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
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.
because I’m sometimes too literal, you mean a surveillance bug, not an insect bug?
Sorry yes it was surveillance.
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…