Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have unprecedented corruption in the White House but much of the other stuff is not new territory. It’s bad and a regression I hate to see. But we can always improve when the people demand better. The people always have the power, even if they don’t realize it. For the most part nothing has changed.
I remain hopeful that we will react to this latest test by improving the guardrails again. The current regime does not by any means have the popular support of the citizenry, so there is every reason to expect some backlash and consequences on the other end of this. It'll take years, though, to work through.
Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
491–500 of 1001 posts
Re: Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or keep it in a faraday bag and have the phone wipe if it sees it. If you're ever searched (or otherwise indisposed), they'll open the bag and wipe your phone for you.
> If you're ever searched (or otherwise indisposed), they'll open the bag and wipe your phone for you. Isn't that the same issue here that resulted in felony charges? Border agent was given a duress PIN and wiped the phone for the owner. Now owner is charged.
Re: Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
its only with the benefit of hindsight (and being on the winning side- thus the propaganda was never dispelled) that we consider the stasi and so on the way we do. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck.. might just be a duck. I don’t believe those living “normal lives” in East Germany or the Soviet era considered the police to be evil and invasive the way we do today.
> I don’t believe those living “normal lives” in East Germany or the Soviet era considered the police to be evil and invasive the way we do today. That's wrong. I am sure you do not speak German, because otherwise you'd have a lot more information available. If you do speak German, listen to Dieter Hallervorden. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJh9ejnpvFc He explained why he escaped from the DDR. And they AL…
He was not a “normal person”, normal people are like your neighbour who lives simply and doesn’t engage in politics except to share their discomfort about some relatively trivial grievance like the price of eggs.
Re: Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
#494Now I'm worried that this will be held against me..
Re: Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple makes this very easy. I broke an iPhone and bought a replacement. If you have iCloud, you login to the new phone and you can see which backups you can recover from. If you are transferring a phone, say you upgraded, it’s even easier. You can also image the phone with a connected laptop and store it on a backup drive, which is nice to not use up iCloud limits. The transfer and backup system are pretty much the s…
Aha that is actually pretty long
Re: Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
#496The naivete of some of the comments here is astounding. It doesn't matter whether you're right, it doesn't matter whether it's the law, it's irrelevant that you have rights, etc. Those things are of the past now, for the US. I think it would be easier to understand the playing field and choose your actions accordingly, if you accept the US has entered its East Germany / late 20th century Soviet era -- except of cours…
With all due respect, this is a wild take. Things aren't great in the U.S. right now, but they're not even in the same universe as what the Stasi was doing. > I think it would be easier to understand the playing field and choose your actions accordingly, if you accept the US has entered its East Germany / late 20th century Soviet era -- except of course with 1000x more invasive and effective surveillance tech.
Don't kid yourself. That's what they want. They're slowly testing to find out how much they can get away with. Would you have imagined that the nation would quietly sit back and allow what's been done so far ten or twenty years ago? Just because there have been large protests doesn't mean anything. Congress should have been outraged on both sides at this madness, but one side only cares about winning (so they like it) and the other is completely feckless.
Re: Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if you accept the US has entered its East Germany / late 20th century Soviet era -- except of course with 1000x more invasive and effective surveillance tech. I'm pretty optimistic that after the next general America will be ready to give up on the extremity of late turn over a new leaf. I fully expect a new president to be ushered in, whether R or D, and for some level of normalcy to start creeping back. The Sovie…
America dominance on the world is ending, it's a fact. East Asia is at least on par, India is china from 25 years ago. It's becoming more obvious every day. And yeah, people in 1910 watched Europe dominate the world for about 1500 years. Yet it came to an end. If you want to Speedrun the collapse, vote for trump. He sure is making a good job right now with diplomacy, lack of long term planning and just getting all yo…
Re: Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Those things are of the past now, for the US. It's a temporary situation, it isn't necessarily a permanent situation. Tell me how you think East Germany is doing these days. And no, it doesn't have to take 40 years to right the ship, so long as people get their heads out of their asses and vote. Things are likely to change by the end of this year, and in another 2 years we could have a very different government that…
On a long enough timeline, nothing is permanent. The question is how long it lasts and how bad it gets before it gets better. In terms of the ending, East Germany was nearly an ideal case. The state just sort of gently fell over. The country got absorbed into a friendly neighbor. There wasn't much loss of life, no widespread destruction. Then there's East Germany's predecessor state, which ended because it decided to…
Re: Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a half-truth. In a full banana republic, technical compliance with the law will not prevent consequences for failing to do what the authorities want. In a jurisdiction with perfect rule of law, it always will. The USA is somewhere in between. One of the laws that's enforced pretty well in the USA is the protection against unreasonable search. Most of the time, a search requires showing a judge evidence that t…
Agree with the thrust of your comment, but I had to comment on this: > In a full banana republic, technical compliance with the law will not prevent consequences for failing to do what the authorities want. In a jurisdiction with perfect rule of law, it always will. I think you may be misunderstanding that many laws, even in fair, just societies, are intentionally designed to be flexible. The real world is so variabl…
Re: Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
#500For exactly the border search scenario, I wish smartphones could be imaged and restored as easily as PCs. Imagine booting the phone from a flash drive, making an encrypted image of the phone on said drive, and writing a fresh OS before reaching the border. There's no deception required to protect sensitive data or avoid the seizure of an expensive phone. Consent to unlocking the phone, refuse to unlock the drive. The…
Those "nandroid" backups weren't "close" to that, they were literally that initially. Then, when Android phones started coming with the /sdcard partition mapped to the internal flash memory (a subdirectory of /data) instead of an actual SD card, the /data partition backup mechanism was changed to copy individual files into some sort of archive, but the end result remained the same. You can still do it on modern Andro…