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Comment by 23ahGa17 | Hacker News Reader

People believed the reboot feature last time GrapheneOS was mentioned. It is of course nonsense.

Shut down the phone in areas with a high snatch risk. That means during landing for example, because the aircraft can be boarded covertly if on the ground.

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> Shut down the phone in areas with a high snatch risk.

Yes this is of course safer. What evidence do you have that it doesn't work on GrapheneOS, though?

https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Journalist-Richard-Me...

Medhurst has no evidence that it worked either. He hasn't tweeted since August 24th, I hope he is well and at liberty.

To add an extra layer of safety. Bring a secondary phone when travelling by airplanes, especially to other countries. You should also use it frequently, maybe with some side apps to make it look like it's your daily phone.

Or, just don't bring a phone if you're particularly vulnerable. What are they going to do? Deny you entry because you don't carry a phone? If we're really at that point, where merely not having some item is suspicious, we're in deep shit.

I wouldn't want to be the one to test this. That's an indication of how deep we dug ourselves in.

if you don't know yet, we are in deep

It's standard for many multinationals and universities to provide blank secondary devices for travel to China that are synchronized with data after getting past the border. They are then erased after one gets back, because Chinese intelligence has broken into hotel rooms and installed keyloggers before.

Adding the USA to the list of countries where this is done would increase costs but it wouldn't be some nightmarish unprecedented problem.

Not bringing a phone looks suspicious, though. Maybe they will ask you to open all of your suitcases and such, which is annoying at least. Since they just want to do their job, better give them an excuse to wrap up quickly and go to the next one.

The internet exists and can transfer your data with no customs and borders, so if you are at risk of being snatched, the correct choice is to not carry a phone (or laptop, or..) at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall:

“The Great Firewall operates by checking transmission control protocol (TCP) packets for keywords or sensitive words. If the keywords or sensitive words appear in the TCP packets, access will be closed. If one link is closed, more links from the same machine will be blocked by the Great Firewall. The effect includes: limiting access to foreign information sources, blocking popular foreign websites and mobile apps, and requiring foreign companies to adapt to domestic regulations. Due to the Great Firewall, China has one of the lowest cross-border internet traffic rates in the world. Usage of foreign apps in China is minuscule; Asia Society estimated in 2026 that foreign apps blocked by the Great Firewall have extremely low traffic, particularly compared to domestic apps; the top five domestic apps saw traffic that was 1,000 times more than the top five foreign apps.”

The Great Firewall doesn't restrict SSH, so you can functionally ignore it (assuming using e.g. `ssh -D` is second-nature to you).

Last time I tried it (which was quite a while ago, but I'd be surprised if they became less restrictive) ssh was fine for interactive use, but they did some sort of traffic analysis to kill connections that got used for tunneling other traffic like that.

When I was there last year, it took some doing to get a VPN working. Mullvad was pretty good but it would take a few tries to find an endpoint I could connect to. The simplest escape hatch is to have a cellular connection from another country, but that's either expensive or slow.

If you live in the UK and travel to the US and are afraid of state actors, leaving your hardware at home seems like a bad idea, too.

Despite all the nonsense that's posted about UK on the internet, British agencies do require a warrant to enter your home. TSA on the other hand does not require a court order to confiscate and mirror your device before giving it back to you.

Edit: Just to be perfectly clear - Border Force in the UK can do the exact same thing to you once you return, British citizen or not. Leaving your device at home is still the safest choice.

I believe it's CBP that does this, not TSA. Therefore Americans don't have to worry about it during domestic flights.

> Despite all the nonsense that's posted about UK on the internet

How is it nonsense? I'm not debating the warrant thing, but it's very reasonable to assume the UK has terrible protections for these sorts of things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#:~:text=Uni...

https://eylenburg.github.io/countries.htm

I mean in a broad sense if you read any news about the UK it might looks like a dystopian surveillance state where you get arrested for criticising the king(I kid you not - I've had multiple American coworkers ask me if this is true).

And yes, UK has some awful laws around this. Yes it has put people in jail just for planning a protest before. Yes you can go to jail for not disclosing your passwords. But what you read on the internet is almost laughably out of proportion - no, you won't get arrested for posting a meme about the king.

> news about the UK it might looks like a dystopian surveillance state where you get arrested for criticising

Might it "seem" that way because it is that way?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/22/britain-has-beco...

https://freespeechunion.org/news/more-than-62-000-people-hav...

Oh, and your government itself openly states it on record, too: https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2025-07-17/debates/F807C...

How many of those people got arrested for criticising the king?

Not that this is some kind of great bar to clear, but if you're going to argue with what I said, argue with what I actually wrote.

Ok then. Soviet Union had free speech too. Nobody got arrested for criticizing Reagan or Churchill.

Clearly the point is clear. Why nitpick pointlessly?

You've missed my point entirely, by a country mile.

Someone above asked me how it was nonsense. I responded that people parotting the point about getting arrested for criticising the king is nonsense - like for instance, my American coworkers asking if that's true, because they read it somewhere on the internet. That is nonsense.

If you want to argue with this point please do, but also please observe the rest of my comment and especially the parts that I haven't actually said.

Let me repeat reports about these arrests here as well, for your convenience.

6 people got arrested for trying to say "Not my king!" BEFORE his coronation: https://londondaily.com/not-my-king-anti-monarchy-protesters...

Before they had a chance of protest. After months of discussing the planned protest in details and getting a green light from the Met Police: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65542558

52 people were arrested DURING the coronation, for example for holding a placard "not my king": https://londondaily.com/over-52-anti-monarchy-protestors-arr...

Police arrested despite KNOWING it's the member of public doesn't commit any offence: https://novaramedia.com/2025/03/11/police-officer-who-arrest...

I'm afraid you unwittingly misled your coworkers.

I'm aware you are still going to twist what I said to prove your point, but I really don't fancy repeating the exact same point for the third time just so you can say something unrelated.

They already said you can get in trouble for [planning] protesting. They said you won't get in trouble for online criticism. Your links about protests aren't proving anything.

It's not in the comment I'm responding to,

>> Someone above asked me how it was nonsense. I responded that people parotting the point about getting arrested for criticising the king is nonsense

Protesting against the king is criticising the king IMO. I didn't see his quantifier, since I would agree that online critique of the king in particular is not yet penalised.

Not surprising you're implying bad faith though, if we're splitting the hair this thin.

(and this specific planning of the protest was so heavy handed, because it belong to one of the two naughty protests, environmental. The second naughty one is protesting against the genocide. The rest is okay)

> It's not in the comment I'm responding to,

It's in the original comment you responded to, and it's a critical part of the conversation chain.

"And yes, UK has some awful laws around this. Yes it has put people in jail just for planning a protest before. Yes you can go to jail for not disclosing your passwords. But what you read on the internet is almost laughably out of proportion - no, you won't get arrested for posting a meme about the king."

I'm not saying bad faith, I'm saying you misread their argument pretty badly.

Your citations support the problems they already admitted. The hair was split before you got here because they're distinguishing in-person and online actions.

Yes, and no one mentioned parroting the king in this thread. Journalists under known observation from the state, which the UK does arrest from time to time, were mentioned however.

You can use other European countries like The Netherlands, which is a lawless police state with a liberal cover, as well.

Re-read my comment again.

FWIW the same applies to flying in the U.S. as long as you're not a person that the government cares about. I haven't had any issues with either TSA or CBP since 2011 (when, apparently, being multiracial with facial hair made me look Middle-Eastern and looking Middle-Eastern is a cardinal sin at U.S. ports of entry). Neither has anyone I've observed at the airport, and that's thousands of people per flight, and I fly about 3-4 times per year. There's plenty of stories on the Internet, and I don't doubt the stories are true, but the Internet can easily make a 1-in-a-million occurrence happen every day (indeed, given the sheer numbers, a 1 in a million occurrence does happen every day, it's just that it's unlikely to happen to you).

Yeah, it's true, you should go back to your coworkers and straighten it up.

6 people got arrested for trying to say "Not my king!" BEFORE his coronation: https://londondaily.com/not-my-king-anti-monarchy-protesters...

Before they had a chance of protest. After months of discussing the planned protest in details and getting a green light from the Met Police: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65542558

It's not like Republicans in the UK are a violent group, unlike far right coddled by the same Met police.

52 people were arrested DURING the coronation, for example for holding a placard "not my king": https://londondaily.com/over-52-anti-monarchy-protestors-arr...

Police arrested despite KNOWING it's baseless and frankly illegal: https://novaramedia.com/2025/03/11/police-officer-who-arrest...

Tell me some more how it isn't arresting for criticising the king. Oh, well, technically he wasn't a king yet.... but that's even worse to be fair.

GrapheneOS is critical infrastructure. Questioning it is not like criticizing Neovim. People can get detained, killed and more.

Perhaps the reflexive genius downvoters can explain what happened to Richard Medhurst? After his phone was snatched and the authorities pretended not to be able to decrypt it, he went on a GrapheneOS promotion spree on X and wanted to write a book about computer security.

Now he has disappeared for nearly 6 weeks. How many more people do you want to get in trouble with your false promises?

What you really want is to wipe the device befoee landing.

Shutting it down won't help if you are forced by law to give out the password, which is the case in more and more countries.

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