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
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…