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Comment by wing-_-nuts | Hacker News Reader

>or seize your $1000 phone/laptop.

So be it. I used to say that the reason I valued my privacy was not that I did not trust my government _today_, it was the fact that data would be available to every potential authoritarian government _tomorrow_.

Welp, today has become tomorrow, and yeah, I'd _absolutely_ rather just have my devices seized than have the contents of my phone dumped into a database that can be searched without a warrant, for the next 15 years.

Rights (like the 4th amendment) that are not exercised are not upheld. I'm sure the threat of having one's devices stolen (let's be clear, that's what this is), is enough to deter many people. For myself, my next course of action would be to contact the ACLU and sue the government for violating the 4th amendment.

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Having your $1000 device stolen by the government as an acceptable outcome is something only a fatcat on HN with their cushy salary would be able to tolerate. I'm not a FAANG employee, and don't make that kind of salary. Loosing a $1k anything would not be something I could just shrug my shoulders and just turn around and immediately replace it.

Even if you do sue the gov't, it'll be at least a year before any kind of resolution that results in the return of that device. Them keeping my phone would be one thing, but if they also kept my laptop, I'd be screwed. My laptop is much more than $1k, and there's no free laptop with contract cell service I could use to replace it. Now I'd be without a means of working.

These kinds of situations make me really yearn for the days of replacing the internal hard drive of a laptop. I could swap out my daily use drive for a travel drive, which would be much less of a hassle than the options on offer for modern laptops.

My Lenovo from last year still has non-soldered NVMe drives. I would probably just install Windows on a separate partition and set it to boot to that, then install a few games and set my Chrome homepage. I bet CBP won't be mucking around with bootloader settings looking for Linux, and even so it would be pretty trivial to just remove GRUB from the EFI partition for the travel days.

This is something no on discusses but I've wondered heavily- GRUB can be made to not show a menu and then boot up Windows automatically, in like a second or two with no one the wiser. [There is an obnoxious welcome to grub message that pops up now but I see a public project out there that solves this very easily called GRUB shusher]

I don't know if other bootloaders outside GRUB have a silent/hidden start option, as well in a similar vein that would require you to hit a key in that first second to get the menu to appear, or else it just boots up normally

I wonder about the other approach, just going into the BIOS nad changing the order so Windows boots first, which should be doable in some setups. Lock the BIOS with a password, and you're in not bad shape. (Not sure if Secure Boot being enabled could also help here - probably couldn't hurt)

Any examples of the silent GRUB setup? Sounds interesting.

I left a comment about Veracrypt offering the Hidden OS feature, with two passwords - one for the dummy OS and one for the real OS. However it doesn't seem to be supported anymore on Windows 11 or modern hardware, the option is greyed out on my laptop with no explanation.

My approach would be to rename the Grub EFI image to something silly like "HP Windows Recovery", then set Windows to boot first. Someone could smash F11 then select the recovery option to make sure it was really recovery... but the average Keystone Kop at CBP would probably not figure this out. In fact, I think they would just turn the machine on, see it start to boot Windows, shrug, and turn it off again. If they image the machine, they can find that it has Linux with forensics, but I really struggle to imagine anyone caring enough to chase me down after the fact.

I am a US citizen though. The only real goal for me at CBP is to avoid secondary at all. I'm not worried at all about them coming for me after I leave the airport. If that sort of stuff starts to happen... I am screwed anyway. They can find records of everything I've said by just compelling US companies to disclose it to them.

> Loosing a $1k anything would not be something I could just shrug my shoulders and just turn around and immediately replace it.

I'd suggest that if $1K is a big deal to lose, one should not spend such an ungodly amount on a phone.

Perfectly adequate phones can be had for $100-$200. I couldn't imagine wasting more than that on a phone.

>Welp, today has become tomorrow, and yeah, I'd _absolutely_ rather just have my devices seized than have the contents of my phone dumped into a database that can be searched without a warrant, for the next 15 years.

You're totally ignoring the option of wiping your phone prior to crossing, and avoiding both fates.

>Rights (like the 4th amendment) that are not exercised are not upheld. I'm sure the threat of having one's devices stolen (let's be clear, that's what this is), is enough to deter many people. For myself, my next course of action would be to contact the ACLU and sue the government for violating the 4th amendment.

This already has been litigated, and the courts have affirmed CBP can deny entry or seize your phone. By all means, try to affect change by writing to your senator or whatever, but displays of civil disobedience is mostly pointless. ACLU won't even take on your case because it's been settled, and the chance of it being overturned is slim.

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