Returning from vacation? The government can search your phone without a warrant
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
If for whatever reason you think you're being investigated or surveilled (who knows for what these days, could be enough to just associate with the various protest groups / orgs), you can just assume that the border will be where they'll try to clone / download your data (phones, laptops, whatever)
I know the UK is an authoritarian state and not really comparable to the US, but as a Brit it's kinda weird hearing Americans complain about flock cameras and arbitrary border searches – these are common place things in the UK and no one cares (well, apart from me and maybe one or two others).
Once they do, they might stop wanting to live in one. But for now they want it.
One eye. That will rule them all.
Citizens had been cheering when the government over in El Salvador was rounding up all the gang members and just locked them up without due process.
Fascists are split between young American influenced ones who want freedom and hate the Online Safety Act, and racists who support anything as long as will make Muslims lives harder. The freedom loving ones are winning today so you see Green and Reform MPs standing together against the government.
Middle class professionals see Dubai, Singapore and China as good examples and don't mind losing freedom for safety. The rich technocrats running the country are the ones who came up with all this, because they see the world as uneducated masses who need a nanny state to control them. And it helps their investments grow.
The types of people who are most affected by the surveillance state already gave up on politics years ago because there's no one to represent them. There is no party fighting for young or working class people's actual interests, so they vote for extremists in the hope that something will change.
When Thatcher said "there is no society" she was wrong at the time, but her successors did everything they could to make it real.
Summary is they can’t detain people for no reason, they can detain people for specific offences relating to immigration and citizenship, customs and excise and also the normal stuff any regular police officer can arrest people for.
I’m no apologist for how much state authority they have, but it’s not as bad as you’re making out.
The UK border agents (technically counter-terrorism) can stop you at the border, force you into a room, ask for your passwords to all your devices and you don't have the right to refuse.
You also don't have the right to a lawyer to be in a room with you and you are compelled to answer all their questions and they do not need to tell you why they stopped you.
Then, if you are lucky they return your devices 7 days later after they have been through everything.
This guy went through it last year and talks about what happens when they stop you: https://youtu.be/991kRp8KUmo?si=-5S1uLE7K9KG_gNj
What happens if I still do? Or pretend that I forgot my pin and accidentally lock my phone down?
If you are a UK citizen, they will charge you under the terrorism act if you refuse to answer their questions or if you try to conceal anything or if you refuse to provide all the passwords to all your devices.
As for what happens when you can genuinely not remember your passwords, I honestly don't know. The guy in the video just gave them access to everything because he travels a lot and did not want to have to explain why he has a terrorism charge to his name every-time he has to apply for a new visa.
Maybe you can refuse and stay silent and fight the charge later in court with a good lawyer but who knows. IANAL so do your own research before doing anything.
As for what happens if you are a foreigner and refuse to unlock your devices/ answer their questions, they can deport you and potentially ban you from entering the country for a certain amount of time or indefinitely.
You ask who knows. Then you say IANAL. I'm excited for you. You're so close to identifying who might know! Keep doing your own research, you got this.
The decision matrix around these things is often obvious. Most people simply comply. If you want to be one of the few people willing to stand up to these things, then good I commend you. But you're going to have to put in some basic effort.
Or you could be extremely lazy and watch some random guys overwrought personal narrative which the commenter basically admitted was completely uninformative in explaining how the system actually works and then extrapolate from this video to make broad claims while simultaneously conceding you know pretty much nothing, and therefore are wasting everyone's time. I'm not asking anyone to become a lawyer but is that really the best evidence they could come up with? It just seems like a basic information literacy failure that should not be encouraged.
Yes the law is convoluted and complicated. Free societies that need to balance the same tension humans have always struggled with - between freedom and safety - and try to do so in a fair way despite all the impulses and incentives for abuse are going to be complicated. Justice used to merely be the mob. Are you sure you don't want the law to be complicated? You resent the modern need for the expertise of specialized lawyers? Do you complain medicine has gotten too complicated when the doctor doesn't begin by hacking your limbs off?
Above you mocked "Doing your own research"; most of the people "Doing their own research" are watching these Youtube videos by people who claim to be lawyers and may or may not be. You can't have it both ways.
This really isn't that hard.
Stop making excuses for mediocrity.
This is pretty scary. I don't know any of my passwords because they are random strings of letters, numbers and symbols, and they're only kept in a password manager that sits on my powered-off PC at home. How do these border agents expect me to recite my passwords from memory?
If you've genuinely forgotten/don't have the keys, that could be a bigger problem. It is a defence, if charged, not to actually have the key - and they do have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt if "sufficient evidence of that fact is adduced to raise an issue with respect to it" (53(3)(b)) - but that does ultimately involve convincing a magistrate or a jury.
I avoid flying anywhere near the UK or its territories.
Err our policing and judicial systems weren't born yesterday. You'll be treated as having refused to unlock/decrypt, as devices are so ubiquitous and people unlock tens or hundreds of times a day.
I'm just saying the police will unlikely drop their line of questioning after you claim you forgot the PIN. They'd probably then seek to prove you did know it - eg ask where's your boarding pass is, ask if you messaged/called anyone before/during your flight, try to establish the time the phone was last used, reducing the period of forgetting etc
IANAL/officer of course
The anti-Americanism on this site is bizarre. The USA gives people the greatest protections in the world.
Meanwhile, the U.S. has gangs of armed ICE "agents" that can pretty much murder people at will without even getting arrested.
You might be persecuted for it - but that right to say, “F-you I’m not talking” is always an option, it’s just that it tends to be more pain than most are willing to endure. Myself included, to be fair, but the right to “STFU” is pretty hard for them actually to force you to comply with if you decide not to talk.
That seems like a YP not an MP. Just because you and your fellow countrymen gave up long ago is not the problem of those fighting to not lose those rights now. Except maybe you guys make it easier as an example of for the government to show as an example of other countries are already doing it. Thanks for that.
The fight might be a losing cause, but at least it is being fought as long as it can be fought instead of just laying down and accepting it like the UK seems to have done.
We complain about those things because we can clearly see that "the UK is an authoritarian state" because they are common place in the UK.
> no one cares
More like people pretend to not care for fear of being locked up for seemly arbitrary reasons, which seems to happen quite a lot over there based on the news reports, because "the UK is an authoritarian state".
That is exactly how authoritarian state looks like.
"It's not illegal in the <our-authoritarian-state> to do <something-our-authoritarian-state-does-not-like>" (but if you do, you'll be f.ucked. Probably. Because it is not illegal).
Punishing someone for saying they don't like cameras seems like it'd be perfectly on brand for the UK at this point.
If you go to the US inauguration and yell "hashtag not my president!" you'll get arrested too.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-tru...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-tru...
This makes returning to the country nice and pleasant. The border agents never ask you creepy questions like: Where are you going? Where will you be staying? What do you intend to do? (it's what US border agents ask their citizens). They just say hi and let you in.
I did have to put my hotel on the landing form when I entered singapore last week but nothing more - again didn’t talk to anyone until checking in at the hotel. In China they did talk to me, asked me if I was there for business or tourism the week before, nothing more.
I know the US border is perhaps the least friendly border I’ve ever crossed — and that includes going in and out of Gaza, but I assumed that US citizens didn’t get that treatment.
+1 for the US border comment, and I've been into East Germany, Russia, and similar countries. And that's not an exaggeration, the US border experience is by far the worst of any country I've ever been to.
Wouldn't everyone just answer, "home", "home", and "go home"? What would even be the point?
I just walk through the global entry gate without interacting with anyone...
"They have to let you in" means that they don't let you in and you might be able to get a payout in court.
Nobody at the border has the job of "Force the border agent to let in anyone who is an actual American because they have that right", and nobody holds a gun to the border agent's head if he does not let you in.
Why? Your passport is literally proof of both those things.
Racial profiling for one. Also "citizen" and "natural born citizen" getting treated differently for another.
The point is harassment, and trying to trick you into some perceived lie so they can detain you. The US is friendly like that.
The fastest I've ever gotten through passport control.
Also I guess while we're sharing experiences returning home, at least for US -> YYZ I just fill out info at the self-guided kiosks. Officers just say hi, glance at the receipt and mark it, and I'm done. Never been asked anything so far.
It's not like I kept a list or anything, but as an American, I don't think I've ever been asked questions like "Where are you going? Where will you be staying? What do you intend to do?" by border control when returning to the US.
I distinctly recall having been asked questions about where I'm coming from, like "Do you have any X"? (where X is legal and common in a country I visited, but illegal in the US).
I do not look like an immigrant or other marginalized group that stereotypically gets extra attention at borders. I know the difference, because my (American) brother-in-law gets 'randomly selected' everywhere for the misfortune of having Arabic ancestry.
I've been traveling during high alert corona times where you had to carry extra corona related paperwork or at least that was the official message, but at the border no one even asked for your passport. There were a lot more people at the border but a lot less interest in getting close.
Then at more normal times border agents wanted to know nearly everything about what was in the car. Sometimes you have to drive through a scanner and sometimes they just wish you a happy day or not even talk to you.
It's mostly chance, but no one ever wanted my phone, so far.
Recently you don't even have to get your passport out of the bag, nevermind talking to anybody - you just stroll through the gate. They know who you are via facial recognition (which is creepy in its own right). But how would you know that, tovarisch mayor, your metoditchka was written a long time ago.
Nerves are not a measure of someone's guilt of anything. Life is a bit more complicated than that. Im sure we are aware of many world leaders who lie quite confidently and your trap would never catch them.
It's not used to establish guilt, but to establish whether the person is worth further examination, so false positives (e.g. due to language difficulties) would just lead to either further interviewing or searching.
There's not really any good reason to not do it as the questions are not overly intrusive.
Firstly the staff would need training to effectively ask the right questions and interpret the responses.
Asking the public questions cost time. If you have two lines and one does the required checks and the other also asks questions and conversations happen, the later will be slower.
Slower lines means more staff are required.
The questions are usually asked at the same time as passport checks are performed so I doubt it takes much longer at all.
The question is how the fuck did everybody devolve into invertebrates and let it become that way
If you're not pissed at all the laws that treat you like a bitch, you should at least be pissed at how the ruling class is immune to those laws.
This law actually predates the discovery of evolution by some decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_evolutionary_though...
I recently wrote a short blog post about exactly this worry. Link if anyone's interested https://www.vinoth.net/internet-for-humans/
If was arrested on suspicion of something, I can get legal assistance and I can know what I am suspected of and why before any of my property (or in this case, potentially very private and sensitive information) could be taken. If the arrest is manifestly wrongful or not based on any evidence, then I expect it would be easy enough to resist investigation.
On the other hand, having someone at the border who can justify an arbitrary search on the basis that "they might suspect of something", without having to clearly justify that basis and that if they then take property (or information), potentially copy it completely opaquely and then have zero accountability if that is misused is extremely frustrating but I guess you need to lobby your lawmakers to make the system fairer and to ensure legal protections of privileged information is completely upheld - period.
Wipe your phone and factory reset before you cross the border, then restore afterward.
At this point recommending the minimum that normal people will actually follow feels more effective: photos, main messaging app, and password database.
Photos are backed up; normal people use Google photos, my partner and I use a NAS, but everyone should have a "Free up space" / "Delete photos that are backed-up from device" option. This makes it easy and gets you space for more vacation photos
Main messaging app can be Telegram, Whatsapp, or (in my case) Element. Deleting it from your phone won't cost you your messaging history, but gets your most sensitive chats out of any potential spotlight
I can handle a password database, but "Chrome saves my passwords" means signing out of Chrome is all normal people have to do
I mention it because it's something I absolutely want in day-to-day use on my phone, and that I agree with it being one of the few things I'd make a point of not having with me when crossing the US border with
Normal people can sign out of Chrome, I can set up a delayed email (with an encrypted database) before I leave, or put it on a uSD card in my checked baggage, or any number of low-effort but not-on-my-phone workarounds
It's self explanatory.
Carpenter v. United States (5-4)
Collins v. Virginia (8-1)
Barnes v. Felix (9-0)
These are all Supreme Court cases that were specifically about the 4th amendment and happened in the last 10 years.
The 4th amendment is over 200 years old and yet requires constant supervision by the Supreme Court to define the word reasonable or to police the lower courts understanding of precedent.
So you are wrong, with whatever presumption you are making that the word "unreasonable" is well defined.
The entire point of my post -- nay, the entire point of the jury system in the United States -- is that until a jury is empaneled, the word "reasonable" may as well have no meaning whatsoever. No one is ever going to define that word short of a jury. You may think you know what is reasonable, they may think they have set forth reasonability in the law, but the only judge that's ever going to make an applicable decision on the word is a juror.
The Supreme Court may decide whether a reasonable jury could have come to a certain conclusion (about whether something was reasonable) but the Supreme Court is also not the place to look for this definition.
Good luck in your studies.
One of the Constitution's big failings is this sort of thing; deeply vague wording. What counts as interstate commerce? What counts as reasonable? What's considered press activity? What's considered illegal speech?
If you were writing a new one today, you'd define some stuff more.
I don’t think “interstate commerce” is unclear at all. That’s one where started with an end goal in mind and rationalized everything in between. There is no sane English reading of that passage that resembles the current interpretation at all. We just repeatedly mentally Google Translated it to Spanish and back until it was vague enough to allow what we wanted.
The law isn't computer science as much as Silicon Valley would like to make it so.
That doesn't mean we can't learn from mistakes and make certain things clearer.
I think the Founding Fathers would've had some thoughts on Flock cameras and Facebook.
I'm just a regular guy who really has nothing to hide, but that doesn't mean I need to be complacent with just allowing a future I don't like be propped up in front of my eyes.
What I've come to realize is there is really no safer place for your data and communications than just your own home. At the very least, I would like a judge to review the evidence of my alledged wrong doing before the government can raid my castle and get what they need.
Why do I, as a regular citizen feel the need to invoke and create my own protections on personal data and communications?
There's something deep inside me that feels the need to be prepared for this odd future where the government feels they have the right to access everything. It's deeply troubling on many fronts.
Yeah, you do.
Post your nudes.
Post your full financial details.
Post your whole medical history.
Post every crime you might have committed, even as a juvenile.
Post all your credit cards and bank account details.
Hmmmm, so you ARE hiding those, eh? Quit framing this as "nothing to hide", because we ALL have things we hide... Not because they're illegal or anything, but because it protects us.
This is different than arguing 'I have nothing to hide and also because of that you get free reign to everything'?
But really, I don't take nudes cause why?, my financials are remarkably average, I have no medical history that I care about people knowing (broke my hand once), I've haven't broken any law's, I don't use credit cards...?
That doesn't mean you are allowed to access my devices on whims, track my daily movements relentlessly.
You medical history will be used to avoid hiring you to keep health insurance costs down, even if it's illegal. Your gambling or alcohol addiction will be used to target you with for gambling or alcohol advertisements even if they made that illegal. Your financial status will be used to mark up prices of things you need to buy, like how airlines used to show higher prices when you connected with an iPhone.
I think you are wrong. We all have things to hide.
A joke between friends taken out of context. Your angry messages to a spouse or parent after a fight happened between you and them could be used out of context also. And what about your YouTube history and playlist or your web history...
> just your own home
Your home can be searched and all your devices at home can be seized as well. Granted it's probably a higher threshold than having everything on your phone but it's no a panacea either.
You need a warrant to search my home. That's my whole point. Warrantless access is the issue.
Get a warrant, and I will happily show you anything you want. Nothing will be found because at the end of the tunnel, I actually have nothing to hide, I'm just a regular guy is my point.
I agree that is why I said that it was higher threshold to get access to your data but warrants can be obtained for many different reasons and not always good ones either.
All I am saying is that if they want your data, they'll get it. It's just easier at the border.
That's fine, and I will do everything I can to make it as difficult as possible, not because I have something to hide at the end of the day, but because screw that what a terrible future to pass on to the next generation.
"Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, and I will find something in them which will hang him."
I don't hide my bank details it's just none of your business.
This is me exercising personal control, preventing misuse and exploitation, and protecting the little dignity I have left this centry.
All of that is coming back, probably. So enjoy that!
I would take a punt at filing a complaint about that. Threatening someone with selective enforcement must fall short of professional standards at CBP, as stated on their .gov page:
https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/2024-09/exhibit_08_-...
And...
> In Fiscal Year 2020, CBP processed more than 238 million travelers at U.S. ports of entry. During that same period of time, CBP conducted 32,038 border searches of electronic devices, representing less than .014 percent of arriving international travelers.[1]
In other words, now it's as likely[0] to get your phone searched as in 2020. It's interesting how the media shapes people's perspective, isn't it?
[0]: 0.001% less likely, so just marginal error.
[1]: https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistic... not sure it reports 2020's data here though.
Do you think these are random searches?
If there is a spurious zero, .013% is a 7% change from 0.014%, not 0.001%.
32038 / 238000000 ≈ 0.01346134454%
55318 / 419000000 ≈ 0.01320238663%How is your argument any different than Stalin killing only X people that he was suspicious of or the KGB only being able to target N people due to not having more manpower?
I think 0.001% is too high. These are not accidental; these are intentional. That you personally haven't been targeted is only limited by the ability of them to do more, which is continually changing
For US citizens entering the US: If you're concerned about protecting your data from this threat, you should use GrapheneOS (or less good would be a latest iPhone in lockdown mode and BFU) and not talk to the police. The 5th amendment does not seem to have an exception at the border, so you can't legally be compelled to hand over your password by border agents (there's not strong case law here). They can lie, they can detain you, search you, they can seize your stuff. You shouldn't be the one arguing with them, you should be silent (besides identification) and ask for an attorney (you don't have a right to an attorney at a routine search). As a US citizen, you can refuse and still enter.
GrapheneOS has demonstrated to be robust against physical access even in AFU [1]. It's still a good idea to shut down / restart because BFU is much more secure. To maintain convenience while avoiding reliance on the rate limiting of the secure element, you can use a long random passphrase as your primary unlock (you enter it every time the device is in BFU) and a fingerprint with a second factor pin as the secondary unlock.
Even if you factory reset your phone and backed up data (to an E2EE cloud provider, over Tor and memorized the credentials), you should still not disclose your password because it could allow evidence to be planted or your device to be compromised. Nothing you say to the border agents can help you in court, it can only be used against you.
The duress pin is generally not how you should handle a situation like this. You do not need the duress pin to prevent access, its purpose is if you're being physically coerced as well as to give the attacker the dillema of whether to enter a coerced password (it even gives this benefit for people that don't use the duress password).
Sure, if police are behaving illegally and the information that would be disclosed is worth the possible punishment, then that's a personal decision.
[1] Based on leaked Cellebrite documentation, GrapheneOS was the best performing device against AFU attacks. It also has a customizable reboot timer to bring the device back to BFU after a set time of not unlocking. The options are between 10 minutes and 72 hours of unlocking and 18 hours is the default iirc. Apple and Google added this to their phones after GrapheneOS without the option to customize. Theirs are set at 72 hours.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/1qv8y7d/what_do...
The thing is, they do these searches not because they are "evil" - definitely not morally upstanding people, but at the end of the day, its still a job and they are following some guidance. When they encounter an uncooperative person, a) it makes their monotonous job more exciting, and b) an uncooperative person is more likely to be guilty, which means more excitement.
As such, if you care about privacy, just get a degoogled phone, and use the web interface for all the communication stuff that you need, including phone. Then just clear browser data and cache before you land. If you get one that supports usb OTG or screen mirroring, you can also get a lapdock and use that as your laptop.
Then, if they detain you and ask for your devices, you can just give them everything and let them have at it. Because you are cooperative, and the phone did not reset with the pin like the Graphene OS one, they are way more likely to let you go
And quite a bit of backed-up data on Android is not E2EE encrypted
In a dark body cavity?
I'd back up the phone to an SD card and/or send the backup offsite over the network.
After that, I could nuke whatever I wanted -- or factory reset it, switch to a different OS (we often called them "ROMs" back then), play with that for a bit, switch back and forth, or whatever.
When the time was right, I'd use TiBackup to restore the backup. It didn't even have to be the same phone. Apps and data were restored to where they had been. Home screens looked the same. Settings and preferences went back to how they were. The same web stuff remained in browser cache, alongside the same cookies.
There were occasional outliers that didn't come back perfectly, of course, but broadly speaking: It worked very well. Those outliers were few and easy to deal with.
This required root access. But for a time (years), that was easy.
(I will never accept any defense of any proclamations that we must be restricted from doing whatever the fuck we want with the hardware that we own. If I can do things with a desktop PC, then I should also be able to do those same things with a pocket computer.)
I understand the sentiment behind this argument, but please stop making the argument for freedom to do computing on own devices by making a comparison between desktop PC and pocket computers (mobile devices).
I believe that the bad-faith actors are just gonna force same state of things on desktop PCs as well moving forward, instead of enabling freedom of compute on mobile devices.
Rooting is now far more difficult unfortunately, and isn't even available mostly; but I don't see a real method to do a full proper image backup of phones today.
At very least it was way, way better than the wink-and-a-smirk, blind, opaque, vague-handwaving "Your phone is backed up on Google servers!" process that we have these days, wherein: As a practical matter, if I can't touch the backup to examine it, or exercise it at my whim, then that backup doesn't meaningfully exist.
But as I understand it: Your problem is deeper, and riskier. You can't goof around with these existing phones in any way. If you poke at one and the closed-source black-box app decides that it is unhappy, then that means that there is one fewer phone in the world that can do the things you need to do with your cameras.
Maybe the best answer for you is to leave those phones alone, and get another phone you can hack on for the express purpose of trying to to get the camera working on it. This takes the risk out of the loop.
Maybe that means something that passively monitors data over the USB connection and putting together a new app that operates the camera in the same way.
Or perhaps beginning that process would allow recognition: Maybe it's already using a bog-standard protocol on the wire to talk to the camera and it's NBD to download another app that works with your cameras on any new, random phone.
Maybe it instead involves a patch for your existing app's APK that bypasses the authentication step, and this can then be used on a different phone.
Whatever form this liberation takes, it is the kind of thing that a person of adequate skill, or with the right kind of wit and a good LLM, or all of these together, can almost certainly solve. (It might even be easy.)
Of course you do have to be able to reference those files somehow, so they have to be online, but if there are no references to them on the device then the border folks would have to somehow know about them and be able to access them in order to link you and your device to the declared configs. There are a lot of ways to hide such a thing.
Presumably the most sensitive thing here is your social graph and messages. I haven't verified if nix-android handles them in a way that would make sense here, but it's at least plausible that it might.
https://imgur.com/gallery/history-of-telephone-pre-2000-6YCg...
Attackers would need to know you're using that specific recovery system, get your server address, have a zero day or backdoor on the security chip and they might also need to disassemble your phone. That's a FBI level capability not CBP, it would take days and be impossible to hide. Unless they hack your server but that's a risk with every type of backup.
Locking/disabling the phone, I think, only creates suspicion as we've seen in a previous case not long ago. But if phones can have a cloud back-ups, shouldn't it be possible to have TWO different "back-ups" that can be chosen at will?
https://freedom.press/issues/texas-man-sentenced-to-30-years...
Is the search limited to the phone itself and the data physically residing inside or can they open any door for which that phone is the key?
It's 100 miles of land & sea borders. Plus the airport zone. The airport does not create a new 100 mile zone.
For example, ATL is not within 100 miles of a sea or land border, so the CBP zone is just the airport, not the 100 mile circle around the airport. But, ORD and LGA are both within 100 mile zones.
Of course, it's all kind of a moot point, as the current administration seems happy enough to deploy immigration forces nationwide and Congress is spineless and incapable of pushing back.
DC also, because of proximity to the Chesapeake Bay. Austin TX within 100 of the Gulf of Mexico. And on and on.
As noted in a sibling, the 100 mile zone captures about 2/3 of the population.
3.2 Electronic Device: Any device that may contain information in an electronic or digital form, such as computers, tablets, disks, drives, tapes, flash drives, SIM cards, global positioning systems, unmanned aircraft systems, vehicle infotainment systems, smart watches, mobile phones and other communication devices, cameras, music and other media players.
3.3 Basic Search: Any border search of an electronic device that does not qualify as an advanced search as described in section 3.4, in which an officer conducts a review or analysis of information residing in electronic or digital form on the device. A basic search may include documenting information observed on the device during the search that relates to immigration, customs, or other law enforcement actions in CBP systems.
3.4 Advanced Search: An advanced search is any search in which an officer connects equipment, wired or wireless, to copy and/or analyze the contents of an electronic device. Use of external equipment (including a CBP standalone computer) merely to make the contents of the device available for inspection (including, for example, to bypass a password, overcome encryption, translate content, view files contained in an external drive or other electronic device lacking a screen, or charge a device) does not constitute an advanced search. Documenting notes and observations, as noted in section 3.3, does not constitute an advanced search.
5.1.4 An officer may perform an advanced search of an electronic device only in instances in which there is reasonable suspicion of activity in violation of the laws enforced or administered by CBP or, in the absence of individualized reasonable suspicion when there is a national security concern. All advanced searches require supervisory approval at the Grade 14 level or higher (or a manager with comparable responsibilities). In cases where the inspecting officer and approving supervisor rely on the presence of a national security concern, without reasonable suspicion, to conduct an advanced search, approval from the Director, Field Operations; Chief Patrol Agent; Director, Air Operations; Director, Marine Operations; Special Agent in Charge; or their delegate, is required prior to conducting the search. In compelling circumstances where operational considerations prevent prior approval, notification shall be made as soon as possible. Notification must include an explanation of the national security concern, the compelling circumstances that precluded prior approval, the relevant facts and information supporting the search, and the results of the search.
5.1.5 All searches of electronic devices will be documented in appropriate CBP systems. Officers will document any supervisory approvals required under this Directive and, in the case of an advanced search, the factors establishing reasonable suspicion of a violation of a law enforced or administered by CBP or a national security concern, as well as relevant observations, impressions, and actions taken, as appropriate.
5.1.6 Searches of electronic devices should be conducted in the presence of the individual whose information is being examined unless there are national security, law enforcement, officer safety, or other operational considerations that make it inappropriate to permit the individual to remain present. Permitting an individual to remain present during a search does not necessarily mean that the individual shall observe the search itself. If permitting an individual to observe the search could reveal law enforcement techniques or potentially compromise other operational considerations, the individual will not be permitted to observe the search itself"
The harassment is targeted at critics & opponents of the current regime. The message is very clear: Be afraid of us. Be very afraid
There are 33 days remaining until election day. Vote out all the incumbents.
If Obama and Biden really did suck that much, and if Trump's the savior that they claim, he should be doing less of it, not more.
Of course, that's blatantly ignoring the whole premise of Trump - a wannabe dictator implementing totalitarianism for the far-right in exchange for an opportunity to use the presidency for his personal gain in direct violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution - but that would be the improvement, not just the targeting of people you don't like with the same tactics.
There are some instances where powers need to be exercised in a hurry, but there should always be proper reporting and a paper trail, with stiff reprimanded for misuse or abuse of the system. Accidents can happen, but they should be infrequent and should follow protocol.
It would be great if citizens had more direct involvement in these cases too. I don't see why egregious abuses shouldn't be tried by jury.
Police and intelligence agency employees should be held to a higher standard than civilians (like military personnel are subject to UCMJ), and breeches of protocols should lead to harsher punishments imposed upon them. It would be fine to pay them more if it required more training and accountability.
Police officers are 30x more likely to be murdered in the US South than in, say, Germany.
> "From 2014 through 2023, the South region had the most line-of-duty deaths yearly compared to other regions. There was a 38% decrease in line-of-duty deaths in the region in 2023 (20 deaths) compared to 2022 (32 deaths). Last year marked the lowest number of line-of-duty deaths in the South since 2015 (19 deaths)."
https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-officer...
Felonious Deaths vs Accidental Deaths
https://le.fbi.gov/cjis-division/cjis-link/statistics-on-law...
> "A look at police crime statistics shows that fatal attacks on police officers are relatively rare. While violent acts against police officers are increasing overall—last year the statistics recorded 38,960 cases, a rise of 0.8 percent—no more than two police officers have been killed in the line of duty in any year since 2011." (Translated)
Also, right to have a gun should involve right to not be shot by a cop just because you own a gun.
The people who would charge the officers are the same people who rely on the police to provide evidence. Both groups work closely together. Malfeasance by police typically provides the prosecution with evidence they want or people to charge. There’s no incentive other than morality to charge them, and a lot of reasons to find a way to rationalize it as untrue, or necessary, or whatever.
Those terms need to be clearly defined. SCOTUS has declared that the police actually have no duty to protect and to serve the people.
And with an overwhelming amount of evidence, the police operate with effectively no accountability and repeated demonstrate that they abuse their powers freely.
So yes, laws without teeth are pointless but the state's monopoly on violence should only be granted when it can be demonstrated to not be abused.
The question is whether the people who control the police are subject to democratic processes. They are not. We live in an oligarchy whose control over the government is exercised through two small private clubs who have written themselves into the law. To which it has been decided that infinite money can be donated, that money given without explicit quid pro quo is simply a gift, and that money given after something has been done is simply a "gratuity."*
It's an evil country, and the most lucrative middle-class profession is to generate daily the vocabulary to justify its evil acts.
I can tell you who doesn't ever get searched at the border. In fact, I bet you could tell me. Peter Thiel doesn't get searched at the border. Kamala Harris doesn't get searched at the border. Jeffrey Epstein never got searched at the border. Tom Cruise doesn't get searched at the border.
And yet, almost every single time such practices are implemented, nothing about actual safety changes...but a whole lot about surveillance does.
"People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security will lose both.
-- Benajmin Franklin, paraphrased
El Salvador. Case closed.
"Mama! Poo-poo!"
— Adolf Hitler, as a toddler
Asking whether or not something is new or how frequently it's been done in the past isn't saying it's acceptable nor does it put them on the side of tyranny. In fact, a sign of tyranny would be a significant uptick in the number of these searches, and how else would you be able to see that worrying signal without answering the question they asked?
The quote is actually “the best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago. The second best time is today”
29 years ago, 28 years ago … all better than today. There are an infinite number of times better (and worse) than today.
How was this question:
> I think basically every country exercises this power
Their impression was that it wasn't and that other countries do similar things. Stating your understanding of a situation helps guide discussion and helps people answer your inquiries. Doing that should be encouraged, not somehow treated as an endorsement of tyranny.
Was anyone ever refused entry because they had an image poking fun at Kamala Harris? There, your question has been answered.
It’s disingenuous to imply that November will have an effect on either of those topics.
It’s been a thing since 1789: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
The fact that barely any consequences came for those instigating the putsch, except a few of those dumb enough to do stuff like parade around in front of cameras, is completely inexcusable.
I'm not aware of this being a widespread practice at anti-Trump rallies.
> Do they need to subpoena ~400 lawmakers and $10 donors to the campaign? I think it’s obvious that that is overreach and intimidation.
Well... it's not unlikely that there might have been "inside help" from lawmakers and/or their staff or even general Congressional staff. The purpose of an investigation is to go, dig deep and fully take apart whatever conspiracy there was.
As for the donors - anti-terrorist laws in pretty much every country don't care if it was just a $10 donation. Donate to a cause that ends up being terrorists, be labeled as a terrorism supporter.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/us/politics/jan-6-gallows...
Do you think at that point he had it out for Republicans in general? Republican congressmen were appalled by what happened on Jan 6th, and it was only because they thought Trump would just go away that he wasn't convicted in the Senate.
Trying to frame that investigation as some sort of political witch hunt is ridiculous.
I get what you’re saying and agree. But if there is no statistically significant jump in the number from historical data for previous administrations then I can conclude that the reporting is politically motivated.
The issue now is that my entire life is literally on my phone.
The issue now is that there is a 100-mile ‘border search exception’ in place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
Now, within 100 miles of the border, should CBP choose to, they can search me without a warrant and search everything in my phone, and even retain it if they’d like. If I want to challenge that, I need tens of thousands of dollars and time.
This is the very definition of an unreasonable search; but to change that we have to change the politicians and change the judiciary. It’s up to us, but until we get it changed, we may as well consider the 4th amendment a dead letter, and that means trouble for all of us.
The map also does not show Hawai'i, which would be one green blob, there is no part of Hawai'i not 100 miles from the border. All of the New England states are similarly small enough to be completely covered, even by the erroneous picture of the physical border.
You basically get a few, mostly uninhabited spots out in the West that aren't covered.
Or, maybe it might help to stop putting our entire lives on our phones.
If a border patrol agent coerces access to my phone, they're not going to find much. A few default apps, Lyft, an a music player. They're not going to find any social media, any photo album full of personal pictures, any banking apps or really anything that helps them understand what kind of person I am. I'm not going to like them going through it, but the blast radius is limited.
And that's me, a regular Joe, not wanted by Interpol. If you're at high risk, you should already have normalized this "app minimalism" mentality.
People SHOULD be allowed to put their entire lives on phones if they want to.
People SHOULD NOT have to worry about governments using that against them.
However:
> The issue now is that my entire life is literally on my phone.
Is something you should fix. And not because of border searches.
I do most online stuff from a PC.
The USA is definitely not thevonly one. Great Britain has also an extensive history of tyranical privacy-violating border crossing.
As is Israel and Russia.
The point is, the deeper you look, the better you understand how wide-spread the practice is.
There's a much simpler advice:
"Don't."
For some reason, HN commenters constantly struggle with this (simple) concept.
During the last quarter of century, in many hundreds of border controls through many countries of Europe and Asia, including in places with tight security like Israel, I have never seen any case of searching for information in any belongings of the travelers, like computers or smartphones or even notebooks or the like.
Israel is a country that long before 9/11 had extremely effective methods for testing travelers at border control, and unlike the Americans they kept their methods unchanged after 9/11. Unlike USA, they have never relied on technical means, like X-ray scanners or SSD/HDD searching, but they have relied on trained humans who interviewed the travelers and assessed whether they lie about their purpose or not.
"I have never seen" is very different from "it doesn't happen".
I'm pretty sure in many countries, border control agents do their worst stuff out of sight of the public.
That's a good one :) It shows a couple things, like:
• a certain independence from Uncle Sam (like they displayed when they bombed the USS Liberty in 1967)
• that their own population was already sufficiently propagandized into paranoia mode (fear and loathing of “evil muslims”) in order to never make peace and keep the hate up
• and of course that they knew there was nothing to worry about wrt the 9/11 hoax
Fiscal Year | Device Searches | Travelers at POEs | Rate | Equivalent
------------|-----------------|--------------------|------------|------------
2012 | 5,085 | 351.6M | 0.00145% | 1 in 69,200
2013 | 5,709 | 362.3M | 0.00158% | 1 in 63,500
2014 | 6,029 | 375.0M | 0.00161% | 1 in 62,200
2015 | 8,503 | 383.2M | 0.00222% | 1 in 45,100
2016 | 19,033 | 390.6M | 0.00487% | 1 in 20,500
2017 | 30,200 | 397.4M | 0.00760% | 1 in 13,200
2018 | 33,296 | 413.9M | 0.00804% | 1 in 12,400
2019 | 40,913 | 410.3M | 0.00997% | 1 in 10,000
2020 | 32,038 | ~238M | 0.0135% | 1 in 7,420
2021 | 37,450 | ~179M | 0.0209% | 1 in 4,780
2022 | 45,499 | ~316.7M | 0.0144% | 1 in 6,960
2023 | 41,767 | >394M | ~0.0106% | ~1 in 9,440
2024 | 47,047 | >420M | ~0.0112% | ~1 in 8,940
2025 | 55,318 | >419M | ~0.0132% | ~1 in 7,570
These stats aren't also capturing who gets stopped and why, which is pretty important, especially given the current government.
As soon as you say "Trump man bad" then the underlying discussion that needs to be had is lost.
[1] https://www.help.cbp.gov/s/article/Article-1253?language=en_...
[2] https://www.southernborder.org/100_mile_border_enforcement_z...
>Border Patrol checkpoints do not give Border Patrol Agents carte blanche to automatically search persons and their vehicles, other than in the manner described above. To conduct a legal search under the Fourth Amendment, the agents must develop particularly probable cause to conduct a lawful search. Probable cause can be developed from agent observations, records checks, non-intrusive canine sniffs, and other established means. Motorist's may consent to a search but are not required to do so.
I'm sure that "other established means" are a very restrictive requirement if they fail to have an "observation."
Sure, they can lie about probable cause, but they would then have that evidence thrown out in any case that derived from the search. Similarly, I can kick in your door and search your house and your only recourse is violence or the legal system. The whole question here is not whether a search is possible, but whether there is any legal consequences of it.
If you vote out all the incumbents then you encourage them to ignore you. You will vote against them whether they support, ignore, or oppose what you want. Also, removing the people who agree with you makes it harder to form a majority for your cause.
which is to say - you sure can vote. but if you really want to do something, there's plenty of local hacktivist groups around doing things like logging ALPRs to maps, attending townhalls to yell at pro-surveillance councilmembers and the like
my experience with those groups is that anybody who's remotely tech savvy and/or a spreadsheet whiz is a godsend. I was one of two people in a 30+ person group who knew how to, for eg, set up breakout rooms, keep virtual attendees engaged, automate email sends, etc. if there's one thing movement organizers are generally bad at it's knowing how to use the technical tools to actually stay organized
you can also be the person who gets them to move off of Google and onto at-least Proton (though ideally something like Cryptpad). anybody with a halfway-competent understanding of OpSec could've prevented a lot of the things that led to the doxxing of individuals and people leaving the movement due to harassment
Good luck with that vote.
What about having UN observers on the ground to ensure fair elections, like the countries this administration is so found of?
Some states had quite a deep dive, forensic audits, the whole thing. https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-wisconsin-presidential-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Maricopa_County_president...
The 2020 election was probably the most scrutinized in history. How is that not being able to question a fair election?
Even if Dems take the House and Senate, this can't be called a fair election.
The precedent, if anything, is that we will tolerate people upending the whole public discourse and portions of the government for years over nonsense that never had any evidence of anything occurring on a level that would impact the elections.
Meanwhile, Trump has spent the entire administration trying to restrict the ability for demographics that won't vote for him from being able to vote. Openly. Sometimes honestly, but mostly also blaming all of it on the election he lost and claiming it's to stop the voter fraud that never actually occurred.
The precedent that was set is that questioning the election can become dogma for a political party no matter if there is absolutely zero evidence of what they are saying happened.
It is worth pointing out that both when you enter a prison and when you enter a country, you are subject to getting searched. My parents now avoid traveling through the UK because they have been searched even though they are just transiting through the airport.
A more honest way of interpreting that data is: "even if you are a vocal critic of the current regime, it's extremely unlikely anyone will ever search your phone at the border."
In the UK, HMRC can search your house without a warrant if they have 'reasonable suspicion' that goods that are 'liable to forfeiture' are likely to be moved or destroyed. See Customs and Excise Management Act 1979, section 161. Anything seized can be used against you in court. In 2014, HMRC described this power as 'frequently used'.[0] CBP doesn't have that power and it's unthinkable they'd be given it.
Why is the far more limited CBP power (which it shares with almost every border force in the world) mentioned here every 2 weeks or so, while HMRC's very broad power to search your house is ignored?
[0] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7e1bbae5274...
But then again we don't fear police and ICE shooting us dead and our government wasn't subject to a coup in 2021, so there is that. Swings and roundabouts
Neighboring the country in Canada, the US seemed like shorthand for USSR when it came to the border and travel. This sort of policy will make the US unpopular and inhospitable for conferences or any other important gatherings that it's taken for granted.
They'll go through everything: phones, journals, mail. They'll straight up call people in someone's phone and question them if they think it's relevant.
The UK border agents (technically counter-terrorism) can stop you at the border, force you into a room, ask for your passwords to all your devices and you don't have the right to refuse.
You also don't have the right to have a lawyer be in a room with you and you are compelled to answer all their questions and finally they do not need to tell you why they stopped you.
Then, if you are lucky they return your devices 7 days later after they have been through everything or they can keep them forever if they find something suspicious.
This guy (who is a British citizen) went through it last year and talks about the whole procedure: https://youtu.be/991kRp8KUmo?si=-5S1uLE7K9KG_gNj
If you’re just now getting upset about this then you need to check your political bias becise that’s the only thing that’s changed.
Obviously a real practical bummer, just wondering if there is an obvious escape hatch for the professional ne'er do well who would easily circumvent the intent.
Granted, even if they seized my phone now I don't think they'd find much terribly interesting stuff on there outside of a concern at how many lolcow "Documentaries" I watch.
TSA once gave me SSSS for 5 years after they tried making me answer a survey that asked me to prioritize things like "health", "safety", "privacy" as a ranked list and I refused to do that. Fuck em and anyone dumb enough to work for them. I was already used to showing up 4 hours early because they always make me take every single synth/sequencer/etc out so they can swipe it down to check for terrorism particles
I also get groped every single time because my dick shows up on the scanner. So goddamned worthless
> The agent took the phone away and only returned after approximately 45 minutes, during which Kennedy believes that data on the phone was copied. He was then released with no charges.
Does the owner, Mr. Kennedy has actual knowledge/proof if the phone was copied, or this is a guess? Might be missing from the article.
By my math, that's a little over 0.013% (ten times the cited figure).
It's a red flag when someone actually wants to have power over other people, the more, the redder.
Amazing development from idea, vision and lyrics to the current status quo.
1. figure out how to make money by breaking government in a way no one can agree to fix
2. pay politicians to make it legal
3. run political ads claiming the other side is the villain
4. buy that island you've had your eye on
If you don't cooperate they can hold you for a while and make all kinds of threats but, if you are a citizen, ultimately they cannot deny you entry.
If I were truly paranoid, I'd probably travel with flip phone and an iPad with typical (non-sensitive) apps on it and a remote desktop client that I could use to connect to my computer back home. Make sure the remote desktop client isn't installed on the iPad during border crossings.
#1. The download and restore backup method would work for people in general- except it doesn't capture what people would need. Exmaple: I have some thermal cameras that rely on old 32 bit apps that do not run on anything android 12 onwards- If i wipe those old phones, and restore- the apps often wanted to reach out to a server for initial activation- they would fail upon reinstall and i'd be out of the apps that are required to control my cameras and related equipment,which is worth several thousand, and has no equivalent spec wise and form factor today in 2026. And it'd be all dead weight and rendered useless.
( competitors today do not compete now- for example try finding a 640*480 30 hz or better form factor thermal camera that attaches to phones - they dont exist anymore)
\The solution is full imaging- but there isnt a real way to fully image phones and restore backups today. There used to be it seems- but not really with the latest stuff at the time of this post
.
On another note:Veracrypt- The weakness of truecrypt and veracrypt, Their strongest counter, the hidden OS option only worked if you converted your computer to MBR, which means you can't have a hard drive too large. Making a UEFI hidden OS has not been done yet, but all computers are this now.
And the Hidden Volume option- isn't 'as' useful, and of course, your OS might make a copy and put it somewhere, you have to be careful. As a example: Any time I open a file, using the software tool Everything to search and confirm this- you can easily see Windows makes copies and temp files and whatnot in randomly named locations- that's the sort of software and OS behavior that will screw people over.( The year of the Linux desktop isn't here yet..)
Solution:We need fully image-backup capable Phones. I mean fully. Not just backing up some apps- as this refuses to backup apps you have that are no longer on app stores, or that Play Protect doesn't like, etc. We need to be able to fully image a device, a forensic image backup, for phones that people can use, then encrypt and upload so they are good if they lose a phone.
Next- Plausible deniability is a way forward- but you need multiple profiles, that are cryptographically indistinguishable, along with the phone being hardened so GreyKey /Cellebrite won't be able to exploit a way in. This needs to be built this way from the ground up ideally, eventually.
There has been research about making devices that treat all block space the same way so you can't tell if someone has 1, or 50 profiles or partitions, etc- and even stuff that overlaps. Often it needs to be fixed size partitions, but it is apparently NOT impossible to create. I am aware of Shufflecake attempting to make a solution for Linux, and yes, a Hidden OS option that is forensic- invisible.
But nothing has come out yet - and especially, nothing in this vein for phones.
It would be nice to see the day where, if you travel to a hostile country, you can tell them you have just one profile, and if they ask, you could theoretically mention a 2nd, and then show it- but you might have 3 more - and they'd all be immune to forensic inspection if the system is built right.(Yes, there's often issues you have to be careful of ,like setting this up so you dont destroy data when in other profiles, but that's not as important)
This is how you solve this problem in the long run-make computing devices impossible to analyze, but standardized.
...or, returning to one.
Huh. ITAR?
The only thing you can do is travel with a clean device on which you maintain a completely innocuous social presence, such as chats with parents and non-foreign friends, and some social media with normie activity. Even that would not be enough if you're an activist or otherwise personally targeted, as your real accounts are already known in that case and your only option is not to travel at all, but it reduces your chances of getting in trouble (or arrested, depending on the target country). Though it still won't help in the long run as security services collect and organize more and more data about everyone.
But also, things like the hidden OS, or shufflecake - they're building these so they're would be no traces. Which is why I said this sort of thing needs to be standardized - if every phone or device naturally gets extremely high levels of security, and it's built in by default to all of them- it's not unusual anymore, is suspicious. And stems the overall ongoing data collection on everyone that you highlighted.
Or am I the only one who thinks that there is equal risk of someone inserting "sensitive" information into any device - for whatever purpose - without the phone's owner even knowing.
Zero trust peeps. Zero trust.
If you are somebody, would they try to install malware in your laptop (that they can take out of your sight and have full access for an hour while you are kept distracted answering silly questions)?. Maybe not, but we can assume a yes just to play safe.
They had top secret documents in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago so everybody with access could read it (for a fee?). Russia paid for the weeding of the USA President's son. Trump is aggressively blocking an explanation to his real role in a hideous sex ring child honeypot built by Israeli spies to blackmail every rich people in US and Europe, etc, etc...
Ordering somebody to fullfill a quote of poisoning 20 phones a day in the fly returning from Qatar would not even be a thing for them.
That leads me to wonder. Lets imagine that a journalist dd clone two laptops identical, pass a frontier with one of them, don't do anything with it, and use diff on both after returning home. Do you think that any potential malware would pop or is totally undetectable?