Ask HN: Laptop seized by immigration. Now what?
Submitting this post after a very stressful night. Long story short: my girlfriend went on a 10 days planned holiday trip to Israel. Before boarding, she's been sent to a separate security check, then interview room and got heavily questioned, - strip searched (!!!) and everything - for several hours. She eventually made it (flight had been delayed for some reasons).
Now, why am I asking here: when she has been taken to the interview room, all her electronics has been taken away. We have no idea what they did to them. She got back some of them when landed in Israel (Phone, camera, both being obviously searched through). However, they decided to keep the laptop. At the moment of writing, we don't know where is the laptop neither if/when/how we're going to get it. We also don't know why they kept her for so long, why they questioned her, why they took her electronics, why they didn't give it back to her before boarding and why she couldn't get them back for the flight.
Now the real question: I'm concerned about the electronics themselves. Following the theory they could have been tapped, would it be possible to reset both phone and laptop (if we ever managed to get our hand back one), google pixel phone and macbook air 2012, in a way we know they wouldn't be compromised? Could we do some sort of bootloader reset, or anything else that would guarantee a genuine hardware/software?
In addition to obvious privacy concerns, my girlfriend has some clients who required privileged confidentiality and can't afford working on potentially compromised hardware.
Any advice will be highly appreciated. Thank you.