Phones should load different profiles based on the password provided, with some activity logged across profiles so none of them appear stale.
* Just to make the customs agents happy, I would fill the history of the fake profile with porn and pictures of donuts.
If what you want is a mode that wipes your phone only when a CBP agent looks at it, as other people have stated in the comments here, you'd probably be committing some sort of crime (e.g. destruction of evidence or lying to a federal agent).
The only truly safe way to cross is to not actually have your data when you cross, not to try and throw it away once you get singled out by agents.
I have nothing to hide personally. I'm more concerned about business secrets and SSH keys.
If you have nothing to hide you should have nothing to fear. Because you know that US is never involved in industrial espionage and Snowden NSA leaks have allegedly never happened.
You do. And even if you don't, you should hide it anyway. Please stop using that sentence at all.
“Never say anything in an electronic message that you wouldn’t want appearing, and attributed to you, in tomorrow morning’s front-page headline in the New York Times.” — Colonel David Russell, former head of DARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office
Besides, I don't think my data is any more likely to end up in some newspaper if a government agent gets it than if (when) Google gets hacked.
Good advice, in general. I've never met anyone that didn't have something to hide from someone, though. But you're making an even stronger claim: That nothing that you've said or done will ever be something that you'd want to keep private. When data gets out, you don't get to call it back, even when circumstances in the world change.
In fact, your country's president probably wouldn't care too much if the stuff on his phone was exposed. He seems to be more than happy to make public all his thoughts and opinions.
That's the wrong question, though. (Despite the quote above.) The question is, do you have anything on your phone that someday a government may decide is a reason to do something bad to you?
The answer is always yes for two reasons: One, you can't know the future and what it will hold, for instance governments can make laws explicitly for the purpose of "getting" people, and two, the possible set of future governments pretty much has no safe behavior intersection.
The only missing piece is a easy way to restore the phone once I reach my destination.
'[X] You are proposing a technical solution to a non-technical problem'
The border agent of ${COUNTRY} doesn't care if you wiped your phone accidentally or deliberately; his flowchart says 'access subject's chat history on phone'. If that's not possible, goto 'reject'.
All that sounds like a UX nightmare.
The point is its all moot solving this at a technological level.
It does, but that wasn't the point I was trying to make.
> The point is its all moot solving this at a technological level.
If I'm reading that right, it's closer to what I was thinking when I wrote my comment. We can come up with a bunch of clever solutions, someone else can shoot them down with plausible scenarios, but regardless, some asshole at the border can still say "I don't believe your phone's blank, and I don't believe you don't have a Twitter/Facebook/etc account. So, you'll need to restore your phone and give us your social media passwords to get out of here"
Once you get home and want to untravel, you plug your phone in to your desktop and sign in to a cloud service that "untravels" your phone, restoring to the state it was in.
From the customs agent and legal point of view, there is no distinction between hiding a secret compartment in your luggage and a device.
> They eventually returned and said they’d release him if he told them the password to unlock his phone.
How have I hindered official action or lied to a federal agent by providing one of my passwords?
The same way that your child disobeyed you when you say "Go to bed", and they lay in yours and tell you "You didn't say which bed".
Clearly, the border agent wasn't asking for the password to your alternate, fake part of the phone, and they aren't likely to be happy if they figure out that you followed your own interpretation of the letter of the order, rather than an interpretation that conforms to the spirit of the order.
Is it really illegal to have a secret compartment in your luggage? I mean, I have no doubt it's highly risky and that they will make the case you've done something wrong, but have you inherently done something illegal by merely having a secret compartment? Maybe only if you've explicitly represented that there are no other compartments? Or you've got contraband in there, or something else they've explicitly inquired about that you claimed you don't have? (But that's more about lying or existing laws, than the compartment itself.)
If you turned over your phone for inspection and could see they were looking in an app you don't use, are you committing a felony to not volunteer that they should look in the other browser for your real history or whatever? If having two profiles and only providing one is illegal, what about having two phones? (like your "real" one in your luggage, turned off.) Do I have to volunteer that when they asked for "my phone" that I actually have multiple? What if I kept the "real" one at home -- do I have to tell them the one they're looking at is only a subset of my property and doesn't represent what they probably actually meant when they asked for "my phone"?
I'm not entirely sure where "the lines" are here, but perhaps the passcode is part of it. Once they require that, they've crossed from dealing with physical items physically crossing the border, passing into things that are in your mind or physically located elsewhere. If they can require a lockscreen code, there's not really any reason they can't require every other password since those are "secret compartments" accessible from your phone, and if just having an undisclosed compartment really is illegal, I guess you'd better volunteer an exhaustive list of all your accounts...
In many cases, the customs people have discretion to not admit you for a variety of reasons. There's a tension between the process around physical goods and digital data that isn't clearly understood by the law. Until the law is more firmly established, you're better off not carrying stuff you care about.
Having multiple profiles per device and accessible in this manner would be preferable for a number of reasons. Least of which is not wanting anyone else access to your own sensitive information that they have no business looking at to begin with.
Immigration has very broad powers, but even then this sort of case would be difficult to make IMHO.
I agree. But who has the time and money to defend themselves in court against the unlimited resources of the government?
that is a serious felony in the United States
Everyone has the feels over this border stuff and HN is collectively spewing the same inane questions repeatedly, but the reality is that people are more likely to get into trouble more often when spouses, employers, teachers, family, etc get to see things that weren't intended to be seen.
We have airplane mode to shut off phone radios, why not a purge mode to whack marked data. On iOS, the most rudimentary level of this sort of protection is available with MDM -- you can configure a device to erase managed data when it leaves a building or campus. The device is still active and manageable, but the data is gone until it becomes compliant.