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> I am not a lawyer but if you are a citizen they probably can't deny you entry but can probably detain you for an uncomfortable amount of time, and seize whatever they want. Your best defense is to have a burner phone and no other devices nothing they can seize that would hurt you.

Even having a burner phone without any personal information on it can be deemed suspicious. It would be best for your phone to have a recently-reinstalled OS, with a few critical apps like Whatsapp or iMessage set up with a few personal messages sent. You need to be able to set those up without a password manager. Anything else needs to take place on devices that you aren't carrying with you. Fortunately enough people don't update their Facebook these days that just having an account that exists but you don't use will probably work, assuming you don't look like someone that would be obsessed with their socials.

Maybe there are USB thumb drives that operate like a YubiKey unless special setup is performed to access the storage inside? That's one way to carry data with you if you have to.

You can offer the I don't travel with my real phone because it got stolen a bunch of times excuse.

The point is even if they become suspicious all they can do is seize the burner ask you a bunch of questions etc. search you, etc they can't get access to your data. You can't get in real trouble, just majorly inconvenienced.

You "can't get in real trouble" but teh last time I crossed with basically nothing, they wrote a search warrant by literally fabricating almost everything in it. They wrote that an anonymous dog told an unnamed officer I had drugs, then a completely separate HSI officer signed it and a judge signed it based on complete inter-species hearsay two links removed from any named entity to face to question it.

So yeah you can be imprisoned, brought to ERs while they run up private medical bills (they told doctors I had drugs up my ass), have a search warrant executed, and then at the end of the day be chased by debt collectors for the search that turned up nothing.

How did you get charged money for that? When I go to the hospital, they make me sign a form saying I will be responsible for payment.

I refused to sign anything, they billed it to DHS, DHS refused it and put that I was the responsible party, then the hospital sold it to debt collectors under my name.

Granted I've never seen something like this where the chain includes a government agency saying "it's totally on this guy", but normally you can get good results from writing a dispute letter to the debt collection agency telling them to prove that you really owe this debt. The state of the industry normally means that they will not have gotten anything like actual proof from the hospital, just a line item in a spreadsheet... and if they can't prove it they're legally barred from contacting you about it or reporting it to credit bureaus.

(I've never done it, but I suspect you could get rid of a significant percentage of real debts like this, just on the strength of the industry's terrible record keeping practices.)

Yeah done that many times. They always just send the "spreadsheet" entry as their proofs. Sometimes they stop despite their "proofs" and just sell it to the next debt collector and everything resets. Other times they just keep doing it and then I get the CFPB involved and after a few months the regulators stop them, then they sell the debt and the new guy pursues it again.

Just something I deal with every year or two, doing the process over again every time they resell it.

If you’re traveling with kids, they have all the leverage they need.

Suspicious, maybe; but not criminal (like lying to a federal officer in the course of an investigation, or willfully destroying what they’re lawfully trying to search).

Probably even more suspicious if you make sketchy excuses when the truth is fine. I’d go with “I (or %COMPANY%) figure electronic devices get imaged at borders or potentially stolen abroad, so we don’t carry them when we travel.” Blame the other country you’re coming from if you want.

Although I’d just not carry a phone across a border in the first place.

Related, regarding the “hiding a partition on a thumb drive” thing (8 days ago, 287 / 166; project is cool but note that tptacek and others in the comments know what they’re talking about):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48974862

And the immortal words of James Mickens come to mind:

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf

Unfortunately I agree with James Mickens. If CBP asks me to turn on and unlock my phone, I do it.

It is the same advice that cops give to young black men in “the talk”. Comply, don’t get killed, hire a lawyer and fight injustice in court.

I generally agree, I have no interest into getting into pissing matches with random CBP officers. But it's not the same situation.

You have the right to refuse to unlock your phone as far as I know. You do not have the right to refuse lawful orders. So you cant resist being arrested or being searched, or them taking your stuff but you can refuse to answer questions, you don't have to tell them anything, whether that is the best plan of course varies.

But in general you don't know what they know, where their questions are leading, what minor detail in your answers may corroborate your "guilt" or minor inconsistencies may be construed as lying and obstructing.

So you are in general better off not answering police questions.

That of course excludes questions you are legally obligated to answer. Which in the specific case of CBP interactions is most questions.

You should also always keep in mind what the consequences of your actions are don't commit a felony to avoid a misdemeanour, in the case in the article if this guy had child sexual abuse material on his phone, or chats conspiring to commit major felonies his call was probably the right one. If his phone was clean and he was being adversarial, he chose poorly.

You have to try to strike a balance between being respectful, generally agreeable and cooperative while exercising your rights.

I agree when dealing with police in general the only thing you say is “lawyer”.

With CBP, we are in a gray zone. It is hard to know what to do.

>YOU’RE STILL GONNA BE MOSSAD'ED UPON

Thanks for that, it's been a few years and I'd forgotten about this.

"This World of Ours"by James Mickens, from Usenix January 2014, for the unfamiliar:

<https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf> (PDF)

Truth-in-parody.

How do you know if he showed the contents of the phone he’d be free? He appears to have been targeted for his politics and they even claimed they had suspicion. This is chilling no matter how you look at it.

> just log out of everything before you fly and throw away your device after they have had access to it, it's now compromised.

I get what you are saying, but this is incredibly expensive and not really practical for most people.

> not really practical for most people

Evaluate your threat model and the chance that a wipe and reinstall of the OS will be insufficient protection.

If you were targeted, you may have some tough choices. Might as well think about them ahead of time.