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I’ll never bring my phone on an international flight again

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31–40 of 209 posts

Re: I’ll never bring my phone on an international flight again

#31
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Is this the phone you use on a day to day basis"- felony if you lie.

Option 1: "No, I left my phone at home." Option 2: If you're at the US border and a US citizen, "Sir, I'm an American citizen and just want want to get home" -- citizens can't be blocked from re-entering at the border.

Option 1, why did you bring decoys? You should probably sit here in this cell for a bit while we work out what the fuck you're doing.

Option 2, they can't stop you from entering but they can make you enter directly into a jail cell, or generally make your life miserable. See the owner of cock.li, who had all of his electronics seized twice.

Re: I’ll never bring my phone on an international flight again

#33
> Since most of our private data is stored in the cloud — and not on individual devices — you could also reset your phone to its factory settings [...] Then if you’re asked to hand it over, there won’t be any personal data on your phone

This makes me wonder: is it true? Is the data truly unrecoverable if you factory-reset your phone? I doubt so. But maybe there's some special tool to truly wipe a device (say like the equivalent of DBAN)

Re: I’ll never bring my phone on an international flight again

#34
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Is this the phone you use on a day to day basis"- felony if you lie.

Option 1: "No, I left my phone at home." Option 2: If you're at the US border and a US citizen, "Sir, I'm an American citizen and just want want to get home" -- citizens can't be blocked from re-entering at the border.

Result of option 2: "Okay sir, please come this way for an inspection of your rectum"

Re: I’ll never bring my phone on an international flight again

#35
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Is this the phone you use on a day to day basis"- felony if you lie.

Option 1: "No, I left my phone at home." Option 2: If you're at the US border and a US citizen, "Sir, I'm an American citizen and just want want to get home" -- citizens can't be blocked from re-entering at the border.

>citizens can't be blocked from re-entering at the border.

Well, sort of. They have to let you in, but you can be held more or less indefinitely if you're suspected of committing a crime, or not complying with the border agent.

Re: I’ll never bring my phone on an international flight again

#36
post #27

It would be nice if there were a feature built in to phones to facilitate this. Like, on the lock screen, an emergency wipe button that runs a procedure you specify (log you out of everything, obfuscate which services you subscribe to, etc) and this way as you're going through customs, you can gauge your risk and at any point you feel uncomfortable, you discreetly click your button before smoothly handing over your p…

The area you are frog marched into is strictly no devices allowed, if they see you with any electronics in your hand you will be pounced upon. This is very obviously because people try to destroy evidence they have on their devices once they discover they are screwed.

Re: I’ll never bring my phone on an international flight again

#37
post #2

The factory reset seems more practical to me than leaving your phone at home.

on a scale of 0-9, I'd put factory reset at about a 5. I'd wager there's still software out there that could do a raw read of the SD storage device's blocks. Unless Apple and friends have the device reset go to extra measures that tell the drive (at the chip-level, not the OS) "report all zeros" when read from, I think to increase your safety to "level 9" you should overwrite the disk by copying a large file several…

Doesn't seem necessary if you had disk encryption enabled. The data remaining unerased on the disk is already meaningless without the key.

Re: I’ll never bring my phone on an international flight again

#38
post #21

I suggest mentioning in the title that it concerns the US-border, I travelled across a lot of international borders, that didn't care. Only some international borders are a problem, one of these, the US one.

It's always a risk.

We're fortunate to live in a timeframe where this sort of bullshit has been unusual up until now for most people.

Ask a US citizen of Pakisanti descent about travel to India sometime. International conflict gets taken out on poor saps trying to travel all of the time. Sometimes it's petty chickenshit, sometimes real.

Re: I’ll never bring my phone on an international flight again

#39
post #2

The factory reset seems more practical to me than leaving your phone at home.

on a scale of 0-9, I'd put factory reset at about a 5. I'd wager there's still software out there that could do a raw read of the SD storage device's blocks. Unless Apple and friends have the device reset go to extra measures that tell the drive (at the chip-level, not the OS) "report all zeros" when read from, I think to increase your safety to "level 9" you should overwrite the disk by copying a large file several…

All Apple devices are AES encrypted with a combination of a key on flash in the CPU, and a unique static key in the CPU core. "Erasing" the phone just removes the key, rendering the bulk flash storage completely useless. There's never any data stored which is not encrypted.

Re: I’ll never bring my phone on an international flight again

#40
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Is this the phone you use on a day to day basis"- felony if you lie.

Option 1: "No, I left my phone at home." Option 2: If you're at the US border and a US citizen, "Sir, I'm an American citizen and just want want to get home" -- citizens can't be blocked from re-entering at the border.

re: Option 2

Define "blocked". Because Sidd Bikkannavar's recent experience tells a different story[0].

"The document given to Bikkannavar listed a series of consequences for failure to offer information that would allow CBP to copy the contents of the device. “I didn’t really want to explore all those consequences,” he says. “It mentioned detention and seizure.”"

[0] - http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/12/14583124/nasa-sidd-bikkann...

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