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Comment by crispyambulance | Hacker News Reader

If some CBP knuckle-dragger wants me to unlock my phone so he can browse through it looking for whatever as I stand there watching while asking me insipid questions, that's not a huge deal.

The real problem here is downloading of data from the phone. Once that data is off-loaded, the government can make it a part of their "Seven-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-Osama-Bin-Laden edition" game, stored forever, perpetually looking for "connections" no matter how remote. That's a scary and slippery slope to surveillance state hell. I don't think such practices are commonplace, not yet?

Has anyone here ever been in a situation where the CBP confiscated their phone/laptop or downloaded data electronically from it?

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I was crossing into Canada and 3 agents demanded my phone and password (as well as my SO) under threat of detention. They took the phones in the back for 45 minutes before they came out. Asked questions about a conversation I had about marijuana with a friend months ago, basically accusing me of being a drug dealer when even in the most wild reading of that conversation, that cannot possibly be the case. Anyway, who knows what happened in that 45 minutes, probably our data is still sitting deep in some Canadian government server somewhere.

Cheap Android phone. Temporary, cheap SIM (or none—you can get one where you're going) with a different number from your real one. Only way to go. Bonus that it's 100% reasonable to do this because you don't want to risk having your main phone stolen/lost, too, so it's not even a weird (suspicious) thing to do.

Eventually, this might be seen as non-suspicious. Maybe. I hope so. It's quite prudent.

BUT for now it's also something only a very, very small percentage of the population would consider doing and then actually do. Border agents would know this, empirically. So if you're doing something that's highly unusual for the general population then you are, unfortunately, doing something weird and suspicious.

TL;DR: it doesn't matter that it's reasonable; it's still fringe and, sadly therefore, suspicious

The government has everything you put on Facebook already. And everything you backed up to Apple or Google photos. And your emails.

If there's something else they're interested in, don't carry it over the border.

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