Amid the recent news of a U.S. citizen being asked to turn over his phone to authorities at a border crossing, Sophia Cope of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has tips on digital civil liberties.
Related, “Attorney representing a student protester detained by federal immigration agents”
When a man in Michigan was heading home on Sunday from a family vacation in the Caribbean, he was stopped in the Detroit Airport. Federal officers, border agents, detained him, interrogated him and pressured him to hand over his cellphone. The man is a U.S. citizen. He’s a civil rights and criminal defense attorney, and among his clients is an activist who has been charged in connection to a pro-Palestinian protest at the University of Michigan.
Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250410185452/https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5357455
Which US citizen did he deport? I’m not aware of that
I think you posted this comment in the wrong thread btw
If you are traveling out of the country, leave your real phone at home, and get a burner phone for travel, with no business or old social media on it.
Take pictures on vacation, and if you have to use social media, start new accounts for your trip, and dont post ANYTHING political or controversial, just vacation posts.
If you’re not a citizen you don’t have any rights. It’s nearly impossible to file a complaint after they deported you. They can just deny you entry (or worse) and even if technically it was illegal there’s nothing you can do about it.
Don’t travel to the US.
As an American – please don’t come here until we’ve sorted our shit out. Money is frankly the only thing these morons will listen to.
As someone who makes at least part of their living from tourists, i agree. Avoid America right now. Most foreign tourists travel to Florida, which is the MAGA Nazi Homeland. Stay away, and make them feel it. I’ll ride it out.
You don’t and haven’t had rights near the boarder since the Patriot Act. If you’re traveling, use a burner phone and backup/wipe your laptop. Setup a NAS at home and do not setup any logins for it on the laptop before you arrive at your destination if you really need files.
Wipe phone, set it up with dummy info like a Gmail account that you’ve previously signed up for random newsletters.add your mom and your dr as contacts, cross border, wipe it again, then restore from cloud.
When I was supporting people in hostile countries they would use a “burner” device. It literally was considered unusable upon return.
There’s a story about how a person brought back a cheap Pdu from an hotel they were staying ant and one day it caught on fire. IT opened it, because power strips are designed to not catch on fire, to find a bug in it.
If it about of your sight for any amount of time it’s probably untrustworthy.
wipe phone
I’m not convinced there is any way to reliably wipe private stuff from a phone. You have to have a separate phone for travel purposes. Buy it new and never let anything really private onto it.
Just delete the encryption key? It’s unlikely advanced and expensive forensics will be used at boarder crossings.
I wouldn’t assume things about what they have or don’t have at the border. They could also send your phone to a lab somewhere and return it to you after a few months with who knows what spyware installed, after which you can never trust it again. Just buy a cheap spare phone and leave your real one at home. There are some surprisingly good deals on qvc.com if you search for “tracfone”. I might get one myself.
That’s not happening to most people. If they are that interested in you they are already hacking your accounts.
We don’t have evidence that it’s happening to most people, but that’s not to say it’s not happening. We didn’t have evidence the NSA was collecting basically all traffic from Americans, until we did. And even if it’s encrypted, they can always save it and decrypt it later if a weakness is found in the algorithm, hardware is fast enough to crack it in a reasonable time, or quantum computing pans out.
Sure, but it also solves the second problem, where they just confiscate your phone and don’t return it. Do you want them to take the phone you use to access your entire digital life, or your $50 burner?
You can buy a new phone and do a restore. Nbd.
A weird choice though… Who wants to spend another $400-$1000 on a phone? Thats not nbd…
Use a burner phone if possible.
Great advice, but what if you’re concerned about the possibility that you might be stuck in the other country permanently(not because of the search itself but because the U.S. Government could fall apart while you’re visiting the other country)?
Do you just give up on having your phone?
Don’t travel if possible. Foreigners should not travel to the US and Americans should not travel to foreign countries if they care for their personal safety. With the obvious exception that they’re uprooting and leaving permanently.
With the obvious exception that they’re uprooting and leaving permanently.
Well now that you mention it…
I know three people who are moving to Europe. They’re waiting until the end of Trump’s second term to decide whether or not to apply for permanent residency. They’re queer and well educated, so I doubt anywhere they would settle down at would turn them down, especially if it gets real bad here.
Yes don’t bring a phone with anything really private on it. Fixing the country is obviously preferable but sometimes you want a practical stopgap.
I’m not sure I’m understanding your question. The prior poster you’re responding to said to use a burner phone. So you have a phone. It looks like you’re asking: “If I get stuck in another country and can’t come back, how do I get the device (your primary phone) I left in the USA?”
Is that what you’re asking?
Yes.
Me personally, if I was stuck in another country I didn’t plan on being in long term, getting a phone back I spent a few hundred dollars on probably wouldn’t be very high on my list.
If your concern is not being parted from your primary phone because of its replacement cost, you could backup you data to the cloud on your primary phone, wipe it clean, then carry it across the border (not hiding it). If there’s nothing on it then if they ask for it they would likely hand it back to you fairly quickly when they see there’s nothing to snoop on it.
Alternatively, prior to your departure, mail it to your new location in the other country. I’d still wipe the data before mailing it though.
If that comes to pass the burner phone would become “your phone,” as much of a pain in the ass and potential cause of losing media as that would be
Or you know, fix the country? Isn’t that a better way to deal with this problem instead of band-aiding every single thing?
Ohmigod! I never thought of that!
Such a simple solution!
I’ll just go ahead and do that and then everything will be okay again!
I agree, so what are the exact steps I can take to fix the country?
If you have an interest in fixing the country then you definitely need to have a burner phone system because you’re the exact kind of person they’re going to single out (like, this article was inspired by an ttorney for a pro-Palestine protester having his phone seized when he re entered the country)
ha ha ha. I’ve spent the last 24 years seeing this country loose it’s mind. People either want authoritarianism or delude themselves into thinking their guy will do anything. Far too much popcorn and circuses. Far too many people would rather burn the planet down now then risk their economy. Far too many people isolated from what’s really going on.
Its also important to note that there is a big difference between US border patrol and ICE. You should know who you are interacting with.
The clear solution is to back up all your data, wipe your phone, and restore it later.
Use a pass code. Do not use fingerprint or face ID unlock.
The current law is that you can be compelled to unlock your phone with your face or finger. (Probably should require a search warrant).
You cannot be compelled to say what a pass code or password is. You have the right to remain silent.
Turn off phone before crossing, safest, easiest most resistant
If you don’t want to disable biometric auth, familiarize yourself with your phone and see if it has lockdown mode. Apple phones and most modern Android phones support it, using it will require your password / pin for unlocks. Put it into lockdown mode for the flight.
Yes, this is good, however lockdown mode does NOT protect you against forensic extraction of your data, for example from the Cellebrite tool. Your phone has two states, BFU and AFU (before/after first unlock). To maximize your protection against your data being extracted, your phone needs to have not had its first unlock after being powered up. Lockdown mode does nothing here.
So, use lockdown in general if you like, however, when going through customs or in a place where your phone may be confiscated, power it down fully. Don’t unlock it if you power it up, and don’t use biometric fingerprint or face unlock so you’re not forced to unlock it.
PSA on an iPhone, by default, if you press the lock button 5 times in a row, your phone will lock and facial recognition and fingerprint unlock will be disabled.
You’re better off turning the device off entirely. Lockdown mode doesn’t put the device back into a BFU state so you’re still leaving room for an exploit from Cellebrite or Greykey. Not having that first unlock after you turned the device on gives them a shitload of problems.
This, 100%. Lockdown mode is a false sense of safety in all honesty. As MegaUltraChicken (he is legend) is saying, you need to have your phone in a Before First Unlock (BFU) state to have maximum protection of your data (and is also phone model dependent)
Here’s a great link to read more about this and find where your phone falls susceptibility wise.
Good to know!
Depends if you are a citizen or not. Limited rights at the border, but you have an absolute right of entry as a citizen, but depending on the situation they may detain you for some hours, or take your phone. Turn off all devices before crossing, citizen or not, use full disk encryption, have backups somewhere else. Assume you will never see your devices again. Be prepared for that.
If you aren’t a citizen, you have even less rights, they can send you back if you fart on their general direction.
… you have an absolute right of entry as a citizen…
You may have the right, but I wouldn’t count on it being upheld.
Trump has already deported US citizens (supposedly by mistake). And he has plans to make it legal.
Yes, that would be unconstitutional, but Trump has ignored the constitution and the courts multiple times already.
