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Comment by aucisson_masque | Hacker News Reader

> 1. Don't travel with anything you can't afford to lose on device. This means setting up travel-specific password managers and hardware keys for a subset of your accounts that you absolutely need to access while abroad, and being prepared to reset those passwords and disable those hardware keys very quickly once home.

> 2. Review past legal cases against travelers and identify what behaviors the government considers worthy of prosecution or harassment. Your secure setup must function without needing you to engage in those behaviors, even if it is less convenient as a result. This isn't perfect, as the government may decide some new behavior is prosecutable.

> 3. Consult with a lawyer and review your security procedures from a legal standpoint. All of the above is technical and practical advice, not legal counsel and no substitute for it.

Just don't go to the usa and if it's for professional reason, don't bring your personal phone.

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> Just don't go to the usa

As a Canadian. I won't be going there for a long time

Canadian border control has the legal authority to search your phone and you are obligated to provide a password.

Are you a Canadian lawyer? I did some research and your statement doesn’t hold up.

CBSA policy does state you are obligated to provide your password if they are conducting a lawful device examination, however they cannot do it arbitrarily, and they must have a legal basis for searching the device.

> CBSA policy states that examinations of personal devices should not be conducted as a matter of routine; such searches may be conducted only if there are grounds or indications that “evidence of contraventions may be found on the digital device or media.”

Furthermore, Canadian courts have not yet definitively ruled on whether compelling password disclosure is constitutionally permissible.

This is very different than the US, where CBP can conduct a basic search without any individualized suspicion.

So, Canada and the US are definitely not the same, which seems to be the implied meaning behind your comment, and your explicit statement that CBSA has legal authority to search your phone is, at best, misleading.

I’m not a lawyer or a legal expert so I could be wrong, so feel free to correct me if you have Canadian legal experience.

https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/privacy-topics/airports-and-border...

US CBP is also not doing phone searches as a matter of routine.

Talk about overreacting. How likely do you think border control are going to spend any more time on some random schmuck than necessary? If you're afraid about remote risks like that then definitely don't leave your home at all (except that's also risky).

You've left out the important qualifier I put at the outset of those three points:

> If your threat model includes US state actors

It was not advice for everyone, nor even most people. I have plenty of friends abroad, and a few of them have even traveled to my country for the World Cup and had a grand time.

I roll my eyes at this kind of overreaction, the same way I imagine Europeans rolling their eyes to hear Americans worried about migrant crime news stories not wanting to travel to Europe. Or maybe they used to roll their eyes at that... I'm less sure now.

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