If you don't cooperate, they don't have to let you into the country. They can simply tell you to turn around and go somewhere else.
As a US citizen with no other nationality, where do I go exactly?
To a free country? The US has lost so many cogs of its democracy... How far is the day when some US citizen (journalists, intellectuals) start begging for political asylum in countries that don't pride themselves for being free (like Russia, Iran, Thailand or just even Europe)?
You most likely will need your phone when you're traveling, an easier solution is to remove all apps and data on the phone and then reinstall when you get to where you want.
Or perhaps enable the guest account with restricted permissions?
>You can be damn sure the government has a list of possible email addresses associated to individuals. things the government knows, and things that a CBP agent knows, are not the same thing. They NSA doesn't just provide their database to all the hundreds of thousands of front-line law enforcement agents. If you're being specifically targeted for some reason, enforcement agencies might be provided with a history of y…
Actually, you're wrong. Just recently Obama opened up data sharing between the NSA, FBI, CIA and hundreds of other agencies. Source: https://www.engadget.com/2017/01/12/obama-expands-the-nsas-a...
Obama made it easier for them to legally share data, that doesn't mean they opened the firehose the next day.
Supposing all this is true, and you leave your phone/laptop at home, what stops the the border control agent from demanding that you log in to your email and social media accounts on a device they provide before allowing entry?
Can someone clarify how if I can be compelled to unlock my password protected phone, they can't do the same with my social media, email, and other accounts? I feel like this author advocates for a stop-gap that may not even help in the long-run.
This is addressed a bit in the article. You can just tell them "I don't have a Facebook account", and there's really no easy way for them to verify this. If you're extra paranoid, you can create secondary accounts without much info and innocent posts/messages. There's no way for them to know you're logging into your border patrol FB account and not your "real" account.
I'm tempted to do something like this, but I'm worried it indicates a level of complacency with this madness.
It looks like it is going to be a new norm in the name of "security" - across the globe, not just US (or UK, or Canada...). Doesn't it point to something much more troublesome than what it seems? Thinking about the real motive, the root cause of all this kind of stuff (mass surveillance, security issues, privacy wars, encryption need, etc.), I could see no other reason than a flawed nature of human - the greed of power and sustaining it. You can do many kinds of tricks like wiping your devices, using multiple (fake) accounts, leaving your electronic devices at home while travelling and etc. But what if the using a smart phone, having a FB account become a mandatory thing by law in a couple years? That doesn't sound irrelevant now. It's a passing game between security forces, government(s) and wealthy people - they watch for each other's interests. I don't know if it sounds senseful to you. If it is, how do we fight that?
Really? Seems like a pretty silly conclusion. If you have important stuff on your phone, you should back it up. If you back it up it's not a deal to wipe it.
Wipe it, restore after crossing the border, it's not really a big deal.
This article says "It’s totally legal for a US Customs and Border Patrol officer to ask you to unlock your phone and hand it over to them. And they can detain you indefinitely if you don’t. Even if you’re a American citizen. [...] Barring the use of “excessive force,” agents can do whatever they want to you." and "[I]t’s illegal in most countries to profile individual travelers" I don't think any of these things is a…
It's not that I don't believe you but there are numerous examples of Canadians who have been denied entry to the United States because they refused to allow CBP to access digital devices or they allowed it but had 'incriminating evidence' like Muslim prayer videos or photos taken from areas in conflict as part of photojournalist work. Also afaik, the ACLU has lost cases pertaining to defending liberties at the border
The border situation is very difficult. (If you do have "numerous examples" of that, please let me know, because it's relevant to our writing and legal analysis. I care a lot about this, but I don't want anyone to get the wrong intuition about how frequent or infrequent a particular scenario or, as the lawyers say, fact pattern is. Maybe in the second case you're thinking specifically of Laura Poitras's experiences, or do you have some other cases in mind?)
I also agree that some border and immigration challenges are lost in court and that it's a legally difficult context in which to defend individual rights, and I was responding to the article's claim that the only court-recognized limit is "excessive force", which is unnecessarily pessimistic.