The US is charging an American citizen for wiping his phone at the border | Hacker News Reader

The US is charging an American citizen for wiping his phone at the border

gizmodo.com

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Do not cross with your gadgets. And just do not go to / via the US.

“just do not go to / via the US” is not a serious solution for a lot of people.

When this hits the supreme Court they need to debar the prosecutors who bring these cases to begin with.

Title is: A Feature That Makes Your Phone Data Self-Destruct in Authorities’ Hands May Soon Have Its Day in Court

And it's 3 day old news

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49024436

Disgusting. I’ve never had to let anyone touch my phone in my entire life in any country I’ve visited.

Is there a list of countries that does this? At this point it’s obvious I won’t ever be traveling to the US, but I’m curious if genuinely authoritarian countries like China are actually less of a police state at the border than the USA.

I think almost all countries do this if your name is on a list (as this person's is). It's the nature of the lists and what gets your name added to them that varies from country to country.

Visiting another country is a privilege, not a right.

That, whatever it means, cannot mean losses of personal rights.

It means you aren't entitled to visit a foreign country. You aren't entitled to them letting you in.

Of course in a perfect world we all trust each other and have open borders, but that's a privilege we have to work for. I'm European and enjoy the open borders, but also am well aware that such a situation is not a given.

Cannot mean loss of personal rights, sure. Showing up at a border and being required to give up personal rights isn't ok.

But many people in this thread are writing as if they actually believe they have a right to go anywhere, and that simply isn't the case. It's the kind of thing you need live in a strong passport country to believe.

I'm sure this has already been pointed out to you, but this was an American citizen returning to America. This guy had rights under the 4th Amendment.

No matter what the government claims, they do not have carte blanche to inspect digital files that are physically being carried across the border. I guess technically deleting them may have been a crime, but the government better have a great explanation for why they wanted to see those files if it's gonna charge him.

Most countries disagree?

("Most", is to be verified.)

These times will not be remembered as a pinnacle in the stages of Civilization. On the contrary, immensely barbaric and dark ages.

Sure buddy, and WW1/2 were walks in the park.

And why would pointing to what may seem to be indicated as times of violence attack the idea of these current being times of ignorance (and after all that was done to provide remedies against ignorance).

Your statements appear to be notably myopic.

Show it. If your argument would be that these times would be much better than those of one century ago, prove it. If you believe that these times would be "civilized", and not «immensely barbaric and dark ages», argument it.

What I said was, in reply to the note that entering a country could be considered a privilege (could not be considered a right), that nowadays the authoritativeness of countries is very greatly diminished compared to a standard.

a claim without evidence can be dismissed just as easily. you’re the one making a claim it’s particularly barbaric right now, compared to… pretty much the rest of human history presumably?

it’s pretty boring recapping Stalin, Hitler, Ghenghis Khan, Khmer Rouge, the Red Scare/McCarthyism, etc.

Oh no, I compared it to decency.

And your examples do not falsify my statement.

Statement which is, by the way, differently expressed by Henry Kissinger ("Leadership", 2022): the defining traits of current administrations are increasing mediocrity and inadequacy.

uh huh.

The point was that the "disagreement from most countries" must be contextualized in its weight recalibrated in their (in general) authoritativeness, which has reached abysmal lows recently.

If you do not agree, show that these times would not be represented by Cummings' judgement "stupid like a box of snakes". My denunciations are around, and I do not wish to be suspected as inflammatory by the moderation by reiterating here.

Rights are universal, whether a state cares about them or not.

Some might even say these are natural rights.

This is a US citizen, so that’s a moot point

I travelled to the US three times and once had my devices checked. Travelled to China more than 50 times, never had anything checked.

That's because they already checked in advance :)

UK passed a law for this recently. Germany has been doing it for a while.

I've been to China recently. No phone search whatsoever. Their Internet is behind the famous Great Firewall though, but there is no issue using a (foreigner-only) unlocked sim or e-sim to access the rest of the Internet.

Try Xinjiang

"If you’re a fan of privacy in our age of creeping digital authoritarianism, there’s one famously effective way to pass through U.S. Customs at an airport without worrying about a device search: travel with a burner phone only."

What about setting your phone from the get go to store all data on the micro sim card ? Then, when traveling through airports, swap out for another micro sim that has some small, useless data on it, fake contact list, etc. ?

Real sim card is so small can be hidden in a million places.

That isn't something that actually exists

Replace micro SIM with micro SD, and it can be done on android.

Still no. Plenty of references to SD card stuff in the main storage.

If you root it, you can put all writable storage on the SD card, and the phones internal memory becomes readonly

less than a minute of an duckduckgo search: https://www.sysmocom.de/products/sim/sysmousim/index.html

This does at best 1% of what the parent mentions. Is that going to hold all your data across all your phone apps?

At least on Android they've removed the ability to encrypt data stored on external media, so in exchange for the ability to do this you're carrying around everything unencrypted (except what individual apps might encrypt themselves).

This is not true at all, adopted storage is encrypted.

It seems like I was wrong about the platform support, but in fact some OEMs like Samsung have disabled it.

https://www.androidauthority.com/using-microsd-card-android-...

Most of the budget / midrange devices likely to have SD card slots do support it though.

I thought the play was to travel with a burner and mail the real phone to a drop somewhere in the destination country. Supposing you could just put all your sensitive data on a microsim or microsd and do the same thing, but this all feels like different colored wrappers on the same piece of candy: don't bring data you want to keep secret to the place where they're allowed to use force to steal secret data. Obv packages are subject to search and seizure at borders the same way you and your phone are but a package in the mail has the advantage of volume and relative anonymity. There are a lot of packages and not enough resources to seize and search all of them, and it's harder to tie the package to a person or entity that warrants increased suspicion if it's mailed anonymously from another country than it is to tie a phone to the guy whose pocket it was in when he tried to cross the border.

Warrantless searches are a violation of the Fourth Amendment and thereby your constitutional rights.

Obviously border agents need to be able to check your bags for contraband but checking all your gmails just because they want to? That's antithetical to the spirit of the law. That is overreach that does not stand up to scrutiny.

> Graphene OS has a duress password and PIN, which “will irreversibly wipe the device (along with any installed eSIMs) once entered anywhere where the device credentials are requested.”

iOS kinda also offers such a solution, though a bit more suspicious to perform: "Erase all data on this iPhone after 10 failed passcode attempts"

Can be set to less attempts via MDM profiles.

Same for Android.

But if the data is backed up on iCloud, Apple will provide it with a warrant.

Turn on Advanced Data protection, which encrypts it so Apple can give them the data, but they don't have the keys to decrypt it. Doesn't help if the other person you're talking to doesn't have it turned on though.

But how will they prove which Apple account was just wiped from that iPhone?

iPhones have unique identifiers. So do you, via your set of emails used. The email maps to the iCloud account, which then maps to the iPhone. It would be trivial to map a backup to an iPhone.

Ah yes that makes sense, they can retrieve the iPhone's serial number and warrant Apple to handover the associated iCloud backup.

Fascinating case and arms-race, seems like part of the issue is the bricking is too obvious...

if you're obligated, by law , to unlock your phone even if you did not commit any crime - you live in a police state. it's simple as that.

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