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Comment by paulgdp | Hacker News Reader

> Yep, police can simply ask anyone for their passwords and if you don't give it up they can put you in jail.

This is precisely the reason why I don't want to visit the US at the moment.

The USA immigration officers can ask me to forfeit my phone's password and look at all my photos, documents, messages, call logs etc, WITHOUT SUSPICION.

Some of that data can even stay on their servers for decades, and who knows if it ends up on a CIA/NSA server.

Of course, I can always refuse, but non-cooperation with CBP means immediate denial of entry and risks of lifelong headaches with future immigration checks.

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Me too. I’m going to wait a few more years before I visit again.

I‘m also careful with what I say online. US CBP tracks what people post online, and has been known to deny entry to people for being critical critical of the current president. I don’t want to risk losing out on future opportunities in the land of the free.

Just don't visit USA and you will be fine.

Not practical in many cases. I'm starting a new job soon and have to visit the US. No way am I saying no to that (way too good a job).

I'll probably just buy a decoy phone for the border.

Start setting up profiles ASAP, you want a plausible amount of history for a decoy.

How would one do that?

I will rather choose not to visit the US for the foreseeable time, maybe never again (have been to the US more than 10 times). Freedom of speech is more important than tourist visits to the US. Well and working there was never an option for me, worker protection, universal healthcare, etc. make life much nicer.

Maybe the US will be free enough again in the future, but with its trajectory, I am not betting on it.

What happens if you send the phone by mail?

You go on a list for acting smart, and they dump it with a cellebrite same as at the border.

they can try, so far GrapheneOS has been the only mobile OS immune to them.

Also, why would you set up the phone before it arrives?

I have really, really, really bad news for you about any modern SoC, including all those by Qualcomm. Their ROM private keys are widely available to the three letter agencies. Your OS, while cute, provides no protection at all to anyone who has physical access. Secure boot root keys give away the whole kingdom

Please explain how would you acces to encrypted data on turned off GOS device with locked bootloader.

Ask the owner to come in and unlock it if they ever want it back.

That is not an answer.

The disk is encrypted. They might be able to install a backdoor but they can't get the data.

Backdoored OS installed. Device returned. Wait.

Why bother with that when they can replace it with any backdoored phone of the same model.

There are no "ROM private keys" in Qualcomm or most other chips. The root of trust is fused in by the OEM. Apparently the exception is Apple.

They would have to individually steal keys from every OEM, in GraphenOS' case meaning Google. Then they'd have to do the right dance to fake the right stuff to satisfy the Secure Element(TM) and get it to let them use the data encryption keys. Which, by the way, I believe requires forking over a hash that may vary among individual phones; you have to know which version of the appropriate stage you want to fake.

... and you'll excuse me if I'm skeptical of your confident statements about what TLAs do or don't have access to, especially when you start talking about keys that don't exist.

Secureboot keys do not give away any data on the encrypted "cute" OS. At worst they can attempt an evil maid attack but why bother when they can use any device of the same model.

Indeed. So they'll hold it and ask you to come in and unlock it. If you don't, you don't get your phone back.

It depends on your country if that would be legal

At least you can walk in with a phone reset to factory settings, and once you cross the border restore from the cloud (or home server like me). In UK you can be stopped walking on the sidewalk. It's much more dystopian in UK.

There are no sidewalks in the UK, even more dystopian!

Did you mean the US or is the joke wooshing on me?

Edit: ah, because the word is pavement in British English :).

Sort of. It's also footway when denoting the no-carriages part of a road that also has a carriageway.

There's a whole complex terminology of footway, cycleway, bridleway, bridle path, footpath, cycle path, and carriageway. Even more fun: It's ever so slightly different in Scotland to England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

* https://legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1984/54/section/151

Any good examples of that happening? As far as I know, the police have to have a probable cause to stop and search you, but they can certainly ask you to stop and answer questions to which you can ask "am I being detained" if you object to their questions.

I haven't written up an article about it yet, but from a cursory look of the legal stuff this only affects private citizens and could be circumvented by setting up a shell company that owns your devices.

Legally, you can't surrender these devices, access to them or their passwords, as they are company property.

> could be circumvented by setting up a shell company that owns your devices.

Hard LOL. Doesn't apply at borders. Any country borders.

Also https://xkcd.com/538/

There's what's legal, and then there's what the border guard with a hemorrhoid flareup decides to do on the spot. One pain in the butt can cause you a lifetime of pain in the butt even if it wasn't the intent of any legislator.

Indeed, but the UK is in many ways words. At the least in the USA, often the constitution is upheld (give or take); in the UK you often don't even have such fundamental rights. The UK at present fits more to Russia than, e. g. European countries.

> At the least in the USA, often the constitution is upheld

Some of ICE’s detainees may have different opinions on that point.

The UK may endow her citizens with fewer rights. But I have a lot more trust in British due process. British civil servants seem much less … capricious than Americans.

I was almost denied entry to Hawaii once because I told the CBP agent I didn’t have any cash on me. (My money is in a bank account, obviously). He went on a big rant about how expensive Hawaii is. I think he was worried I’d end up homeless. (Even though my visit to hang out with my then employer.) Over the years I’ve heard so many stories from other Australian friends about wild and unfortunate encounters with US police and officials.

By comparison, the British government seems far more civilised. If something happened while visiting the UK, I have much more confidence that everything would be resolved in a fair and reasonable manner.

I had the same experience visiting the US - this was 15 years ago so I imagine it’s much worse now.

Got subjected to hour long questioning because I only had a little cash on me and told them truthfully that I would travel the country so I didn’t have one place to stay for the entirety of the trip (because I was TRAVELLING).

I since learned that my first mistake was to tell them the truth but alas.

After asking me about every single detail of my life they eventually let me in.

It’s a pity, such a great country being ruined by kleptocrats.

I mean, the argument is that ICE detainees are not citizens and thus don't get the protection, similar to foreigners engaging with CBP at the border

Have you looked at which sections of the constitution say "citizen" and which say "person"?

I didn't say I agreed with the argument, but it does seem to be interpretable like the Bible.

> By comparison, the British government seems far more civilised

Henry Nowak would disagree.

Not having a written constitution is not the same as not having rights in everyday practice.

It would seem that having a written constitution isn't the bulwark many thought it was.

If you read the Soviet constitution, it is remarkably liberal and progressive.

Only it had no teeth and whatever Stalin or Brezhnev wanted, the KGB would do.

This confuses so many people - the Uk has a series of constitutions and a very strong and historical legal basis for rights. It’s not strictly codified in one purposely written document but it does exist. And it’s a mistake to say if there’s no constitution then you have no fundamental rights. The UKs system is a hodgepodge but so is having a written constitution that can be regularly amended or otherwise ignored.

I still remember learning about habeas corpus. And loved Terry Pratchett’s take on it.

Like trial by jury... Oh wait. Going this year

Or freedom of protest... Er ehm, that was three years ago

Well at least no Double jeopardy... until 2003

Right to silence! Oh no not that one either

Shrugs and scratches head

I’m not really defending the system, just making the point about a form of constitution existing. Even if the things you mention were nailed down in a constitution, that constitution could be amended to undo them, same as every other form of law.

The problem with that view is that when the "strong legal basis" is not codified, and codified in a way that nonspecialists can at least vaguely identify and understand, it gets a lot easier to get away with ignoring it. Which the UK has been going hog wild doing in the last 20 years or so.

I am not saying the US is better in practice. The bottom line is that authority worshippers will take whatever liberties they can get away with in any system.

UK has (for now) the Human Rights Act and is a (for now) subject to the jurisdiction of (by being a founding member of) the European Court of Human Rights.

Which is not to excuse the errors, but to put it in context: it is a European country… albeit just like Turkey and Azerbaijan.

In the UK I'd be worried about being arbitrarily arrested, deported, and banned from re-entry.

In the US I'd be worried about being murdered. By police. In cold blood.

> In the UK I'd be worried about being arbitrarily arrested, deported, and banned from re-entry.

That's not going to happen unless you commit a serious crime, in which case it's not arbitrary. I can't think of a single case that's made the news.

Meanwhile across the pond in America you have the nightly news reporting on children and people in cages screaming. People being rounded up for not being white. Little to no due process at all until you've been through 6 rounds of hell.

By "commit a serious crime" I assume you mean "publicly state that I support Palestine Action" or maybe "hold a blank sign at a protest". Those are serious crimes in the UK now. But as I said, the worst they're going to do is kick me out, not kill me, and that makes the difference.

Small factual correction: the barrister holding the blank sign was not in fact arrested.

> I assume you mean "publicly state that I support Palestine Action"

They are currently a proscribed group, so yes, that is included in the list of things you probably shouldn't do. You're not going to get killed for it though. You're probably not even going to get arrested in most cases.

Whether or not they should be proscribed is a different issue. The best course of action is probably to wait for the courts to decide. Pressure groups damaging military assets probably aren't going to be well received by the public regardless of which cause they're for.

It's actually easy to avoid getting killed.

Simply don't chase, harass, attempt to run over, or assault LEOs doing their jobs

Hope that helps.

Americans have been killed by American cops without doing those things whose absence you claim will prevent being killed.

Also make sure you're white!

Lol it's American whites who are so detached from the reality of violence.

Why did people suddenly stop talking about body cams after mass adoption. Maybe it didn't show you what you thought it would.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBUUx0jUKxc

You’re tripping m8.

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