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Comment by danboarder | Hacker News Reader

Suggestion: for international travel, when possible stow your powered off phone in checked baggage, and bring a non-important factory-reset phone or tablet for entertainment or to connect to the cloud if needed for work etc. If needed keep your work files in a hidden folder on an SD card in your camera... lots of annoying but increasingly necessary workarounds to deal with the growth of authoritarian states.

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I would advise against putting any phone in your checked luggage. Too many dishonest baggage handlers and security screeners around.

Also, lipo batteries are "discouraged" from being checked.

edit: adding quotes to help signal the sarcasm

s/discouraged/prohibited/ if I'm not mistaken.

I thought this, too, but apparently a small device with an installed battery can be checked. Specifically, you can check a device with an installed battery of up to 100 watt hours. If the battery is loose, it has to be carried on. If is larger capacity, it might need special approval.

[0]: https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...

[1]: https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/as... (PDF)

Only when they are outside a device. So checking in a laptop with a battery is fine, checking in only the battery is not.

However last time I checked (few years ago) there was also a wattage limitation to that, batteries below 99watt/hour could be checked in. A phone battery is about 10watt/hour, laptop 100-200wh.

When checking in baggage at the ticketing line, there is a list of things you cannot check, and they also read out a line when they are "courtesy checking" your carry on when the bins are full. This list include "smart" luggage with li-po batteries, they cannot be checked without removing the battery. They include e-cigarettes, and all sorts of other much less than 98Wh batteries. The manufacturers of batteries for professional cameras make 98Wh batteries specifically so they can be brought onto a plane. These are meant to be carried on and are not allowed to be checked. I used to shoot a lot of VR using GoPros. The pelican case had four 6-camera rigs with a spare body per rig totaling 28 cameras with li-po batteries. We were not allowed to check them as instructed by the ticketing agent.

What do all of these anecdotal stories mean?

Laptop batteries are generally 40-99. Almost no laptop has a battery over 100, specifically because of these rules.

Differently from the security theater on the cabin, unhandled lipo batteries on the cargo are a real safety risk.

Instead of a factory-reset decoy phone or tablet, bring a lightly used decoy with enough fakeish stuff on it that it looks legit on casual inspection. Keep your real phone powered off, deeper in your luggage. No need to go though all that nonsense with hidden SD cards.

Be compliant with the border control people and offer up your decoy without complaint. You win if they don't search your stuff at all, and you win if they're satisfied with your faux compliance with the decoy. You only need to start to resist and demand your rights once they've shown an unusual interest in you and thoroughly search your stuff, but if they're doing that they probably had it in for you anyway.

It seems like the risk that they would discover both phones is not worth the reward of hiding the content on your everyday phone. I agree in principal that you shouldn’t be compelled to unlock your phone at the border, especially on the way out, and I hope that we can change our laws to fix that. But as a traveler who just wants to get on my plane, I’m gonna swallow my pride and let them dig through my chat history or whatever, rather than risk them finding that I have a decoy phone, which basically guarantees I’m spending the night in some extralegal black site.

All the inbound customs checkpoints I've seen in the US and overseas are after you pick up your checked luggage. It sounds like this specific case was outbound, but outbound inspection at commercial airports is unusual in the US.

Formal checkpoints, yes. A cluster of agents standing in the jetway and pulling people aside as they board the plane - not uncommon.

In the US? I've traveled internationally almost continually for the last six years or so and have never seen that or any outbound customs checking.

I've seen that as a TSA thing, on a domestic flight. It was on the first flight in the morning, so the airline wasn't trying to do a quick turnaround.

It also only covered the people standing in line... so I sat there, waited for my boarding group to go, and followed behind them.

Wait, what? You were approached by a CBP officer while taking a domestic flight? Which airport?

That was a TSA thing -- they were TSA officers. Las Vegas. And I didn't get approached -- I wasn't lined up, as described.

yep, i've been pulled aside on the jetway while boarding a british airways flight to the usa, to have my carry-on searched. this was in heathrow, so not sure who the particular security agent worked for. none of my phones or electronics were turned on or checked, though...

Definitely inbound to the USA, that happens all the time with additional screening to meet US requirements. Talking about outbound though.

Interesting. Flying out of SFO, I’ve seen it several times over the past few years, also logging a good dozen overseas flights per year ...

I would prefer a phone where I can have more than one partition. For all intents and purposes the presentation looks the same but unless I am in the more secure partition I may not see everything that is on my phone.

This would need some work on the app side, like being able to push anything I want from nonsecure to secure partition with a swipe or similar gesture. once pushed to another partition the only way to return it to the open partition would be swap to secure and copy it back.

you want a bell-lapadula [0] style security labeling model on the phone, i think. it would only allow allow write-up (copy data from insecure to secure side) and read-down (view data on insecure side from secure) mechanisms.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%E2%80%93LaPadula_model

Just make sure you phone's battery is dead. Then you won't be able to unlock it anyway.

They would plug it in for you.

Hmm, I'm wondering how they'd respond if you stored your battery in your checked baggage...

"Just wait here sir, we'll get that... Also you're going to be charged with checking a lithium battery into the hold, you're not allowed to do that."

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