Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any time I travel out of country, a week or two beforehand, I pull an old phone out of a drawer, factory reset it, and move my SIM card over. I don’t sign it in to any cloud services. I’ll install a few apps (browser, news reader, YouTube, maps, stuff like that) but nothing of any real substance. For the couple weeks until I travel I carry both phones, collecting a bit of data, the odd text message from my mom, snap…
The stupid thing about this whole security charade is that this is exactly what any serious actor would do if they actually had sinister motives for entering the country, so the policy is only punishing ordinary people who were no threat in the first place or occasionally by accident catching a dumb criminal who probably would've been caught eventually anyway.
No non-idiot criminal or terrorist was going to ever get picked up at the border. It’s the equivalent of getting arrested with 60lbs of pot in your trunk when you got pulled over for speeding through a red light in a car with a burned out headlight.
It’s especially hilarious going though this shit as a Canadian crossing into the US.
Like, if I drove a mile east or west I’d literally have to “off road” my way through a dozen feet of grass and I’d be over the border. I mean, shit, look at places like Point Roberts. Literally crossing some roads moves you between countries. In others the only reason you’ll know you moved between countries is a vaguely angry sign saying if you walk past it it would be illegally entering the US.
The whole thing was only ever going to catch dumb criminals. And yet it’s done well enough that they keep doing it.