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US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years

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Re: US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years

#361

Post by woodruffw »

gmadsen wrote: post #350
woodruffw wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there are. I said that in the last comment. There are two points here: * Estimates of "darknet" economies (and "criminal" economies in general) strongly express preferences for the mostly unfalsifiable LEO hypothesis that there's lots of crime just floating around out there , and they could do so much more about it if we just put up with a little more surveillance, etc. * There's no particular evidence that…

there is without a doubt a correlation between the significance of criminal enterprise and the rate of getting caught. they may be catching some low level movers with these practices, but not much else above that. The evidence is that there is functioning enterprises in the first place. If captures at the border were a normal distribution of all criminal competency.. that would be destabilizing to a trillion dollar i…

> there is without a doubt a correlation between the significance of criminal enterprise and the rate of getting caught.

This is the problem with unfalsifiable claims. Why is that "without a doubt"?

I can formulate a just as intuitive (and just as baseless) claim: less significant criminal enterprises get caught less, since they fail the "significance" test.

Re: US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years

#362

Post by peteradio »

chubot wrote: post #229
988747 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, just 5 minutes ago I read a story about Iranian 'hacker' who wrote a ransomware note in Microsoft Word, so the file metadata contained his full name :)

Similar SecOps problems happened to both John McAfee and the Silk Road founder. As far as I remember, McAfee shared an iPhone photo with location metadata when he was in Belize, so American authorities were able to track him down. The Silk Road founder had some sort of PHP coding error which led police to his San Francisco location. That is, you could simply visit the Silk Road home page and his location leaked. So y…

Eh? I thought silk road guy had old stack overflow questions with same alias or something.

Re: US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years

#363

Post by KMuncie »

arkadiyt wrote: post #270

Reminder for the folks using iPhones, you can prevent law enforcement from doing this by "pair locking" your device: https://arkadiyt.com/2019/10/07/pair-locking-your-iphone-wit...

Isn't the new Lockdown Mode also a way to prevent this?

Re: US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years

#364

Post by rsync »

chubot wrote: post #229
988747 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, just 5 minutes ago I read a story about Iranian 'hacker' who wrote a ransomware note in Microsoft Word, so the file metadata contained his full name :)

Similar SecOps problems happened to both John McAfee and the Silk Road founder. As far as I remember, McAfee shared an iPhone photo with location metadata when he was in Belize, so American authorities were able to track him down. The Silk Road founder had some sort of PHP coding error which led police to his San Francisco location. That is, you could simply visit the Silk Road home page and his location leaked. So y…

"As far as I remember, McAfee shared an iPhone photo with location metadata ..."

This reminds me of the workflow I use for publishing pictures on my website:

  magick convert IMG_2673.HEIC -strip -quality 80 -shave 10x10 -resize 91.1% -attenuate 1.0 +noise Uniform out.jpg  ;  exiftool -a -u -g1 out.jpg
(where 80 is a random number between 75 and 85 I choose at the time and 91.1 is a random (real) number between 91.0 and 91.9)

You cannot exiftool purge a HEIC because it breaks it - you need to exiftool purge the resulting jpeg ... also, weirdly, -attenuate needs to come before the +noise switch in the command line.

Re: US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years

#365

Post by JohnFen »

notch656a wrote: post #348
JohnFen wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why even bother with plausible activity? Just don't have your real phone with you at all. You can't produce what's not in your possession.

"Oh you have no phone and nothing to search? There must be drugs up your asshole" My true story as a US citizen re-entering America. Enjoy!

There are (still) lots of US citizens who don't own a cellphone and so couldn't produce one. Are all of those subject to a cavity search? If that were common, I'd think I'd heard of it by now.

In any case, if the choice is between having a copy of the contents of my phone made, or being detained and cavity-searched, I'll take the detention and cavity search.

Re: US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years

#366

Post by LightG »

YeBanKo wrote: post #304
macrolime wrote: post #227

Even if you are a person who will never in your life end up as any kind of person of interest for the government, handing over data in this way could still be quite dangerous. Phones will often contain data that can facilitate theft and fraud if ending up in the wrong hands. If they're able to copy everything, including private data from all apps that could be quite bad. For example many countries now use apps to log…

Things like secured enclave should make it hard to extract private key from a device even if you have full access.

You're giving way too much credit to reality...

Re: US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years

#367

Post by jjtheblunt »

macrolime wrote: post #227

Even if you are a person who will never in your life end up as any kind of person of interest for the government, handing over data in this way could still be quite dangerous. Phones will often contain data that can facilitate theft and fraud if ending up in the wrong hands. If they're able to copy everything, including private data from all apps that could be quite bad. For example many countries now use apps to log…

> to some account in Nigeria.

It must be awkward to be an honest Nigerian on Hacker News, since the country is famous for obvious online scams.

Re: US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years

#368

Post by jollyllama »

dylan604 wrote: post #328
jollyllama wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they just don't scan your laptop or phone if you gum up all the ports? They wouldn't pop out your hard drive? An alternative solution might be to backup to microsds.

Pulling out the hard drive might be effective if it's 2002 or something. If you have a modern laptop like a MBP, then the drive isn't really removable. If you were to remove it, the use of encryption linked to the T2 chip makes the thing useless.

Good point. I don't travel a lot and I use old hardware.

Re: US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years

#369

Post by arkadiyt »

KMuncie wrote: post #363
arkadiyt wrote: post #270

Reminder for the folks using iPhones, you can prevent law enforcement from doing this by "pair locking" your device: https://arkadiyt.com/2019/10/07/pair-locking-your-iphone-wit...

Isn't the new Lockdown Mode also a way to prevent this?

Yes, although if the premise is that you're being compelled to unlock your device by law enforcement then it seems like they could also compel you to disable Lockdown Mode and restart your device - that's not possible with Pair Locking.

Re: US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years

#370

Post by phpthrowaway99 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #192
throwoutway wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me know how successful you are crossing the border and getting home when you tell CBP to “pound sand”. They’ll just deny you entry and you’re left with very little recourse. Effectively they are the judge and jury and you’re stuck in the waiting area if you’re lucky, a holding cell if you’re not If you think you’re immune just because you’re a US citizen, you’re not.

> If you think you’re immune just because you’re a US citizen, you’re not. That's a pretty big claim, do you have a particular example in mind? You might have your phone seized, sure, but denying a citizen entry to the country? Even CBP understands they can't do that and it would make the evening news if they did it.

This thread is confusing. Are you implying that Canada can't deny entry to Canada to an American?

Canada denies entry to tons of Americans. Americans with a DUI on their record have trouble visiting Canada.

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