got their wares on a blanket that they can quickly scoop up and get away when the police come by.
There seemed to be a tacit agreement between the people and the Chinese oligarchy: if you let those in power just keep doing what they want, they'll just ignore you.
However, China is a pendulum. It was very much the opposite at the time of Tienanmen Square; from the late 90s into the 10s there was quite a lot of freedom; but now with Xi's power having been consolidated, it's swinging back toward authoritarianism again. I've seen people describing more recent conditions there as the start of Cultural Revolution 2.0.
> In the past I've felt the same way in China. At a macro level there may be a lot more restrictions there. But when it comes to day-to-day life, it seemed like people had much fewer regulations bearing down on them.
in general I would agree (also pretty low taxes for small businesses and employees), but:
> For example, you'll see farmers on the Shanghai streets come in from the countryside to sell their produce - and doing so with impunity. In, say, NYC there are vendors still, but they've got their wares on a blanket that they can quickly scoop up and get away when the police come by.
this is bad example, chengguans are infamous for scaring away street sellers, which is one of the reasons why people operate their business from (electric) tricycles, so they can get away, when you see chengguans are coming they will disappear quickly same as those blanket sellers in the West, alternatively in evening you will see car trunks open with people selling their stuff from there, but it also depends where you are, I'd assume Beijing is the strictest since in BJ suburbs where I was staying last summer this didn't seem to change much over last 10-15 years
I used to work (among others) in Xi'erqi subway station neighborhood (Xiaomi HQ) and what happened around the station is happening all across China - cleaning streets/gentrification, there used to be huge market next to subway station where you could buy all kinds of food and things from street sellers, but when I was leaving they effectively shut it down. Same thing happened at my parents in law town, though it's not so strict in BJ suburbs, people still operate from sidewalk, but there used to be for instance nice bakery market which was shut down, same with small local police station, now everyone needs to go to big central one and many other (small) places shut down, while city keeps growing. So they are clearly cleaning the streets and regulating street sale especially in Beijing. Though when I walked last summer around my other workplace across CCTV in CBD (downtown) there was guy operating from relatively big folding trailer, but I guess he has permit, didn't see any jianbing/jidanguanbing small sellers on sidewalk as I used to frequent on the way to work.
I agree China around 2010 was peak China when it comes development balanced with freedom, I remember how we thought upcoming Xi will open China even more, we couldn't be more wrong... On the bright side at least now you can go 30 days visa free to China, which is a bug positive compared to past, 30 days should be already quite enough even for regular tourist to cover China, those previous 15 visa free days was pretty much useless.
What region of China was that?
Beijing/Hebei, I've done paperwork/lived long term only in these two regions, worked on business trips in more provinces, but don't have any experiences with bureacracy over there other than HK where you have to go if problem with visa
I wouldn't say you are overreacting at all. I know someone who was detained for months on US soil after a phone search where the only "evidence" against him they found is illegal content sent by someone else to him on a group chat he doesn't even check. Had to get a lawyer and spend time in prison just waiting to be deported back.
What is illegal content in this context?
Jokes about Supreme Leader Trump?
(I'm not the person you replied to, I have no idea)
Jokes about Trump are rife in America, as are leader jokes in many Western countries. These are the last places you will need to worry about that.
Isn't Germany an exception to that?
At long as it doesn't involve [multi purpose eggs](https://www.euronews.com/culture/2026/06/06/mehrzweckeier-di...) or calls to violence you should be fine.
I don't know. Can you not make jokes about the chancellor in Germany?
Sure .. just not jokes about how tall they are with a punchline that involves raising an arm to demonstrate.
Insulting people is a crime in Germany. If you said "Hitler was a poopy head" that'd be illegal. But they wouldn't bother to enforce that. If you say it about a real person, they can press charges.
Does defamation laws apply to deceased too?
There's a separate law against insulting a dead person.
fyi: insult is a so called "Antragsdelikt". That means authorities can only press charges when the victim files an official complaint. Otherwise they can't do anything.
Which also means they wouldn't be able to do anything about you saying "Hitler was a poopy head".
You sure about that? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/trump-musk-f...
WhatsApp was especially sketchy considering they used to automatically auto-save images to your photo album.
My dad's eighty+ years old, he was born in the States, though he did give up his citizenship. He brings a "fake" phone when visiting family, he's been doing so for years.
Me; I just change all my tabs and recent history to slightly kinky porn and truth social. They do look hard, but they don't look hard.
The older guys cannot look too hard but the young guys can certainly look quite hard while browsing through your kinky porn.
(Laughs expected here)
The US is first world on a technicality: the first world is defined as countries that were allied with the US during the cold war. If not for that, it'd be classified as developing.
It's common to mix up developing/developed and third/first world because they were largely aligned during the cold war. But there is one first-world developing country.
The biggest economy in the world and the richest country to have ever existed is not a developing country, although it is quite unequal. What you've stated is political rhetoric that you want others to accept as fact.
Many developing countries have extreme inequality. What would it look like if the whole world's reserve currency accidentally ended up being the South African Rand?
The US is not so allied with its long-time allies as it used to be. Allies tend not to threaten to invade and take over other allies.
The behavior of the us is so stupid and self-destructive I'm constantly amazed that the average trump supporter doesn't see it. But the failure of the political resistance to him is the real surprise. If your buddies have the majority in the house and the senate there nothing you can do?
This is not true. However, because of the massive inequality, I often found it easy to use a sentence I saw somewhere: "the US is a South American country that happened to become successful".
Why do yo think the US should be classified as a developing nation?
There’s a definition independent from 1st/2nd/3rd world [0] and the US’ income seems to clearly make it developed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developing_country
Who made them the law? I don't trust the OSI to define open-source, either.
The UK, per capita, is poorer than every single state in the US. https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/articles/gdp-alert-united-...
As much as the current situation in the US upsets me, anyone who has spent considerable time within the US and outside of the US cannot believe what you've stated as anything other than a trite delusion. The US isn't just the richest country in the world, it has the second highest purchasing power parity per capita in 2026 and historically the highest. The average person in Mississippi is economically better off than the average person in England.
In a similar way to Ireland, measurements of the USA's wealth tend to be severely distorted by the financial shell games that countries play.
https://www.ubs.com/global/en/media/display-page-ndp/en-2026...
Seems to substantially disagree that the average person in the U.K. is worse off than the average person in the U.S.
The American poors (10th percentile income in America) are 67th percentile income globally, when calculated via Purchasing Power Parity. [1]
Your description of it as a "developing country" is completely inaccurate.
[1] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/great-convergence-equal...
I used to love visiting the US. I have many friends there, and I really enjoy staying in places like Seattle and SF. But I haven't gone there since Trump 1.
That said, I think protecting your privacy is a good idea in general.
Yes, I will probably never go back to the US. But I find it sad that my kids for example, will have to think twice before visiting, if they do.
> for visiting a supposed first world country.
... which by now is a banana republic of the worst kind. Can you interact sanely with an insane counterpart? Avoiding to visit would be my recommendation too.
Just out of curiosity, like what country would you not have to worry about this in?
The US is quite transparent about these rules, and certainly other countries are not necessarily searching peoples phones as publicly
But anytime I transit a country USA or any thing I fully expect to have zero rights
European citizens can travel in the EU without even noticing that they are crossing borders most of the time. I once got lost on my bike and accidentally ended up in France for example.
I drove a friend to an airport in Switzerland, got lost on my way home, and accidentally visited both France and Germany.
And if you're unpopular enough, they can also abuse arrest warrants for political persecution from another country. Case in point, captain Tommy Olsen from Norway, who Greek authorities accused of "human trafficking" for helping boat refugees.
They've deliberately made it very easy to request arrests across borders, so it isn't all rosy. One of the reasons it really sucks for everyone when an EU country starts slipping towards fascism.
>But anytime I transit a country USA or any thing I fully expect to have zero rights
That is so sad, man. How is this normal for you?
Schengen, Nordics, Japan, Canada, in that order.
Trump’s America: when confronted with negative traits of your country, always assume your country is the lesser of all evils.
Australia has stricter screening for fruit than for people.
don't bring anything organic to Australia unless it's been commercially processed, and even then show it to the border officers so they can make the call. You don't get penalized for showing them something not allowed, you just can't bring it into the country, and they throw it in the bin for incineration. Penalties start when you try to sneak something in anyway.
An Australian sniffer dog was very interested in my rucksack when I visited Australia a while back. Apparently it was due to previously having kept some bananas in there. They really don't mess about with finding and fining people importing anything that could germinate. They are very friendly though and one officer even washed some seashells that my wife found in New Zealand.
Australia has very one sided arrangements with some other places. It is far easier for Aussies to get into the UK than vice versa, for example. They get in visa free, but UK citizens need a visa.
I have an Australian acquaintance who got into trouble recently since he was born in Scotland but moved to Australia as a child. He is about as Aussie sounding as they come and went to school there, but after working in the UK for a year or two, Australian immigration gave him grief when he decided to return.
Australians actually comprise one of the biggest groups of illegal migrants in the UK, but they are more rarely commented on as they are much less visible than certain other groups. Australians with a parent or grandparent from the UK qualify, whereas those who don't, don't. But the ones who don't are rarely deported, and can't be easily distinguished in many cases.
> I have an Australian acquaintance who got into trouble recently since he was born in Scotland but moved to Australia as a child.
He's not a member of ACDC is he? ;)
I think many in the UK don't really regard Aussies or Kiwis as "immigrants" at all. I have various red faced in-laws with political views that are, shall we say, to the right of centre and they see Aussies as just Brits with funny accents.
Haha, no he'd wish! He's into that type of music!
But yes, if you had someone whose UK ancestor back in the 19th century, or descended from Italians, Greeks or Lebanese, with an Aussie accent, then you're unlikely to be a suspect.
Here's the full version https://www.eff.org/wp/digital-privacy-us-border-2017
One of the names in the byline matches his HN username so it's likely this.
Xiaomi phones have/had a feature where depending on which finger you unlock the phone with, it can hide certain applications/folders on the filesystem.
who believes an empty phone?
You need it to look set up enough to do critical communication / tourist activities. It should look like you had to reinstall your OS right before your trip, and only had time to get the basics on there. Most people will prioritize communications, maps, and payments over anything else, with video/music/books/podcasts following that, and signing into the vast universe of social apps later if ever.
You're right for non-citizens.
For citizens, no one needs to believe it. You give them your empty phone and they can't download your phone contents and contacts.
Generally, within 100 miles of a border (which includes international airports) there is not a warrant required for a search.
Which is where 99% of people live btw
They can search as much as they’re able to, but they can’t compel a citizen to supply a passcode.
The point is not what they believe, but how to avoid both breaking the law and not giving up your data, isn't it?
As long as that's legal, what they believe doesn't matter.
You are not legally obliged to keep your data on your devices all the time.
What do you mean?
I guess you could just bring a flip phone. But then that could be seen as suspicious these days.
When a government is paranoid, everything is suspicious.
Maybe just don't do anything on your phone but normal capitalist business sht.
The comprehensive solution would be for the supreme Court to say this is unconstitutional. They don't seriously think that smuggling CSAM on phones is how it gets into the country. It's all pretext.
> I think they should not have this power, but the agents and courts probably don't care that I think that. ...
> and about not angering the agents more than you plan to
When I was a teenager (long ago at this point), I got into an argument with a police officer over surfing in a certain area. It was pouring down rain, so he was annoyed he had to sit outside and wait for my friends and me to come to shore. Once we got in, he was telling me that he could take my surfboard and my car, and all other craziness. Being the dumb smart-ass I was at the time, I laughed and told him he was full of shit, among other things. He went to take a swing at me but his partner grabbed him.
We all go to court and the judge immediately dismisses the case against all my friends. I had a lawyer with me that I knew and he went to talk to the cop and when he came back over he goes "I don't know what you did, but that cop hates you." I get up in front the judge and he praises me for understanding the law (and I could still see the cop was visibly pissed), but then says he can't have me disrespecting and being a smart-ass to his cops and gave me community service that once completed whatever the ticket was would go away.
> but then says he can't have me disrespecting and being a smart-ass to his cops
Maybe it's just me, but I am of the exact opposite opinion. Cops have enormous power, and any misuse of it should be pushed back on hard. Cops that misuse their power should not be respected. An informed citizenry is a wonderful asset in making that power imbalance less of a problem.
There's a difference between polite pushback and being straight up disrespectful. It shouldn't matter as the cops shouldn't abuse their power and shouldn't attack people, but we live in the real world. The judge probably didn't want to have to deal with the potential future mess if op didn't learn their lesson and got beat up by a cop.
"Straight up disrespectful" can be made up to mean anything, but in general should refer to things that shouldn't bother police officers doing their job. They can get pissed off about it in their own time.
And then people are surprised and saddened when LEO start acting like robots and default to treating you as threat to be mitigated as much as legally allowed in context.
The parent described a story from a different reality - one where people are people, where communities have basic expectations of conduct, and authority is respected on all sides. The cop was angered and snapped (bad), but was stopped by their partner (good, and it's one of the reasons cops have partners!). The parent was a kid who behaved like an asshole in a moment, by their own admission. Plenty of teenagers act like that, it's an age-old more. The judge did not act as a proxy for the angry cop to retaliate, but instead reacted correctly by both praising the civic attitude (to the chagrin and I imagine further embarrassment of that cop), and addressing the behavior that is not welcome in a civilized community.
You can't have it both ways. You can either have civilization of people, or violent hellhole of laywers and robots. Pick one.
(And if you pick wrong, then don't complain, and by $deity, don't export these attitudes overseas, please.)
People are frequently "straight up disrespectful" to me in my work. I have to maintain professionalism and composure at all times, and if I were to suggest otherwise I'd get laughed at best. I don't see why it's hard to ask for cops to do the same. A real threat that I need to call security for is very easy to distinguish from a person just being an asshole.
> The parent described a story from a different reality - one where people are people, where communities have basic expectations of conduct, and authority is respected on all sides. The cop was angered and snapped (bad), but was stopped by their partner (good, and it's one of the reasons cops have partners!). The parent was a kid who behaved like an asshole in a moment, by their own admission. Plenty of teenagers act like that, it's an age-old more. The judge did not act as a proxy for the angry cop to retaliate, but instead reacted correctly by both praising the civic attitude (to the chagrin and I imagine further embarrassment of that cop), and addressing the behavior that is not welcome in a civilized community.
So why did he not give the cop community service then?
If I swung at someone at my job I'd be fired. If a security guard swung at someone who was not an active threat they'd probably be fired too. We still do our jobs.
I would argue that arbitrary authority inherently deserves no respect, and the second that authority is overstepped there should be consequences.
It's no surprise that there's so much hostility towards police in the US when they routinely abuse their authority.
> And then people are surprised and saddened when LEO start acting like robots and default to treating you as threat to be mitigated as much as legally allowed in context.
yeah that would be pretty petty, given that most people in their lives are able to perfectly deal with such behaviour, whether it's their job or in personal life, without a judge to slap annoying people on the wrist
what is this prima donna behaviour?
it is them that need to work to deserve their uniform, they need to understand it is an honour they have to keep up, be the better person. if you can't do that, you have no job wearing that uniform.
but I guess their narcissism must feel strengthened by people like you arguing this is perfectly reasonable behaviour for officers of the law
you can have it both ways, you just need to want it
There is a general understanding that police officers deserve implicit respect while on duty, more so than random citizens, as they are representatives of the law. Swearing at a random passerby is rude but legal, swearing at a police officer is against this need for respect and is a misdemeanor in many places around the world.
Police do need authority and respect in order to do their jobs, of course. But at the same time their position of power and their role as maintainers of public peace mean they should have a thicker skin rather than thinner. They should be able to keep their professionalism and composure in the face of adversity better than the average person, and someone being verbally disrespectful towards them is at the lower end of that.
Police officers who think their pride needs to be put first in the name of authority may be common around the world but that doesn't mean reactive cops are a good thing.
It's perfectly legal in the US. In fact it's legal to lean out your window and yell at them. It's protected speech here, and for good reason. Otherwise the cops could just say your speech made them feel disrespected and you could get penalized. The first amendment in the US has been interpreted pretty broadly to protect a lot of speech that in other countries could get you fines or jailtime.
Respect has to be earned. They have done the opposite.
> The judge probably didn't want to have to deal with the potential future mess if op didn't learn their lesson and got beat up by a cop.
A judge solving their own problems in this way is clearly abuse of power as well
Sure, I agree that we should be polite and respectful to random people, cops included, but that judge decided that it was illegal to be disrespectful to a cop, which is pretty fucked up.
Respect is earned, not given. Police in some communities are (generally) respected, but they are also (generally) professional.
When trust breaks down, it’s up to those who hold power to restore it, not those subject to power. Too often authority demands submission as a substitute for trust, and the results are predictable.
> disrespectful
To paraphrase a useful distinction I saw once...
Some people talk about mutual respect, but it's not mutual at all because they use a different definition on each side. They demand you "respect" the power of their position or uniform, or else they won't "respect" you as being human.
It's not respect unless it goes both ways.
If a cop demands your ID when you have no obligation to give it, your answer should be something to the effect of "I hope you get hit by the next passing 18-wheeler".
Malignant authority needs to be treated with maximal hostility. The 'lesson' you want here is completely backwards.
That answer would mean that you’re are on drugs. And your being on drugs means that the cop can request your id.
America is a free country. Everyone can ask you for everything. I can ask you for money. A cop can ask you for an id. No need to rush and provide what you were asked for. But that 18 wheeler thing is extremely counterproductive.
I said demand, not ask. Demand requires reasonable articulable suspicion of a crime.
Many cops arrest people for not providing identification when they're under no obligation to do so. Those cops should be insulted, and deserve consequences.
I see zero difference between verbal asking, verbal request and verbal demand. Probably that’s because English is not my native language. Could you please provide a sample of each one?
Your second text creates the impression that if the cop arrested you for non-compliance - then what was before was the demand. If yes, my point still stands: insulting the cop who had arrested you will not make him let you go. Probably it can only make your situation worse. Counterproductive, as was said.
There’s no legal difference between polite pushback and disrespect. In a just world, the commenter should have had zero consequences, and the cop should have gone to prison for assault and abuse of authority.
> There's a difference between polite pushback and being straight up disrespectful.
That's a distinction without a difference. Cops see any form of noncompliance as disrespectful ("contempt of cop"). You not only legally can, but absolutely should be able to tell a cop "Get fucked" to their face and walk away if they have no legal basis to detain you. The fact that in reality you will have your life ruined is a problem far worse than any "disrespect".
Yeah, but go tell that to the judge who’s just about to slap you with a sentence.
Unless you want to fight that all the way up the judicial food chain
Absolutely. It's not worth it unless you're more principled than anyone I know at least. Instead you're left with a minor punishment and most of your faith in the justice system left behind.
There's a huge difference between misusing their power and not having perfect understanding of what they're allowed and not allowed to do.
I'm sure there are scenarios where the cop can confiscate the surfboard and the car. The distinction is probably somewhat vague even for highly educated lawyers, and cops cannot expected to be that.
He should have stood up for his rights, sure, but laughing in the cop's face and telling them they're full of shit is disrespectful, and at least where I live is a misdemeanor even if the original case is wrong.
As a citizen, when I have an incomplete understanding of what I'm allowed and not allowed to do I have every incentive to stay on the side of things I'm sure I am allowed to do. Just threatening to do things that you are not allowed to do has the annoying tendency of being a crime
I'm not sure how this suddenly flips for cops
And what did this judge think (not much, apparently)? Punishing you will make you respect the cops?! This idiot confuses the fear of punishment with respect. Also, does not understand that respect is not to be forced but to be earned. Forcing it will erode respect and generate lots of pretension and covert hate. This judge basically endangers all cops (and the community) for giving revenge to this one prick lacking self control! It's mind-blowing that someone less mature than a teenager can become a judge!
I wonder if the cop learnt his lesson? (rhetorical question)
Too bad you could not bring that judge up on charges of judicial misconduct - if he indeed told you that the charge against you had no merit, but decided to punish you anyway because he did not approve of your demeanor.
... or otherwise, that people in your community could not apply any counter-pressure to such judicial behavior, in the media and public fora.
To be fair to the judge we all had broken an ordinance about surfing in a certain area. It was enacted to protect swimmers in the summer. With that said, there was a storm with wind, rain, and currents that had pushed us into the area. Obviously there were also no swimmers out.
The ordinance was removed a few years later. This cop was also known to hate surfers. All the small beach town BS you hear about.
at some point you just take your lumps.
Most people don’t have boundless time or energy and just want things to go away.
… ironically this fact is used a lot in gaining confessions by police.
I don't own a cell phone, haven't for years. I fear this alone would be enough to arouse suspicion and I'll be denied access. Not an immediate problem for my family: as a Canadian I have no plans to visit the states for a long time. However, I could see this being suspicious in other countries as well..
I worry that at some point, the physical device won't matter. Border authorities will know your email address, and could force you to log into your account on a device they supply. Five years ago, I would have called anyone even bringing up this possibility paranoid, but a lot of things that were completely unimaginable outside of Hollywood political thrillers have already happened.
And then there's the problem that you can't just log in with name and password to your email address. You need your special "authy" style number generator, or a software version on the phone. They know you probably have it on the phone. but what if you bring your other phone that doesn't have it on there - you removed the software before you left so no one could even log in.
All these fancy tricks don't work because the doofus/poor soul at the border doesn't understand the nuances and they don't know if you are lying or not. Even if you wipe your phone and restore it once in the safe usa, that's no doubt suspicion of a crime.
Me solving technical problems without motivating requirements:
Can you just like have the graphene OS device wipe itself if it knows that it's going through a border and you haven't logged into the device in 24 hours?
Or maybe, Enter into a precipitous one false move mode, where it's just about to wipe itself if the 24 hours elapses, And it does wipe itself if someone doesn't put in a code the next time the device recognizes that is being handled, within like 90 seconds of being picked up?
What about simply not using a smartphone and accessing your data via internet when you're in the country? You could use Mega (secure file storage) to access your files, for example.
I wonder if border agents could coerce you into giving access to your internet file storage, though.
I believe they can. I believe they can even request your social media credentials, despite that being against the ToS for those sites. It's not against the law to refuse, but they can and will reject entry on that basis.
That's interesting. I don't even know most of my passwords (thanks to password managers).
Don't worry, they can ask for that password too :D
Yes, but that one has 2FA, and I might not travel with that second factor on me.
Of course, they won't be amused.
In other words, 2FA might actively put you in danger. Something to consider before travel and perhaps temporarily lowering your digital security to preserve your physical one.
Remember that the creator of Mega is getting extradited to the USA - again - a country where he's never been, by the way - for basically this crime (using encryption).
Not true. He previously ran a site called MegaUpload which hosted copyright infringing files. This is why he created Mega, which is an end-to-end encrypted cloud storage service similar to OneDrive of Google Drive.
Even if Mega users host illegal or copyright infringing contents he can't be convicted for it. In fact, he won't even know about it.
I'm just amazed that not everyone is using it. People don't seem to know about it and they're not advertising it. They probably made a deal with LEA or politicians not to spread the word in exchange for not being extradited.
AFAIK in the US their policies do not allow them to access your cloud stored data.
There’s more to it than just not antagonizing the guards. I mean if you make them mad by doing something that is legal that’s probably not ideal for you practically speaking, but it’s not the end of the world. Destroying evidence while they are investigating you is not just going to make them mad though. It is illegal (18 USC section 1519).
Where I think people are a little confused here is not realizing that this would be equally illegal in many other countries. At least in the UK and France, border investigators also have the power to demand your PIN. And it is also illegal to wipe your phone during an investigation in those countries.
I wonder if the smarter thing to do would be to quietly nuke it as soon as it becomes clear that you'll be detained, so they can't really know that it wasn't already blank (IE you aren't nuking it in their presence).
The smarter thing to do is to just wipe your phone of everything you don't want border patrol to see before going to an airport.
With self-hosting, it's possible to easily bootstrap a clean phone with all your data and passwords from scratch, without relying on any third-party cloud services. The only thing you need to bring across the border is your brain (which contains the most basic information on how to set up your password manager) and maybe some kind of 2FA generator. Your password manager then contains all the other information you need to get everything running.
I don't think it ever makes sense to transport actual data across borders if you care about governments gaining access to it.
Possible, yes. Easy, not so much. Phone operating systems don't really place nice with local backup and restore, which I consider a serious flaw.
I'm not sure what you're referring to, but what I basically do is self-host everything that stores relevant data: Vaultwarden, Immich, Notesnook, etc. I only know how to set up Bitwarden and my 2FA generator from scratch, so when I get a new phone, I install Bitwarden and the 2FA app and set them up.
Then everything else is documented inside Bitwarden. It's just a matter of installing the apps and logging in using the credentials stored in Bitwarden and a 2FA token generator.
There's no need for relying on any phone OS features.
This seems to describe a workflow with a small number of apps that store things remotely.
I want to back up my phone and restore it in one step, possibly to different hardware, and have it work like nothing ever happened. I can do that with a PC. I ought to be able to do that with a phone too.
I'll use Signal as my example of an app that's especially annoying to deal with in the border crossing scenario. I want to back up Signal and install it on a clean device without losing messages, changing my safety number, or verifying by SMS with a phone number I may not have access to at my destination. It's not possible, though I'll grant some of that is design choices made by Signal rather than the operating system.
I have to use its built-in backup function to keep my messages; if I just copy the data, it can't decrypt because the keys are in the old device's TPM. Even with the backup and password, I have to use SMS verification. Finally, the safety number seems to be tied to the keys in the old TPM, so I there's no way to do this without changing it and annoying my contacts (or teaching them to ignore safety number changes).
Makes sense, thanks for explaining!
You still have to set all that up.
I don't carry a smartphone, is this likely to be a red flag if I'm stopped?
Many countries now assume you have a phone. For example getting UK visa requires a smartphone. I don't think going without a phone is feasible nowadays.
Another question is if going with a burner phone that has just sim card and bank card, sufficient. But then you need appleid/google account on the device, and this again links back to your phone number, and it's not easy in practice to have proper clean device.
You can simply use an Apple account for your primary device and a Google account for your burner (or vice versa). Or set up a secondary Apple or Google account. Or use a device/OS that doesn’t require one of these accounts!
> UK visa requires a smartphone
I don't think this is accurate.
she's wrong. i did it on the browser on my desktop. the ui definitely doesn't make it easy to find though.
Well, assume your phone number is public knowledge.
You can get more than one.
Sure. Assume the one that's attached to your payment is public.
Threat modelling. France is unlikely to tell USA if two numbers are owned by the same person without a good reason.
My friends from the German CCC are mostly like (1) do not travel to the US and (2) if you absolutely must, travel with an empty device with decoy data and download all data you need once you're there.
Why not have a passcode that boots in to a second “safe for cops to look at” partition?
That partition will always be obviously out of date and obviously not the main partition.
So I guess what you really want is a duress PIN that loads into a fake innocent profile.
Yes I thought this was the standard solution?
People have been doing this since way back in the TrueCrypt days - IIRC you could configure it to run a whole fake version of Windows if you wanted without easily revealing your actual main volume.
Most hardware crypto wallets also have a "duress wallet" feature where you keep a low balance for the same reason.
Wiping is obviously extremely suspicious and asking for trouble
"Wiping is obviously extremely suspicious and asking for trouble"
It's sad this is the default view. It's his device, his data, his life on that phone. If he had wiped the phone before the interrogation it wouldn't be a problem. How long before? A second before? A week before? But wiping the data a minute later is suddenly asking for trouble.
I don't like it and I wish we had more privacy, but realistically there is no such "right".
If you're going to be in a situation where you're in a room with some goons backed by the full power of the state, it is what it is.
Maybe because I'm not American I don't have any hangups about seeing the US government this way, but my own government is no different - you can (and people have) get stopped at Heathrow, taken to a dimly lit backroom and given a going over for hours
I don't know that there is case law on this but I imagine that "prior to the admissibility inspection" is likely to be treated differently from "during the admissibility inspection" or "during administrative detention or secondary inspection" (or "in response to a request or question by a border agent"!).
Edit: a bigger picture question is the difference between things that may be legally punishable and things that may cause suspicion from CBP agents, which aren't the same thing at all.
it seems to me that if you give them a password to unlock the phone and when it unlocks it has been wiped that will cause problems whether it is the password that causes the wiping or not?
A US citizen has an almost unlimited right to enter the USA. The border search rule permits officials to search for things that are illegal to import. A blank phone is not illegal to import.
A non-citizen who arrives with a blank phone might be denied entry because it seems suspicious.
well OK, luckily my checking of media informs me no citizens have been stopped and held in custody by immigration without due process or any particular grounds, especially recently, so it all sounds good.
We noted in the border search guide that lying to the agents in response to their questions is potentially a crime in its own right (even if it's not done in order to hide anything illegal). We thought that this made hidden volumes quite tricky, particularly if one's intent was to pretend to comply with a question or request while actually not complying.
IANAL but I think while lying to some questions might lead to obstruction charges, not answering is simply exercising the right to remain silent.
Sure - but the point is, if you're instructed by the officer to enter a password so they can inspect your device, and you enter a fake password and show them a fake version of your data, that could easily be found later to constitute a lie and lead to serious legal trouble.
I'm pretty sure they can't compel you to enter a password.
They can't compel you, no. However, they can ask you to do so, and if you enter a privacy password that shows them something other than your real device (which is what this thread was about), you can very likely be faced with charges of obstruction of justice or even perjury. The point was that it's better to simply refuse, and accept the consequences of that, rather than trying to use technical means to trick them or to wipe data.
Note that if you're not a citizen of the USA, refusing to comply with a request like this is very likely to have you sent back to your country and denied access to the USA forever. While they can't legally force you to comply, they can absolutely deny you entry for any reason like this, regardless of having a valid visa and everything else in order. This even applies to legal residents.
How would they discover you entered a wrong password?
If you want to gamble on that, that's your prerogative. But if they suspect you did this, computer forensics techniques can easily reveal this, especially if the rest of the data on the device is recoverable to you as well.
Edit to add: beyond forensics, they can also simply ask you to enter the other password, to prove that the account you showed them first was the right one.
They can't, but that will put you in another "suspicious" bucket.
Not enough, e.g. when crossing the Russian border (even as a citizen) your phone can be connected via USB to a device that uses exploits and whatnot to download all of the data. Surely US border guard can do something similar.
And using encryption will only make you more suspicious, and may be a reason to get jail time until the situation is "cleared up" one way or another (e.g. by getting even more jail time).
Only a second phone works, if you can make it seem like a device you're actually using (though also not a silver bullet as e.g. a lot of messenger metadata is available to governments and border control can physically coerce you to log in to your real accounts)
Or that just selectively wipes only stuff you have marked for deletion. That way the profile stays up to date and believable.
Problem is „are you sure you marked for deletion all the correct things” because you could have already deleted it before traveling or moved to other device you don’t travel with.
Selection on border control might be arbitrary, they can hold you or send you back over a photo or something you wouldn’t think should be a problem.
Ideally you would like to have all wiped just in case but then you really stand out…
That's why you do it the other way round: you mark things that you don't want deleted.
That is not really making any difference if you can prepare beforehand
and
you can’t be sure which things can get you in trouble.
It does make a difference: you only mark enough to be kept to make your phone looks like it's in use, as opposed to obviously wiped.
By default, new material will be deleted. So you don't have to prepare again and again.
> you can’t be sure which things can get you in trouble.
When in doubt, don't mark it as keep.
That's a more risky strategy. What if you added new files since the last time you updated the deletion profile? It's also technically more challenging. You have to think about what might be in RAM, caches, backups, etc.
The good thing about a total wipe is that it's very easy to implement, and it's hard for it to go wrong. You just encrypt the whole drive and, when you want to wipe it, erase the key.
Obviously, you'd go the other way round and marks things that you don't want deleted.
Deleted stuff can easily be recovered. I think the full clean will remove the encryption keys hence making it unrecoverable.
Yes, this also has the advantage of speed perhaps. I can see, deleting specific apps (and their data) as thing #1, and thing #2 would be certain directories. Of course, the problem is, are icons going to be vanishing off the home screen, when the agent is looking at it? Or will the unlock -> screen coming on, be super slow?
Of course the problem there is, many people have an app store installed, and app stores have histories. And logs. And "what you used to have installed" is so easily found under Google Play, for example.
As someone else said in this thread, the law isn't code. It's not if-then statement based. It's also predicated upon intent in many cases. What actions did a person take, and why, when told to (for example) unlock their phone.
The problem here is that if you are asked to unlock your phone, any action you take to thwart that request by "trickery" to get data deleted, could be construed as 'deleting evidence'. So while some methods might make it more difficult for the border agent to realise "something happened", if they're suspicious still, then you're still in hot water.
In the eyes of the law, the court, and likely the jury, you've done a sneaky thing to thwart evidence collection.
The only safe method is a full wipe prior to travel. In this manner, you're not deleting evidence when told to hand it over. It's an entirely different bar. They can be cruel about it, and take your phone for a few months, but you're not going to be in legal hot water.
In as no one will see the phone is wiped until you are compelled to unlock it, there's no greater change of the phone being seized. You're already being investigated. Just be blunt, say "Whenever I travel, I just wipe it", and that's that.
This is why it's a shame that GrapheneOS has no viable backup solution. Its build in method is unreliable, and doesn't work very well, and is gitchy, it's a very well known problem.
And Android and ADB sometimes have issues with large backups of directories, and so you have to manage that with tar + stream and other business, but at least working around that is easy.
But if you could backup individual apps and all their data, you could uninstall all your privacy laden stuff, cross the border, and reinstall in minutes.
That's the true, legal way to travel safely. Especially if the app removal resulted in a 'shred' of the data files instead of delete.
If anyone has ever struggled with large data backup/restore, here's the only real method I've found for copying large swaths of files from/to via adb:
and to restore Or something similar.Note that in the USA and a few other jurisdictions, I believe there is now a recognized possibility for the border agents to ask for access to your social media, so even wiping the phone, or even traveling without a phone, is not entirely safe.
As far as facts go I was thinking of this one case:
... where I seemed to recall it was a social media post, but it is unclear whether it's private messaging, public social media, or private messaging under a public social media account.
[EDIT] according to [1] it was on WhatsApp with a U.S national.
My understanding is that refusal to provide social media accounts, or passwords to devices, or passwords to social media accounts, can be considered suspicious in its own right and ground to be held in custody for further exam, and/or denied entry; foreigners do not get to have the same "give password" == "right to not incriminate yourself" that U.S of A. citizen have. In doubt I would assume I don't.
[0]: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/03/20/f...
[1]: https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2025/03/22/le-r...
Yes, as a foreigner there is no such thing as a right to enter the USA - the CBP agents can refuse you entry for any reason whatsoever and you have no recourse (they could be breaking various laws of their own and face personal liability for their own actions, of course, such as if they were seeking a bribe from you - but that doesn't give you any right to sue over their refusal to admit you). The only exception is asylum seeking, where there is a legal right for your asylum case to be heard.
Or travel with a diary containing a post-it note labelled "p4sswd"
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So burner phone for US visits I guess
> The big picture problem is that the agents performing the searches have an enormous amount of power in terms of potentially seizing devices and potentially denying entry for non-citizens. I think they should not have this power, but the agents and courts probably don't care that I think that.
That's the reason I never traveled to the US and never will, just having IT security in your CV is enough to make the border gamble not worth it
Note that border searches of electronic devices are extremely rare overall. There were some statistics from CBP implying a base rate lower than 1 in 10,000 (I think lower than 1 in 100,000) border crossings.
I do know two people who have experienced them as a result of the government taking a personal interest in them, so it's certainly not impossible. However, it's not a common experience.
I've personally experienced searches of my suitcases about four times in about 100 U.S. border crossings (as a U.S. citizen, but the people performing or directing those searches generally didn't know my citizenship status), and zero electronic device searches.
I'm European and I know plenty, albeit the minority of those I know that went to the US, so I wonder how reliable are CBP stats.
Maybe my anecdotal experience is influenced by me being in IT, but still.
But why would that be legal? The device is owned by the individual. No judge signed any warrant search for the device. I can do what I want with my device - that is a basic right of property. Imagine if border guards seize money willy-nilly.
You are allowed to refuse access to your device, and they are allowed to refuse entry to the country.
Most constitutional rights are suspended within 100 miles of a border or international airport.
Which leaves me wondering - should domestic travel be treated the same as international when it comes to securing your devices?
Worse, almost the entire population of the USA lives within 100 miles of a border or international airport.
> Imagine if border guards seize money willy-nilly.
This jogged my memory, though I couldn't find the example I was thinking of. But here's an item that is pretty similar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenaha,_Texas_asset_forfeiture...
Edit: Not on the border, btw. Just people travelling inside US. I guess it was their mistake to carry cash instead of getting a bank check or something.
> Imagine if border guards seize money willy-nilly.
no need to imagine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
It's also quite surprising that all socials need to be declared. And presumably them AI vetted in time for you to get to the border.
This part is pretty new. I wonder if my former colleagues have done any FOIA work looking into how travelers' disclosed social media accounts have been reviewed or analyzed!
You also have to provide every single email account you have used in the last ten years, all of them, forgetting to declare one is an offense.
There's no chances I can remember them all, especially as I've been contracting and get a new email every 3-4 months or so.
It's reasonable for a country to want to know if you're likely to abuse your visa.
Eg your socials might show you are a professional paid speaker at conferences. If you applied for a tourist visa that would be reasonable to flag you and ask you if you have paid gigs on the wrong visa.
Europe will also ask the same questions for foreigners. If you're a young woman travelling on your own you can expect questions to challenge if you might be earning money as a nanny on a visitor visa. Checking their phone messages to see if they've been making arrangements to this effect is a very straightforward way to determine intent.
Not everything is an evil conspiracy.
Tell me if I'm wrong but it seems that if you cross borders a lot the solution is straightforward. Have a second set of disposable devices for out of country usage with nothing but a VPN to virtual desktop. Give them the password and your mailing address to return when they are done, or just consider it abandoned?
Can they force you to log into another remote computer in another country to examine it? I'm not discussing politics, simply the solution that you can actually do now side of things.
I don't have any hope of this situation improving globally and my gut says it will get much worse over time. I wonder if in the future you will have to not only give them your computer but have some sort of follow up investigation of your "real" computer if you do this two device method.
Just don't travel to the US.
This is an increasingly popular solution. Foreign tourism has crashed.
I love the geography of the US, and it has some truly stunning places to visit.
But they're not so stunning that I need to risk my freedom - risk my freedom - to visit them in person.
I do not sell tourism services. I sell software. If there is less foreign tourism in the US, nice places will be less crowded. So, what are my incentives to ask my government to ease foreign entry to my country?
This person is a US citizen. What happens if he just said nothing (beyond identifying and answering basic questions) and refused to cooperate? How long could they hold him? As a citizen they have to allow him to enter eventually.
According to the ACLU I think this person would have been better off saying little and not wiping their phone.
https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/what-do-when-encounter...
And they would have taken his phone, pulled it apart and cloned the memory to get the data. And in a month or three, returned his phone to him in some condition which may or may not include "working".
Sounds like a better outcome to me.
Plus, unless GrapheneOS gets encryption wrong (which I doubt), cloning the memory to get the data isn't really a thing.
I've done that and they held me for about a day, strip and cavity searched me, imprisoned me, "diesel therapy" me across the state while taking me to multiple private ER claiming there were drugs up my ass to run up hospital bills in my name. They've also threatened to revoke my passport or deny me entry to the country (both failed).
They also would not allow me access to a lawyer during questioning or imprisonment.
Another woman was at the same port of entry, was raped to "check for drugs", sued, and lost. Apparently raping is a legal way to search for drugs (that were not there).
This. If any country won't treat you like a guest, avoid travelling to it.
If it's your own, that's harder to do – time to fight and change the system before it gets worse and will swallow you whole.
I live in the U.S. (as, I think, does the person who is the subject of this article).
Maybe change your location then :P
The US have things like exit taxes etc which make it a pain to leave.
I'm sharing this experience just to share, not suggesting or making any claims about what people should do with it:
One of the best ways to get through airport CBP quickly without being overly hassled is to be overtly, clearly sick in a gross way. If you're about to vomit or have horrible diarrhea, they do not want you in that line any longer than you have to be. If they're the type to want to take people down a peg, they won't bother with you because they're already miserable, and if they like picking on the weak, they're probably going to go for a solo young female traveler who isn't ill.
Nobody wants to risk getting vomit on their clothes or in their work area, having to close a line and shuffle people around while their coworkers glare daggers, or subject themselves or their coworkers to the very fun smells of human bodily fluids.
At the same time, it isn't purposeful so it's not read as malicious.
Sounds like you swallowed balloons containing drugs and one of them burst.
You might need some additional screening or to have a seat on the Drugloo to make sure everything comes out OK.
Maybe the actual solution is traveling with burner devices when you are concerned with border checks?
Like, get a cheap phone, install the bare minimum stuff you need for travel.
For extra safety, before returning home wipe it and just put back the exact apps you need for moving around (e.g.: ride hailing app).
Same thing with laptops, tablets, etc.
This is one of the reasons I also won't ever go to the US again.
While most of my Italian/Polish friends had 0 issues, on a handful of occasions people were stopped and questioned for hours with agents pretending full access to every single device and just overall treating you as criminals.
In one occasion a friend of mine stated that he was quite sure they just enjoyed that kind of sweeping power and it had nothing to do with border security, it was just fun to them.
In another one, the suspicion was on the fact that this person did not have socials, he just disliked them and had nothing except a Google account for Youtube. This fact made them super suspicious and the person was stuck at La Guardia for 3 hours, even his body was inspected. Disgusting.
> ... you may have to think both about protecting your data by technical means, ...
I thought about that. And I came to the conclusion that a phone is a pathetically bad device to both store your data and to access your data. Mediocre screen. Mediocre input methods. Moreover most phones happen to also be spying device.
So if you think about "protecting your data", a reasonable idea is that a lot of data is way better kept on your homelab, with say encrypted backups in a safe at the bank, at a relative's place, on a server you rent, etc., rather than on your phone. And there's really little need to access your data from your phone.
Oh and I'm no luddite: I've got a homelab, I rent servers, I pay three AI subscriptions, etc.
But my phone is boring. There's no app on it besides the stock ones (say Google Maps) and then I added the Google Authenticator app (for stuff still using that kind of 2FA).
If people were to wake up and stop being glued to that mediocre thing, the problem would already be 99% solved.