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US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years

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Re: US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years

#381

Post by Dma54rhs »

rjbwork wrote: post #378
jjtheblunt wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to some account in Nigeria. It must be awkward to be an honest Nigerian on Hacker News, since the country is famous for obvious online scams.

I worked with a great Nigerian dev some years ago. He contracted for us to do our frontend work. The stories this dude told were insane. He lived in Lagos, notorious for traffic jams. He would frequently get stuck in multi-hour long traffic jams just trying to get fuel for his electric generator. He had to do this to keep his power on during the routine black/brown outs that plagued the city, so that he could continu…

UAE imposed visa sanctions on Nigeria recently, afaik right now it would be impossible to immigrate there from Nigeria.

Re: US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years

#382

Post by jrockway »

nilespotter wrote: post #376
YeBanKo wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things like secured enclave should make it hard to extract private key from a device even if you have full access.

For my part I don't trust PRISM partner Apple to secure anything from the government, enclave or not.

Were any of the companies listed on the PRISM slide consensual partners? My understanding is that the NSA tapped the internal network in an era where mTLS wasn't rolled out. Everyone then saw the slides and rolled out mTLS.

Re: US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years

#384

Post by kube-system »

Grimburger wrote: post #217
browningstreet wrote: post #207

On my last trip back from Europe in June, when I re-entered the US, US Customs & Border Control didn't ask for my passport. No one did. They did wave a webcam connected to a computer in front of my face, and then a moment later, called out my name and said I could enter. Same with everyone coming through the international border area. I think that's just as weird a development and worthy of "WTH?" as this topic.

Pretty much all passports have biometrics now. I assume they can work out who you are from that. In Australia it's an autogate with a face scan for citizens and PR's, you only deal with a person if it can't identify you, which is rare.

All US passports issued in the past 15 years are biometric passports.

Re: US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years

#385

Post by thewebcount »

lizardactivist wrote: post #380

Imagine having a knock on your door because you exchanged a few friendly text messages 15 years ago with someone who is being investigated for a crime committed today. Citizens are suspects. Tourists are terrorists. Everyone is a potential criminal in the land of the free.

Something like this happened to a friend of mine. He was using a work-allocated phone. He didn't directly get contacted by authorities, but someone at the company tipped him off that they had been contacted.

Turns out the phone number he was assigned had previously belonged to a drug kingpin's burner phone or something like that. When my friend got a new phone and ended up with the number, he made calls from the US to Pakistan because he was going to attend a friend's wedding there. The authorities saw these things and at some point contacted the owner of the phone (the company) to try to figure out what was going on.

Re: US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years

#386

Post by formerly_proven »

macrolime wrote: post #227

Even if you are a person who will never in your life end up as any kind of person of interest for the government, handing over data in this way could still be quite dangerous. Phones will often contain data that can facilitate theft and fraud if ending up in the wrong hands. If they're able to copy everything, including private data from all apps that could be quite bad. For example many countries now use apps to log…

> Even if you are a person who will never in your life end up as any kind of person of interest for the government

Literally no way to ensure that.

Re: US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years

#387

Post by mring33621 »

Can I ask how long it takes to 'copy' someone's phone data?

The mid-level consumer tech I have access to takes a most of a work day to copy my wife's 80GB of iphone 7+ data to a flash drive.

Based on this, I doubt they have some sort of magic thing that will just copy everything on your phone as you pass through a checkpoint.

Do they hold you until the copy is done?

Or do they have some super fast thing that works on every device?

Honestly curious.

Re: US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years

#389

Post by elliekelly »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #367
macrolime wrote: post #227

Even if you are a person who will never in your life end up as any kind of person of interest for the government, handing over data in this way could still be quite dangerous. Phones will often contain data that can facilitate theft and fraud if ending up in the wrong hands. If they're able to copy everything, including private data from all apps that could be quite bad. For example many countries now use apps to log…

> to some account in Nigeria. It must be awkward to be an honest Nigerian on Hacker News, since the country is famous for obvious online scams.

I once sat through a “Pending Regulation of Cryptocurrency” CLE and one of the panelists was a real crypto-fanatic. He put up a slide about how quickly bitcoin was being adopted around the world and he kept excitedly saying how Nigeria was the fastest-growing crypto market in Africa! Another of the panelists was an FBI agent who investigates crypto-related crimes and when it was his turn he was quick to point out that rapid adoption of crypto in a country famous for internet scams isn’t exactly a selling point...

Re: US border forces are seizing Americans' phone data and storing it for 15 years

#390

Post by Dma54rhs »

MrDresden wrote: post #264

As a European I find it strange how the article and many comments here seem to focus only on it being US citizen's data being hovered up by the boarder control. No one's private data should be taken without a legitimate cause, no matter their nationality.

Why strange if we very much do the same at external borders? Especially asylum seekers who get their phones confiscated but all in all the system is very similar when you entry outside Schengen, only imo Americans are more paranoid in a good way, about their privacy unlike euros.
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