New DHS policy on demands for passwords to travelers’ electronic devices

So the DHS requesting you passwords in order to enter and the DHS collecting your facial scan in order to exit will effectively bookend the experience of visiting the USA.

This agency seems to increasingly act with complete autonomy and impunity. The culture there seems to be one of arrogance and disregard. This is evident all the way down to the clowns at the airport who berate and harass regular folks who are just trying to get somewhere.

This link[0] is admittedly an advert for legal services, but there are a couple of interesting snippets in there such as:

> ... if you have been refused entry into the United States at any point in the past, even for an expired passport, the previous denial is reasoning enough for future denial.

IANAL but my understanding is that for non-residents there's no legal obligation to admit you outside of maybe some of the international refugee conventions (which are unlikely to apply). The law is deliberately discretionary. A refusal to admit can be based purely on "suspicion". You can imagine a CBP officer finding you suspicious (rightly or wrongly) because you refuse to hand over your passwords even if they don't have a legal right to force you to hand them over. They can simply offer you a choice of handing them over or going home.

To be clear: I'm not advocating for this state of affairs, but it does appear to be the case.

[0] https://www.visaplace.com/blog-immigration-law/denied-entry-...

Do a full backup. Wipe the phone, log in with child account.

You can now redownload a few key apps needed for the trip, as well as some normal apps: weather, TripIt/Uber/CityMapper, games, etc. Because it’s a family account, all the re-downloads are free.

Share essential data (that you don’t mind being taken) from your own account to this account the way you would to another family member. Use the iCloud “Family” calendar for your trip planning (useful anyway to share travel plans with partner etc), or subscribe this account to e.g. your TripIt/TripCase calendar. Invite this child account as a family member for your smart home etc., using child (parental controlled) config where available so it’s not an admin. Use secure Shared Notes from Apple Notes or Evernote to bridge travel lists. Subscribe to a shared iCloud Photos album so you can seamlessly post photos taken with this account back to your primary account (and that album will only contain photos you intend to be visible on this persona). Load in your business’s main contact info, your personal contact card with your business email and number, and then contacts for airlines, car rentals, hotels, and customer support numbers you use. If traveling with a partner, load their contact in as well, also using work info. Include a contact record for the ‘emergency contact’ you already disclosed on other forms (airline, customs). If the device is lost, searched, etc., revoke this child from everything you’d shared to it from.

If you need access to more while traveling, look into 1Password’s travel mode, and share a travel-safe vault from yourself to yourself:

https://blog.agilebits.com/2017/05/18/introducing-travel-mod...

When you are set up as you like, backup to iCloud. In the future, you can restore from this backup.

Caveat: On the parent ID, avoid applications that mark their data to exclude from iCloud backups unless they sync themselves to the cloud and auto-restore the data when restoring that Apple ID to a new device. For such apps, you will have to manually recreate their data, or use legacy iTunes wired backup and restore which defeats the purpose if you wish to restore at your trip destination. A common example might be Google Authenticator.

Pro-Tip: Restoring very large numbers of apps, as well as iCloud data such as files and photos, can take a very long time OTA. On a home Mac, set up iCloud Content Caching with a sufficient size to cache all apps, documents, and photo data, to radically improve restore times:

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/about-content...

This will speed up app restore for the child account as well, though that shouldn’t be an issue as you’ll maintain a very small number of apps.

The device will be useful from home to destination, and info (notes, photos, etc.) on the go can be shared back to the parent. Depending on length of trip, you can restore to your primary ID at destination and then flip again for the trip home.

The device will be normal.