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US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

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Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#601

Post by vintermann »

frgturpwd wrote: post #501
mcv wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security concerns you need to think about when visiting the US are absolutely no less than those when visiting China these days. Treat it like a totalitarian dictatorship with more technological means.

Honestly, I personally would be less nervous visiting China.

Maybe marginally, but I'm still not visiting any county where I would be in trouble if the government/police knew my opinions of them. That's not just the obvious ones like US, Russia and China, but also countries like Thailand, Egypt, UAE, Israel to name a few. I like seeing the world, but not that much.

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#602

Post by deadbabe »

drewfax wrote: post #184
deadbabe wrote: post #89

I don’t understand why phones can’t just have decoy profiles you can activate via PIN that look like regular harmless user profiles? Especially now with AI you can quickly populate with a bunch of plausible data. Or better, have PIN for taking you to your criminal/secret profile instead.

How would it work? Isn't it easy for the authorities to check the list of users on the device?

The PIN you enter determines what profile opens up, and they are not connected to each other at all, they are isolated.

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#603

Post by InsideOutSanta »

Zak wrote: post #591
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With self-hosting, it's possible to easily bootstrap a clean phone with all your data and passwords from scratch, without relying on any third-party cloud services. The only thing you need to bring across the border is your brain (which contains the most basic information on how to set up your password manager) and maybe some kind of 2FA generator. Your password manager then contains all the other information you nee…

Possible, yes. Easy, not so much. Phone operating systems don't really place nice with local backup and restore, which I consider a serious flaw.

I'm not sure what you're referring to, but what I basically do is self-host everything that stores relevant data: Vaultwarden, Immich, Notesnook, etc. I only know how to set up Bitwarden and my 2FA generator from scratch, so when I get a new phone, I install Bitwarden and the 2FA app and set them up.

Then everything else is documented inside Bitwarden. It's just a matter of installing the apps and logging in using the credentials stored in Bitwarden and a 2FA token generator.

There's no need for relying on any phone OS features.

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#604

Post by wartywhoa23 »

wraptile wrote: post #244
sire-vc wrote: post #226

To everyone who thinks this is somehow a violation of rights: if you were being questioned by border officers, and were asked 'Sir could you please open your suitcase', and you pressed a button that caused it to burst into flames, there isn't a country in the entire world that wouldn't arrest you on the spot. Why would 'wipe a phone when officer requests it opened' be treated any differently? Suspicious behaviour is…

material =/= information. Are we supposed to live in a world where if I'm crossing a border I must give access to all of my information? That's absurd and more equivalent to a full brain/memory scan than a suitcase search from your example. This is dystopian in every sense of the word.

The Overton window of this fucking prison planet went so far that there's little to no discussion on how absurd and dystopian it is.

And rest assured, when it gets to actual full brain scans, the corresponding threads will be chock full of scum tasked to normalize that.

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#605

Post by inigyou »

invalidusernam3 wrote: post #483
itake wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you share the link? This? https://www.eff.org/document/eff-border-search-pocket-guide ---- Seems the better strategy (for iOS) is come in with a plan to say yes to agents without pissing them off (like handing them an empty phone). better to local back up, encrypt, upload to your home server etc. Then login to a fresh iCloud account, selectively install apps, photos, and mail accounts. So it doesn't look like you…

This seems like an insane thing to have to do for visiting a supposed first world country. If phones had been around during USSR times I imagine you would have had to do the same. Personally I will rather just avoid any travel to the US, and I hope others do the same.

The US is first world on a technicality: the first world is defined as countries that were allied with the US during the cold war. If not for that, it'd be classified as developing.

It's common to mix up developing/developed and third/first world because they were largely aligned during the cold war. But there is one first-world developing country.

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#606

Post by kelnos »

dgoldstein0 wrote: post #467
Telaneo wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but then says he can't have me disrespecting and being a smart-ass to his cops Maybe it's just me, but I am of the exact opposite opinion. Cops have enormous power, and any misuse of it should be pushed back on hard. Cops that misuse their power should not be respected. An informed citizenry is a wonderful asset in making that power imbalance less of a problem.

There's a difference between polite pushback and being straight up disrespectful. It shouldn't matter as the cops shouldn't abuse their power and shouldn't attack people, but we live in the real world. The judge probably didn't want to have to deal with the potential future mess if op didn't learn their lesson and got beat up by a cop.

Sure, I agree that we should be polite and respectful to random people, cops included, but that judge decided that it was illegal to be disrespectful to a cop, which is pretty fucked up.

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#607

Post by Markoff »

mcv wrote: post #493
invalidusernam3 wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like an insane thing to have to do for visiting a supposed first world country. If phones had been around during USSR times I imagine you would have had to do the same. Personally I will rather just avoid any travel to the US, and I hope others do the same.

Security concerns you need to think about when visiting the US are absolutely no less than those when visiting China these days. Treat it like a totalitarian dictatorship with more technological means.

Nobody in China cares about your phone/laptop.*

*Unless you are (well) known dissident/journalisy/politician.

US is much more totalitarian than China. Lived in China for years, had multiple times various visa/residence permit issues with police and guess what, nobody cared about my electronics or was sending me to any detention, all I've got were quie helpful officers trying to find workarounds for me to deal with the situation.

Same thing on my last trin in summer 2025, we didn't stay in hotel, didn't go to register to police as you are supposed to and when crossing province border checkpoint guess what happened - they let us go to our tourist sight and told us to just register after weekend and as usual officers in police station couldn't care less, they just registered us without any issues.

You can complain about plenty things in China, there sure is a lot of bureaucracy but when you actually have to deal with them, they are pretty laidback and trying to be helpful usually.

By these standards and my experiences with registration in police stations in other two EU countries I can tell you China was the friendliest most laidback and convenient experience.

People who claim China is totalitarian dictatorship clearly never been to China and should get off their high horse, China nowadays make less trouble for their own citizens than EU hating them trying to make lives of EU citizens as inconvenient and expensive as possible.

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#608

Post by bambax »

invalidusernam3 wrote: post #483
itake wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you share the link? This? https://www.eff.org/document/eff-border-search-pocket-guide ---- Seems the better strategy (for iOS) is come in with a plan to say yes to agents without pissing them off (like handing them an empty phone). better to local back up, encrypt, upload to your home server etc. Then login to a fresh iCloud account, selectively install apps, photos, and mail accounts. So it doesn't look like you…

This seems like an insane thing to have to do for visiting a supposed first world country. If phones had been around during USSR times I imagine you would have had to do the same. Personally I will rather just avoid any travel to the US, and I hope others do the same.

Yes, I will probably never go back to the US. But I find it sad that my kids for example, will have to think twice before visiting, if they do.

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#609

Post by wartywhoa23 »

drdrek wrote: post #401

My bets for the actual story behind this are: 95% a criminal hiding evidence 4.99% an autistic attempt to "keep his privacy" for no reason at all 0.01% a genuine need to keep something away from the government In all cases just don't cross security checks with evidence you wouldn't want to be seized, its not that hard

Wrote someone who's got a CCTV camera installed inside his toilet bowl, no less! Right?

The Bentham business is alive and kicking.

Re: US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

#610

Post by vintermann »

adrianN wrote: post #550
itake wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity, like what country would you not have to worry about this in? The US is quite transparent about these rules, and certainly other countries are not necessarily searching peoples phones as publicly But anytime I transit a country USA or any thing I fully expect to have zero rights

European citizens can travel in the EU without even noticing that they are crossing borders most of the time. I once got lost on my bike and accidentally ended up in France for example.

And if you're unpopular enough, they can also abuse arrest warrants for political persecution from another country. Case in point, captain Tommy Olsen from Norway, who Greek authorities accused of "human trafficking" for helping boat refugees.

They've deliberately made it very easy to request arrests across borders, so it isn't all rosy. One of the reasons it really sucks for everyone when an EU country starts slipping towards fascism.

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