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How to Keep ICE Agents Out of Your Devices at Airports

theintercept.com

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Re: How to Keep ICE Agents Out of Your Devices at Airports

#2

Post by mothballed »

I treat all items on an international trip as disposable. Been robbed by thieves, police (Mexico lol), and brutalized by US CBP enough to know it's not worth it to try and take anything across borders besides the shirt on your back. Anything carried is a liability for them to claim you filled some customs form wrong or to fake a drug dog hit on it.

Re: How to Keep ICE Agents Out of Your Devices at Airports

#7

Post by blovescoffee »

seethishat wrote: post #4

Don't carry them with you. I'm old and I can tell you from experience... you can live life without holding a cellphone all the time. It's not as hard as you think.

Do you really recommend people travel internationally in 2026 without a cellphone? I’m kind of bewildered by this suggestion. As someone who has to go between LATAM and US frequently, I have no choice but to bring my cellphone.

Re: How to Keep ICE Agents Out of Your Devices at Airports

#9

Post by techsupporter »

seethishat wrote: post #4

Don't carry them with you. I'm old and I can tell you from experience... you can live life without holding a cellphone all the time. It's not as hard as you think.

> ... I'm old ... you can live life without holding a cellphone all the time. It's not as hard as you think.

I'm in my 50s and I don't know where this stance comes from. Sure, you physically can in the same sense that anywhere can be walked to if you're willing to walk long enough. But so many businesses and services have gone "mobile-first" or "mobile-only" to the point that if you're traveling for leisure you're doing extra work on your vacation, and if you're traveling for business you're wasting time that could be used doing your job. Just as a first order, the denizens of every airline subreddit will tell you that the most useful tool during a trip is the airline's mobile app and that's either tied with or just above or below the Flighty app if anything goes wrong.

Combine that with QR codes for everything from menus to parking, public transit tickets and fare cards that can be easily loaded into a phone instead of using a ticket machine made when we were kids, or paper maps increasingly hard to find if they're available at all, and you're looking at a real challenge. How are you going to talk to and plan with your travel partner or colleagues with payphones removed?

It's also not incumbent upon us to make the government's life easier by making our lives harder. "Just leave your phone at home" is ludicrous behavior to expect when it's the government being the intrusive jerks.

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