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How to lock down your phone if you're traveling to the U.S.

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Re: How to lock down your phone if you're traveling to the U.S.

#171
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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For now. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/trump-deporting-us-cit...

Being from Germany our history classes in school went into great depth about the countries past - and I can't help but feel increasingly scared and left utterly speechless by all the parallels I'm seeing unfolding in the US ...

Re: How to lock down your phone if you're traveling to the U.S.

#172
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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I’ll add a few more freedoms.

1. Can’t walk about drinking a beer.

2. Can’t carry too much cash or it’s at risk of being confiscated.

3. Criminalization of walking. https://illinoislawreview.org/print/vol-2017-no-3/the-crimin...

4. Pretty much have to own a car in most places.

5. Thousands of polling stations closed since the Voting Rights Act was gutted.

6. Federal politics held hostage by low population states. It’s insane that North Dakota has slightly less federal power than Texas.

7. Not even the House of Representatives has proportional representation.

Re: How to lock down your phone if you're traveling to the U.S.

#173
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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The OP was talking the "leader of the free world" You are talking about America That's two very different things

Leader of the free world almost always refers to the U.S. President or the U.S. itself depending on context.

Re: How to lock down your phone if you're traveling to the U.S.

#174
post #115

It's surreal for me to see such a headline and article on a major US newspaper.

we still have freedom of speech for now at least, actual citizens do, anyway

The nutso thing is this idea that there is no freedom of speech for non-citizens. Now that we're eliminating birthright citizenship and allowing people to be deported to El Salvador with no due process it's pretty easy to just declare someone a non-citizen because they can't provide their great-great-great-great-grandmother's birth certificate from 1783 that proves that they have citizenship going back to the founding of the country, then just put you on a flight to wherever they want so that you can't hire a lawyer in the US to fight for you. The only reason that hairdresser has anyone speaking for him at the moment is because he has family in the US and they have been able to find a lawyer.

Re: How to lock down your phone if you're traveling to the U.S.

#175
post #4

"Locking down" is almost always a bad approach when it comes to border crossings. You have very little rights at the border, so keeping your phone locked and refusing to divulge the 20 characters password isn't really an option. Even without the threat of detaining you, they can refuse entry (if you're not a citizen/permanent resident), or seize your $1000 phone/laptop. Far better to wipe your phone and restore from…

>or seize your $1000 phone/laptop. So be it. I used to say that the reason I valued my privacy was not that I did not trust my government _today_, it was the fact that data would be available to every potential authoritarian government _tomorrow_. Welp, today has become tomorrow, and yeah, I'd _absolutely_ rather just have my devices seized than have the contents of my phone dumped into a database that can be searche…

Having your $1000 device stolen by the government as an acceptable outcome is something only a fatcat on HN with their cushy salary would be able to tolerate. I'm not a FAANG employee, and don't make that kind of salary. Loosing a $1k anything would not be something I could just shrug my shoulders and just turn around and immediately replace it.

Even if you do sue the gov't, it'll be at least a year before any kind of resolution that results in the return of that device. Them keeping my phone would be one thing, but if they also kept my laptop, I'd be screwed. My laptop is much more than $1k, and there's no free laptop with contract cell service I could use to replace it. Now I'd be without a means of working.

These kinds of situations make me really yearn for the days of replacing the internal hard drive of a laptop. I could swap out my daily use drive for a travel drive, which would be much less of a hassle than the options on offer for modern laptops.

Re: How to lock down your phone if you're traveling to the U.S.

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Really feel like point number two weakens your overall point here

That businesses are allowed to surprise you with unexpected fees is a negative thing. How can you interpret it otherwise?

Re: How to lock down your phone if you're traveling to the U.S.

#177
post #33

This article is a nice reminder that free speech is awesome. Also, it is terribly unhelpful and uninformative. Schneier’s blog post on this has tons of useful information in the comments: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/04/cell-phone-op... The EFF wrote the canonical guide to this in 2017: https://www.eff.org/wp/digital-privacy-us-border-2017 . I don’t know if it has been updated, but there is a lot that’…

As a US citizen it is still a bit useful. You cannot be denied entry (CBP has told me they would deny me entry, but in the end they just threaten to revoke your passport which is also a lie). If they have decided they want to search your phone, they will tell you that you just have to answer the questions and they will let you out in time to catch your next flight or whatever. The truth is they are vicious liars, as…

They have always been assholes. I was detained by CBP back in 1997 returning from Europe (through O'Hare airport), even though all my papers were in order (I am a natural-born citizen and I had my passport) because I was overheard speaking Spanish (I was returning from a study-abroad trip to Spain). Someone actually demanded to know where in Mexico I was born, even though, as I said, I had my passport, state ID, and birth cert all right there with me. They just dumped me in a waiting room for 90m (long enough to miss my flight), then told me to go with no explanation or apology. On the way out someone laughed and told me they didn't know why I was detained but I "looked like a terrorist" (I had a full beard at the time). Mind you, this was before 9/11 so I'm sure it's worse now.

Re: How to lock down your phone if you're traveling to the U.S.

#178
post #113

> Before traveling, back up your devices so you don’t lose anything permanently. Then delete anything you’re worried about being misinterpreted or saved by the government. That can include conversations that compromise the privacy of the people on the other end. You might delete messages about politics, contact information for political dissidents, apps that save offline copies of sensitive documents like Google Docs…

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Re: How to lock down your phone if you're traveling to the U.S.

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Just don’t share opinions” is not an option for a free society. Being gagged for fear of retribution from a foreign government is not beneficial to my mental health.

Then don't travel, in many countries the penalty for disparaging the leader of that country is quite severe.

It’s sad that the USA is becoming one of these countries. But yes, that’s what I’m doing - travelling to free countries and avoiding the backwards ones.

Re: How to lock down your phone if you're traveling to the U.S.

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For now. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/trump-deporting-us-cit...

Being from Germany our history classes in school went into great depth about the countries past - and I can't help but feel increasingly scared and left utterly speechless by all the parallels I'm seeing unfolding in the US ...

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