Ex-Mozilla CTO: I was grilled for three hours at San Francisco airport

His 3 hour detention story sounds awful, but think of the things that didn't happen:

* he wasn't arrested or imprisoned * no cavity search or exercises in humiliation * no mention of his devices being taken out of sight without explanation or simply seized indefinitely

My posture has been that you have no more right to keep your devices locked when crossing the border than your briefcase. You have a reduced expecation of privacy when you are crossing international borders. T Courts have repeatedly upheld violations of privacy at the border as legal despite their illegality elsewhere. Assume the government has a legal right to violate your privacy to inspect what is crossing their borders. Even if they don't they will act as if they have that right.

If you transmit data into the US digitally the NSA has a mandate to do whatever they can to snoop at what you're doing. Border security has a similar mandate. This story happened to a CITIZEN who merely lost their express entry pass and was inconvienced and intimidated. A non-citizen can get in a lot more shit than what happened in this case. Especially if they're Arab.

It's generally easier to move encrypted information across borders digitally rather than physically without government interference. It's easier to blend in with the torrent of data moving across the border than it is to fight the law in regards to your right to privacy at the border.