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
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.
I will only travel with work devices from now on. Big tech is complicit in electing Trump, they can deal with my devices being seized by immigration