Thread

Second Circuit allows government to search electronic devices at the border

131 points · 79 comments · HotGarbage

k310 · 1789745717 · focus · HN ↗
Everyone please read Surveillance Self Defense from EFF [0]
My advice, take a burner phone to the airport (and elsewhere?), and since devices are subject to warrantless search anywhere and everywhere, via exceptions to the fourth amendment [1] (the constitution seems designed to be bent or outright ignored), keep your data at home and encrypted. The "cloud" is a government data supermarket.
For example.
> While the Fourth Amendment is the foundation, federal and state laws can add layers of complexity. For example, the Patriot Act expanded the government's ability to conduct surveillance and searches, particularly in national security cases, sometimes with a lower burden of proof than traditional criminal investigations.
MUCH lower.
[0] <a href="https://ssd.eff.org/" rel="nofollow">https://ssd.eff.org/
[1] <a href="https://uslawexplained.com/warrantless_search" rel="nofollow">https://uslawexplained.com/warrantless_search
1. rconti · 1789753046 · focus · HN ↗
  The resources you link to are helpful; however, this is not really practical advice for most people most of the time. To the extent that our smartphones are a very helpful device to have in our day-to-day lives at home, they're even more useful in a foreign country where they become our only available computing device; indispensable for keeping in touch back home, navigation on unfamiliar transit systems, translation of unfamiliar languages, and so on.
  Of course, with great effort and moderate expense, you could setup a burner phone with access to many of your same accounts and resources, but the more features you add to the burner phone, the more it begins to look like the device you're leaving "safe" at home.
  I'm traveling overseas tomorrow and my partner and I will both be taking our phones with us as we do every day in our home country.
  1. finaard · 1789754556 · focus · HN ↗
    I find modern smartphones more and more unusable, both OS becoming more hostile towards the user, and applications widely moving to dropping logins in regular intervals. That has been happening for years already, so I slowly moved more and more stuff back to a computer.
    By now I'm at a point where I no longer even backup my phone - there are a bunch of apps, but I can just install them and log in again on a different device as needed.
    The final step to make it truly throwaway was me doing a custom matrix bridge for SMS earlier this year - I had voice routing setup for a while already. So now my old SIM cards are in a 4G modem at home, and the phone I carry around with me just has a data SIM. Huge quality of life improvement, as I can terminate as many numbers as I want there, and have access to both voice and SMS data from my computer as well.
    rconti · 1789860491 · focus · HN ↗
    How does this relate to travel? Are you saying that the modern smartphone drops logins so often that the burner is less of a burden? Or that you should just travel with a laptop? (which I do quite often, since a thin laptop takes so little space and weight)
    finaard · 1790011979 · focus · HN ↗
    Both. My standard phone defacto already is a burner phone, so I'd just either wipe it or pick something new up when travelling to that kind of countries.
    Similar for a notebook - I'd travel with an empty one, restore it after arriving, and wipe it again before leaving. I have infrastructure in place to make that easy and secure for me to do.

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