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Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

That falls apart with the simplest IP tracking. The government has all that data anyway, I see no reason they couldn't run a "background check" and figure out exactly who you are and what you've done.

It's a false sense of security, is it not? It's probably best to assume your opponent isn't completely dumb.

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If a state intelligence agency is targeting you, there's just really not a lot you can do at that point. But ephemeral9235's suggestions should work OK to avoid handing over all your personal data at the border.

That depends on what your threat model is. I assume we're talking about random police or border searches of your phone. Not the NSA or some surveillance apparatus which can make warrantless inquiries to your ISP and social network providers at a moments notice.

If we're facing a surveillance state without any internal obstructions then yes, far stricter opsec will be needed.

In the near future I expect random border searches to include all internet traffic associated with you. It's going to get hard for the average person to evade it. Your techniques won't be nearly enough.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/01/obama-administra...

You're right of course.

I guess I'm wondering if border guards at any point in the future will have quick access to a database, presumably with information from a company that has either voluntarily or been forced to provide data.

Sir, we just ran your social networking accounts and according to our data you have another Facebook account that you did not provide access to...

Such a database would indicate two things a) law enforcement has access to such a database without warrants b) facebook provides such a database without warrants.

To me those would be reasons to leave the country and facebook.

A and b are both well established facts. You are, however, still allowed to leave both the country and Facebook without restriction. For now.

where have you been?

Even something like a VPN isn't really perfect, because a smart enough monitoring system could track a vpn connection coming from your system, and then compare that to traffic coming from the vpn. Tricky, but possible.

Read the Snowden docs more closely, there's an express program for automatic identification of VPN traffic patterns.

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