51–60 of 308 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there's no way to verify Obscuring in this manner likely counts as lying to a federal officer, particularly if they catch on and ask if this is your main profile.
INAL but I don't think that legally it would be lying. I believe lying requires more than not complying. Plus, we always have the right to remain silent.
If you want to keep your phone secure, enable a long passcode, turn on full device encryption, and turn it off. If you are a US citizen, you can't be turned away at the border or forced to unlock the device. If you're not a US citizen or don't want to be harrassed by customs, bring a burner phone. Tools like Cellebrite can and do take advantage of security vulnerabilities. Turning off pair locking lulls users into a…
I really wish Apple would put something in place where you effectively have two user accounts. If you type your actually passcode, it's just your normal account. If you type another specific passcode, it's a burner account with minimal apps and information. It has enough info to make it look like it's being used, but nothing important. Obviously border control would quickly know about this, but there's no way to veri…
Have fun.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there's no way to verify Obscuring in this manner likely counts as lying to a federal officer, particularly if they catch on and ask if this is your main profile.
INAL but I don't think that legally it would be lying. I believe lying requires more than not complying. Plus, we always have the right to remain silent.
No you don't. Not at the border.
If you want to keep your phone secure, enable a long passcode, turn on full device encryption, and turn it off. If you are a US citizen, you can't be turned away at the border or forced to unlock the device. If you're not a US citizen or don't want to be harrassed by customs, bring a burner phone. Tools like Cellebrite can and do take advantage of security vulnerabilities. Turning off pair locking lulls users into a…
A warrant is not required. Federal agents can search your phone at the US border, even if you're a US citizen [1]. If they can't unlock it, they can seize it [2].
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/can-us-border-agents-search-...
[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/05/01/u-s-customs-c...
> Pair locking is a useful feature to protect yourself against invasive device searches. Probably also a good way to get onto no-fly lists, and spend hours in detention, etc.
...but it's no different in that respect than declining to unlock, which I imagine pretty much everyone on this site will do in such a situation. > get onto no-fly lists Source? I can't find evidence that anyone has ever been added to a no-fly list for declining to unlock.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you are a US citizen, you can't be turned away at the border or forced to unlock the device. There's an important divide between what customs is supposed to do, and what they might actually do in practice. Going through customs means putting yourself at the whims of people that you do not control. If you're a white male, there's perhaps less of a chance that a bad employee will feel they can take advantage of yo…
Eventually they have to let you through though. They can't send you to a detention center for not unlocking your phone, you're a US citizen and you're not being compelled by a court to do anything. They might keep you in a room for many hours but at the end of the day they will let you go and you'll have a good story to tell the news channels.
This is a dumb idea if you want to actually take your flight in this situation instead of spending hours discussing privacy with TSA agents. But I also wonder what is it that they expect to find during these searches. In the world where I can transfer my criminal activity data through the likes of Dropbox (in encrypted form, of course), why would I have it on my phone or a laptop? What's the goal here?
And here I thought that they'd just put you in a small jail cell for days.
An alternative: make a full backup of your phone, then restore your phone with a different backup with less personal information, and then once you cross the border you restore your phone using the first backup.
This was super easy when I had TWRP recovery. Is there an official Android way to pull a full system backup?
Stopping piracy, enforcing secure storage for apps (eg. Fingerprint storage), and protecting DRM keys are all fairly incompatible with being able to backup and restore the entire device.
If you want to keep your phone secure, enable a long passcode, turn on full device encryption, and turn it off. If you are a US citizen, you can't be turned away at the border or forced to unlock the device. If you're not a US citizen or don't want to be harrassed by customs, bring a burner phone. Tools like Cellebrite can and do take advantage of security vulnerabilities. Turning off pair locking lulls users into a…
I really wish Apple would put something in place where you effectively have two user accounts. If you type your actually passcode, it's just your normal account. If you type another specific passcode, it's a burner account with minimal apps and information. It has enough info to make it look like it's being used, but nothing important. Obviously border control would quickly know about this, but there's no way to veri…
Asking general HN audience: Are you willing to do this? I don't travel often, but this looks like a good option to have... although I don't really do any finicky stuff with machines/phones/etc that I use regularly. if I were using a RPI3 as a phone then I'd 100% do something like this (hope you understand the analogy).