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

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141–150 of 209 posts

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

#141
Signed up to pose two questions :-

1/ I legitimately do not know a lot of my usernames and passwords. I sign up with a unique email that includes the name of the site (I'm not particularly religious about the format of this and usually end up checking previous email to figure it out). Passwords are saved in Chrome and I mostly don't remember them. I'm sure I am not unique. Where would one stand with this scenario?

2/ Wherever I can, I use a U2F device as a second factor. Could one be compelled to provide this along with the passwords (providing I can remember them)? Where would one stand if the key was unavailable - i.e. lost/left at home? Assuming they have a PC nearby for checking your social media accounts, I'd very much doubt it had it's USB ports enabled so, even if I did provide it, I would suggest they probably couldn't use it. Is there any documented precedent for how this is handled?

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

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then you get prosecuted for destruction of evidence, obstruction of justice and whatever else they can come up with. As said in other threads, the solution is not technology.

This assumes that law enforcement actually knows you will have evidence. If the technology could remove everything that would be incriminating and leave benign data you would just be another non-techie traveler.

They don't need to know you have evidence. All they need to know is that you deliberately caused them to erase your device under the guise of unlocking it. Which means your device could have had evidence, and now you've made it impossible to prove that it didn't.

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

#143
post #11

Phones should load different profiles based on the password provided, with some activity logged across profiles so none of them appear stale.

Phone's should have a travel mode, where it backs up all your data to the cloud and wipes the phone clean.

Why does that need a special mode? Just back up your phone and factory reset it.

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

#144
post #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…

On most recent phones, the system is encrypted by default and a factory reset erases the keys, which does make it unrecoverable (unless the key is elsewhere, which I haven't heard of).

Definitely unrecoverable. The whole point of the feature is to make it impossible to recover the data once the key is erased, so you can be sure they're not storing a backup anywhere as that would defeat the point.

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

#145
post #30

I'm interested to see how Apple will react to this, given their history with the FBI. Right now, you can connect your iPhone to a computer and get all the information off it - doesn't matter if you are iTunes or Cellebrite. It'd be good to have a permanent way to disable this ability in the future, so that your phone data cannot be siphoned out, even if you provide the PIN. Of course, that's not the only way for data…

Apparently there already is. It's called Pair Locking, and it's something you can do with Apple's Configurator software. Forensic data dumpers use the same functionality that iTunes uses to talk to the phone, which uses a process called "pairing", and Pair Locking makes it so the device refuses to establish any new pairs.

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

#146

Seems to me Apple and Google should be working on "roaming profiles." You can reset your phone to factory settings, or even get a rental phone at your destination, and then quickly restore it from your profile. After all it's the data you're interested in, not the device per se.

How is that any different than just backing up to iCloud and restoring it to a new device?

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

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Okay, then please give me your Facebook and Twitter usernames and passwords." If you lie, and then they do a search and find you, then you're going to be in bigger trouble.

"My account logins are only available through the password manager on my home computer"

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

#148
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that it's a felony to lie to a customs & border patrol officer. "Is this your main phone?" How will you answer that?

> "Is this your main phone?" This is my main phone I use when crossing constitution-free zones. > it's a felony to lie to a customs & border patrol officer That makes me livid : "Oh, sorry, the constitutional laws (that apply to us ) don't apply here, see it's not technically the US because reasons." [lies to officer] "FELONY!".

Why does that make you livid? Did you think you don't have to obey any laws simply because you're at a border? I guarantee you it's still a felony to murder someone there, so why would lying to a federal agent be any different?

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

#149

Once customs and border patrol is holding you is there any way to back out? Could you say something like "Uh... I think I'm just not going to enter right now."? (then back up your data, ship the computer device with an insurance policy, and give the border crossing another shot)

You can. You have the right to withdraw the border crossing submission which is what you effectively do when you try to cross the border. I once was denied entry to the US and the CBP officer offered me to make it as I'm withdrawing my border crossing application in order to make the consequences less severe.

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

#150

Fun fact - the "border zone" in which your 4th amendment rights are suspended and you are subject to search, is 100 miles wide and overlaps where the majority of Americans live and work https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone

Wow, I thought that only extended OUTSIDE the border, not INSIDE as well!

and worse, it technically includes all ports. which could basically mean radii around every international airport.

when i first learned about this, I scared my lawyer girlfriend about it and she helped me look into the actual court cases. they have been somewhat difficult to hold up. usually because LO abuses the rules by not following the three terms listed above. and it still takes getting all the way to Supreme Court which is a massive drain on resources for those typically affected by this.

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