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What could happen if you refuse to unlock your phone at the US border?

arstechnica.com

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Re: What could happen if you refuse to unlock your phone at the US border?

#101

Post by mikeash »

lb1lf wrote: post #83

Question: what would happen if you are asked to unlock your device and you refuse on the grounds that it contains classified material? Presumably they wouldn't just shrug and say 'OK, then' - but neither could they (if the classifying authority was one they cared about - say, NATO) just say 'Tough luck, now unlock it!', right?

It seems like that would only work if you actually have the appropriate security clearance. And they're probably OK with letting people with clearances get through with less screening.

Re: What could happen if you refuse to unlock your phone at the US border?

#102

Post by M_Grey »

tptacek wrote: post #3

Worth remembering: US citizens can play chicken with CBP and lose nothing more than their computer/phone hardware (perhaps having it returned 6 months later). But non-citizens, possibly including LPRs, cannot: if an alien attempts to cross the border with a device they can't unlock "because they don't have the corresponding 2FA token with them" (as one friend suggested they do), they'll be detained, their devices con…

Solution: No Facebook (which is a solution to so many other problems too), partition and hide what you don't want browsed by some inept CBP agent, and then play your part in their security theatre. It might even be nice if someone could make some programs that offer false home screens for various devices that only open when a given password is input... your CBP "clean slate".

Don't say, "I don't have x,y,z..." accounts... have them, have accounts you never use and hand them over. Have your real identity online not be publically linked to your real identity for the purposes of something as trivial as social media.

Re: What could happen if you refuse to unlock your phone at the US border?

#103

Post by TallGuyShort »

tornadoboy55 wrote: post #75
interfixus wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happily, to counterbalance that, US jurisdiction is often assumed to cover the farthest reaches of the planet.

That's patently false. Good luck enforcing US business law in Norway.

Funny - we seem to have no problem with drones killing an alarming number of civilians with no declaration of war... I guess that's under patent law?

Re: What could happen if you refuse to unlock your phone at the US border?

#104

Post by JBReefer »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #68
ashark wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or instead of going through a bunch of effort in order to risk pissing off border agents with shenanigans, you can buy a dirt-cheap Android phone for travel. Bonus: then you don't have to worry about it being stolen, lost, or broken, either. It'd be a sensible move even without the border search risk. Incidentally, is this limited to phones? Are they only searching these accounts because they're authed to the phone t…

do you have a dirt-cheap android to recommend?

Moto G4

Re: What could happen if you refuse to unlock your phone at the US border?

#105

Post by zackbrown »

rc_bhg wrote: post #15
voxic11 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet another reason never to sign up for Facebook.

A fun prank: Create realistic facebook profiles for people you hate, and send links to CBP right before they travel.

> A fun prank: Create realistic facebook profiles for people you hate, and send links to CBP right before they travel.

During the Chinese cultural revolution in the 1960s, anyone could anonymously post the names of "people they hated" as suspected counter-revolutionaries on public bulletin boards. A "fun prank," maybe, except that many of those reported were executed. [1]

This was contemporary with humans traveling into space. We're not out of the woods today—if anything, technology has raised the stakes.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=AfIydrsE6aMC&pg=PA163&lpg=...

Re: What could happen if you refuse to unlock your phone at the US border?

#106

Post by bflesch »

mikeash wrote: post #97
bflesch wrote: post #81

In a world where thousands of people annually travel to some "freedom fighter" camps in order to get combat training, I very much agree that it is necessary to intensively screen travelers who return to their country of origin once they fit a certain heuristic. As one single returnee who is not caught might actually cause dozens or hundreds of citizen deaths, there shouldn't be a screening exception for smartphones o…

Why limit it to international travel? People can learn how to kill without leaving the country. We need random checkpoints set up on major highways (and occasionally on minor roads, just to ensure you can't reliably bypass them) to stop and search people to ensure they aren't up to anything nefarious. Actually, it needs to go ever further. You can get up to a lot of trouble without even leaving your home. The police…

I think this type of argument only comes from egocentric people. Nobody cares about what you are doing, and you will most likely not be screened. If you are arguing online about civil rights you are not exactly the type of person they are trying to catch at the border.

In my country of origin there is no way to train with military weapons. People travel to other places and learn it there, all while being indoctrinated to perform acts of terrorism.

When IT-driven heuristics determine that you fit that profile, society is better off when you are intensively screened and searched upon reentry.

Re: What could happen if you refuse to unlock your phone at the US border?

#107

Post by pierrebai »

tptacek wrote: post #16
xenophonf wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CBP will begin asking everyone for Facebook logins. I don't understand how this doesn't run afoul of the Fourth Amendment. Surely one's social media qualifies as "papers" or "effects" even though they're digital artifacts and not physical. This just seems _incredibly_ invasive.

The international border is a longstanding exception to the Fourth Amendment: searches at borders are per se reasonable. The history of this exception goes all the way back to the founders, so there's probably no battle to be won over whether the exception is valid, only to what the limits of the exception are.

I'm not traveling while carrying Google's, Facebook's nor Yahoo's servers in my baggages. Asking for login information has nothing to do with importing goods. Login and password are not goods. It's invasion of privacy, pure and simple.

Why are the broder patrol not simply asking for login credentials straight out? Why carrying or not a phone has anything to do with asking for credentials? It's absurd.

Re: What could happen if you refuse to unlock your phone at the US border?

#108

Post by drvdevd »

no1youknowz wrote: post #19

One thing I have thought about. I have dozens of profiles which are just test accounts for social media, to hook up to applications I've been building. I've been thinking recently to just close all the accounts, including email. This will leave me in a state where I have pretty much no social accounts, just 1 email account which is used for friends/family. Are there any cases of individuals giving up their phone and…

I've wondered the same. What if you just opt out of 90% of everything? What are the implications of not using social media?

Re: What could happen if you refuse to unlock your phone at the US border?

#109

Post by ashark »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #68
ashark wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or instead of going through a bunch of effort in order to risk pissing off border agents with shenanigans, you can buy a dirt-cheap Android phone for travel. Bonus: then you don't have to worry about it being stolen, lost, or broken, either. It'd be a sensible move even without the border search risk. Incidentally, is this limited to phones? Are they only searching these accounts because they're authed to the phone t…

do you have a dirt-cheap android to recommend?

Moto G4 Play if you want something that's not totally disposable but is also sort-of an OK phone, by cheap Android phone standards. ~$130, which is pretty cheap for someone from the US on HN, most likely. You'd be sad to lose it but not that sad.

If you want an Android smartphone that's really cheap go to Wal-Mart. Unlocked Android phones south of $60.

If you can do without a smartphone you can get a dumb or feature phone for ~$10-$30.

There might even be better deals on Aliexpress or somewhere similar if you shop around.

Re: What could happen if you refuse to unlock your phone at the US border?

#110

Post by M_Grey »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #62
nkurz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: The policy also states that CBP or Immigration and Customs Enforcement "may demand technical assistance, including translation or decryption," citing a federal law, 19 US Code Section 507. A related document says that "officers may seek such assistance with or without individualized suspicion." Refusing to comply with this statute is "guilty of a misdemeanor and subject to a fine of not more than $1…

The OP article says this particular law hasn't really been tested in court, nobody's really sure if it's legal or not. One way to find out. I'm up for it. As a US citizen with white skin and money for a lawyer, it's unlikely anything _too_ terrible will happen to me. It is at worst a misdemeanor.

You want to bet on that, with the Trump administration? I'll say an 'ave' for you.
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