Six of the eleven times...

Crazy.

What city was this, if you don't mind me asking?

That is insane. Where do you live?

Brazil maybe?

I will ask this here again:

At what point did the German people find it morally acceptable to start killing Nazis?

At what point will the US stop accepting the boot and act to remove the tyranny stamping on our collective face?

> the issue is that when a phone is unlocked, they can just plug in a USB device and scrape everything off it

That's useless if the backup account and the main account use different keys for the home partition.

VeraCrypt (used to?) have this. It was called a hidden volume. One volume, but two keys, two passwords, and two different containers full of data. Technically, the second volume is written into the partition "from the back" using key 2, while the first volume is written "from the front" using key 1.

Fun fact, there's no protection against writing over data in the other volume if volume 1 + volume 2 exceed the size of the partition - and there can't be, otherwise the volume wouldn't be hidden.

Why does the USB port need to even work anyways? It could just be designed to look like a USB port but fry whatever expensive and proprietary phone hacking device they bought from some scuzzy Israeli ‘security’ company when it’s plugged in.

For now the courts in the US have set a different barrier for automated extraction and hand searches. For now.

It's hard to justify an iPhone Pro Max as a "cheap travel phone" though so you might actually need to buy a cheap travel phone.

> [most]

Your word memory is faulty as well

I hope to meet one some day.

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.

I wouldn't say you are overreacting at all. I know someone who was detained for months on US soil after a phone search where the only "evidence" against him they found is illegal content sent by someone else to him on a group chat he doesn't even check. Had to get a lawyer and spend time in prison just waiting to be deported back.

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.

My dad's eighty+ years old, he was born in the States, though he did give up his citizenship. He brings a "fake" phone when visiting family, he's been doing so for years.

Me; I just change all my tabs and recent history to slightly kinky porn and truth social. They do look hard, but they don't look hard.

I used to love visiting the US. I have many friends there, and I really enjoy staying in places like Seattle and SF. But I haven't gone there since Trump 1.

That said, I think protecting your privacy is a good idea in general.

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.

> for visiting a supposed first world country.

... which by now is a banana republic of the worst kind. Can you interact sanely with an insane counterpart? Avoiding to visit would be my recommendation too.

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

You're right for non-citizens.

For citizens, no one needs to believe it. You give them your empty phone and they can't download your phone contents and contacts.

The point is not what they believe, but how to avoid both breaking the law and not giving up your data, isn't it?

As long as that's legal, what they believe doesn't matter.

You are not legally obliged to keep your data on your devices all the time.

What do you mean?

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.

Yeah, but go tell that to the judge who’s just about to slap you with a sentence.

Unless you want to fight that all the way up the judicial food chain

There's a huge difference between misusing their power and not having perfect understanding of what they're allowed and not allowed to do.

I'm sure there are scenarios where the cop can confiscate the surfboard and the car. The distinction is probably somewhat vague even for highly educated lawyers, and cops cannot expected to be that.

He should have stood up for his rights, sure, but laughing in the cop's face and telling them they're full of shit is disrespectful, and at least where I live is a misdemeanor even if the original case is wrong.

To be fair to the judge we all had broken an ordinance about surfing in a certain area. It was enacted to protect swimmers in the summer. With that said, there was a storm with wind, rain, and currents that had pushed us into the area. Obviously there were also no swimmers out.

The ordinance was removed a few years later. This cop was also known to hate surfers. All the small beach town BS you hear about.

at some point you just take your lumps.

Most people don’t have boundless time or energy and just want things to go away.

… ironically this fact is used a lot in gaining confessions by police.

That's interesting. I don't even know most of my passwords (thanks to password managers).

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 need to get everything running.

I don't think it ever makes sense to transport actual data across borders if you care about governments gaining access to it.

"Wiping is obviously extremely suspicious and asking for trouble"

It's sad this is the default view. It's his device, his data, his life on that phone. If he had wiped the phone before the interrogation it wouldn't be a problem. How long before? A second before? A week before? But wiping the data a minute later is suddenly asking for trouble.

We noted in the border search guide that lying to the agents in response to their questions is potentially a crime in its own right (even if it's not done in order to hide anything illegal). We thought that this made hidden volumes quite tricky, particularly if one's intent was to pretend to comply with a question or request while actually not complying.

Problem is „are you sure you marked for deletion all the correct things” because you could have already deleted it before traveling or moved to other device you don’t travel with.

Selection on border control might be arbitrary, they can hold you or send you back over a photo or something you wouldn’t think should be a problem.

Ideally you would like to have all wiped just in case but then you really stand out…

That's a more risky strategy. What if you added new files since the last time you updated the deletion profile? It's also technically more challenging. You have to think about what might be in RAM, caches, backups, etc.

The good thing about a total wipe is that it's very easy to implement, and it's hard for it to go wrong. You just encrypt the whole drive and, when you want to wipe it, erase the key.

Deleted stuff can easily be recovered. I think the full clean will remove the encryption keys hence making it unrecoverable.

Yes, this also has the advantage of speed perhaps. I can see, deleting specific apps (and their data) as thing #1, and thing #2 would be certain directories. Of course, the problem is, are icons going to be vanishing off the home screen, when the agent is looking at it? Or will the unlock -> screen coming on, be super slow?

Of course the problem there is, many people have an app store installed, and app stores have histories. And logs. And "what you used to have installed" is so easily found under Google Play, for example.

As someone else said in this thread, the law isn't code. It's not if-then statement based. It's also predicated upon intent in many cases. What actions did a person take, and why, when told to (for example) unlock their phone.

The problem here is that if you are asked to unlock your phone, any action you take to thwart that request by "trickery" to get data deleted, could be construed as 'deleting evidence'. So while some methods might make it more difficult for the border agent to realise "something happened", if they're suspicious still, then you're still in hot water.

In the eyes of the law, the court, and likely the jury, you've done a sneaky thing to thwart evidence collection.

The only safe method is a full wipe prior to travel. In this manner, you're not deleting evidence when told to hand it over. It's an entirely different bar. They can be cruel about it, and take your phone for a few months, but you're not going to be in legal hot water.

In as no one will see the phone is wiped until you are compelled to unlock it, there's no greater change of the phone being seized. You're already being investigated. Just be blunt, say "Whenever I travel, I just wipe it", and that's that.

This is why it's a shame that GrapheneOS has no viable backup solution. Its build in method is unreliable, and doesn't work very well, and is gitchy, it's a very well known problem.

And Android and ADB sometimes have issues with large backups of directories, and so you have to manage that with tar + stream and other business, but at least working around that is easy.

But if you could backup individual apps and all their data, you could uninstall all your privacy laden stuff, cross the border, and reinstall in minutes.

That's the true, legal way to travel safely. Especially if the app removal resulted in a 'shred' of the data files instead of delete.

If anyone has ever struggled with large data backup/restore, here's the only real method I've found for copying large swaths of files from/to via adb:

  adb exec-out 'tar --dereference --create /storage/emulated/0/dir/  2>/sdcard/backup-errors.txt' |dd of=/tmp/backup-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar && adb shell cat /sdcard/backup-errors.txt

  dd if=backup-20250309.tar | \
  adb exec-in 'cd /storage/emulated/0/tempdir; tar xpvf -  2>/sdcard/restore-errors.txt' && \
  adb shell cat /sdcard/restore-errors.txt

You can simply use an Apple account for your primary device and a Google account for your burner (or vice versa). Or set up a secondary Apple or Google account. Or use a device/OS that doesn’t require one of these accounts!

> UK visa requires a smartphone

I don't think this is accurate.

Well, assume your phone number is public knowledge.

I'm European and I know plenty, albeit the minority of those I know that went to the US, so I wonder how reliable are CBP stats.

Maybe my anecdotal experience is influenced by me being in IT, but still.

But why would that be legal? The device is owned by the individual. No judge signed any warrant search for the device. I can do what I want with my device - that is a basic right of property. Imagine if border guards seize money willy-nilly.

This part is pretty new. I wonder if my former colleagues have done any FOIA work looking into how travelers' disclosed social media accounts have been reviewed or analyzed!

You also have to provide every single email account you have used in the last ten years, all of them, forgetting to declare one is an offense.

There's no chances I can remember them all, especially as I've been contracting and get a new email every 3-4 months or so.

And they would have taken his phone, pulled it apart and cloned the memory to get the data. And in a month or three, returned his phone to him in some condition which may or may not include "working".

Maybe change your location then :P

True, although many prosecutors do also try to put their thumb on the scale when possible.

For comparison, Japan has a 99.9% conviction rate, but defers prosecution in 60% of cases. And police aren’t arresting or even attempting to enforce the law for every crime. Citizens complain that petty crime laws aren’t being enforced enough, leading to a rise in things like graffiti, litter, and traffic violations (the “bosozoku” motorcycle gangs are having a resurgence). But if you do face prosecution, there is enormous pressure to sign a confession and avoid trial, as a conviction at trial may be punished more harshly. Very similar in some respects.

>Federal prosecutors won't even pursue cases unless they think there's a high chance of success.

Given the incarceration rates compared to average western standards, that's a moot point. Even if they selectively pursue, they do pursue a hell of a lot, and they do get a hell of a lot of convictions - relatively. Factor in the severity of the convictions, also much worse compared to average western standards even for the same offenses, and it's an ever worse picture.

> Federal prosecutors won't even pursue cases unless they think there's a high chance of success.

The problem with this theory is that it ignores the incentives on the other side in a criminal case. When you get charged with something, the prosecutor offers you a deal and that deal is almost invariably a significantly lower penalty than what happens if you go to court and get convicted. The plea deal is a lesser charge, if you demand a trial then they throw the book at you, stack charges and ask for more severe penalties for each one.

With the result that if someone actually did it, demanding a trial instead of pleading guilty for a lesser sentence has a large negative expected value. Which in turn implies that it doesn't make sense to do unless you think there is a high probability you can win, for example because you know you didn't do it. The coercive force is so large that it can cause innocent people to plead guilty, since even a 10% chance of losing can screw up your whole life when it means a 10x higher penalty.

And yet > 90% of the people who thought their chances of being acquitted were high enough to be worth taking a much large sentence on conviction, still get convicted. Which seems suspicious.

I don't think it's so much a "misunderstood" statistic as much as a number that people (like the commenter you are replying to) deliberately trot out to use as evidence for their position because they are depending on most people being statistically illiterate.

To be clear, I totally agree with your points, I just think this is more of a case of "lying with statistics" than being a misunderstanding.

I think you forgot something even more basic. Federal prosecutors handle federal crimes and the vast majority of those require extensive investigations to gather evidence before you can even initiate a court case.

The most classic case of federal offense is tax fraud. You can't record tax fraud on a camera or believe the witnesses, you actually need to look at the balance sheet and contracts of the company and make sure there is actually a crime to prosecute.

They never pursue court trials, because it's too much work. But they'll pursue plea deals, because there's this gigantic pipeline and everyone in it (including public defenders) is on the same team: Team Make Him Plead.

Because of this, no true justice is possible. Trials don't just try the defendants, it forces the prosecutor to prove that there really was a case and that they weren't just trying to bully someone who felt it was hopeless and would rather get out of pre-trial jail early. It forces the cops to actually make a fucking case, rather than rely on horseshit to lock someone away that can't bond out.

And no reform is possible. If you explain any of this to someone who actually understands it, they panic and say "but the prosecutors wouldn't even be able to bring 1/50th of those cases to trial, the system would overload" as if that were a bad thing that they couldn't. In the same way that you're not caught in a traffic jam but rather you are traffic, you're not caught up in these problems... your apathy, your ignorance, your rejection of boat-rocking, in short you are the problem.

Yes.

Prosecutors will often lower charges to ones where it can be tried without a jury too

And this is as it should be.

Nullify if necessary, more likely duty to justice as best as I can come to understand it.

We should all know it though!:

  It has been commonly used to oppose what jurors perceive as unjust laws, such as those that once penalized runaway slaves under the Fugitive Slave Act, prohibited alcohol during Prohibition, or criminalized draft evasion during the Vietnam War.

I got selected as juror once just hoping to laugh at anything the cops said on the witness stand and let some poor soul go free but it turns out the defendant was just a violent scumbag who stabbed random people in public, and there was a video of it. After we decided he was guilty, they listed other things he had been convicted of and asked if he was a repeat offender... Let's see, shot somebody in the back, robbed liquor stores at gun point (dressed as a clown IIRC) and some other weird shit. That decision didn't take very long.

Honestly we didn't even throw the book at him, prosecutors were charging him with a bunch of offenses and we decided guilty on only two, but the repeat offender bit probably locked him up for a few decades.

The funny thing was that all the jurors thought the victim was a complete douchebag and thought both parties deserved time. As it turns, somebody I knew at the time knew the victim from childhood and he apparently molested his 8 year old cousin.

I went itching to nullify injustices - I left wanting to reintroduce the death penalty for petty crimes.

I've been on jury duty several times and in each time the entire jury pool was dismissed an hour or so into the morning, with "all cases have been settled". As I was leaving, the official said, "see how efficient we are now?". I replied, "The guillotine is efficient, but it's not justice." Look into Aaron Swartz. The % of cases that go to trial is very small, in no small part because plea bargaining is no bargain at all. "Plead guilty and we'll do the minimum (whether you're actually guilty or not), or go to trial and we will seek the maximum sentence, which could be 30 years in prison. What's your answer?"

You're begging OP's question.

The police are there to enforce laws, but enforce it by punishment, rather than prevention. The potential deterrence effect still applies, as people do get discouraged from crimes by the mere presence of the police. However, there is zero legal duty for the police to protect someone who is currently under attack from a criminal.

Police don't prevent crime, they arrest and charge people for committing crime.

Arresting people because they might/could commit a crime would be a bad route to go down.

> The police exist to protect the government, not the people.

The police exist to protect the rule of the land. The military exists to protect the government.

Which part of the government protects the people?

Maybe that's why "they" killed him?

Josh Greenberg from Grooveshark died of unknown cause in 2015 after taking a settlement rather than going to trial. He wiped all the music (did he really need to do that?) and then gave up all the software. The service may well have been seen as a massive cost center during its life and the death was a message or warning. I don't know. Business is war, isn't it? - quite literally.

One person's savior can become another person's scapegoat or witch. Even all three.

Personally, I would be suspicious of any death around a high profile trial - at least as a possibility. Greenberg introduced a 'tipjar' eventually to compensate artists but I think he would've been better off making a swapping service where users can trade their own CD-ripped or purchased files for another person's. Just like swapping physical CDs or LPs. So 1-to-1 personal distribution rather than Grooveshark's 1-to-many public distribution without the required licenses. An escrow service for file-swapping.

Sort of unrelated, though.

To me, litigation may be an incredibly dangerous route to justice. "Winning at all costs" may mean stopping a case going to trial in the first place. Judges can also end up the biggest losers too. Justice always gets served - but whose justice?

> in Europe when someone dies somebody always has to go to jail

Please cite the european law that states this.

The well-known country of Europe with its single set of laws? That Europe?

Self-defence can be a valid justification for manslaughter, at least in the UK.

This is where 'reasonable doubt' comes in from a jury. Would I believe that someone set up a 'wipe my phone' code, something that would be catastrophic, it was one digit different, and they accidentally typed it, or would I think they were trying to wipe their phone.

Honestly, given what I know here (a full case might be different), I would believe they did it on purpose.

Not all color can be represented digitally.

Is a piece of software subject to patents? Is it export controlled?

Both of those can change without the data changing at all. A new patent can be applied for and accepted, at which point all code the patent description matches is potentially encumbered (even if it was written with no knowledge of the patent or before the patent existed, yes our patent system sucks).

Export controlled is also a matter of laws, not an attribute of the data itself, and laws change independent of data.

You've just merely exhibited the symptom of being blind to all the colors which cannot be represented, not proven or shown that there are none.

All of a things properties are not contained in or expressed by the thing itself.

They were accused of "public performance" which doesn't make sense to the spirit of the law to begin with. Avoiding technicality via technicality is fine. They should have been allowed to run their thousands of independent servers.

The reason cable companies have to pay these fees in the first place is a narrow and somewhat pedantic argument that is entirely based on connecting multiple households to the same antenna. Which Aereo doesn't do, no trickery involved.

If there had been a style of "cable" company that used one wire and antenna per house from the start, they could have avoided these fees too. They only didn't exist because cables and antennas are expensive.

Any single person could have legally set up their own server and antenna. But Aereo building these en masse makes them a cable company instead of an antenna-building company because... vibes, basically.

The best evidence that this was a failure of justice is that they pivoted to "okay, we're cable, we'll pay the fees for a mandatory license" and got rejected for not being a cable company.

This sort of legal workaround can work (see Uber) though.

Uber avoided medallions.

I guess that proves law is not code!

I now see engineers treating people like AI agents. It can always get worse...

UK has systematic tax avoidance IIRC i.e. keep starting and closing businesses to save tax is frowned upon. Australia can treat your capital gains as income if your gains quack like trades. (Maybe now less important since the recent CGT changes).

To misquote Bismarck, only fools, drunks, and Americans actually believe the rule of law is real.

Just read this point in a case revolving around the Oxford comma, stated in simple enough legalese I could understand:

“laws must be construed liberally in order to accomplish their remedial purpose" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma#Maine_labor_dispu...

I think it's insulting

I think you’re trying to ask the person you are replying to not to use medical terminology to make a point in a catchy way but I honestly have no idea what the Michael Scott segue was supposed to mean.

ultimately everyone is paying the price of reduced rights and freedoms when the government starts wanting to check your phone for wrong-think and harass unofficial enemies of the state

Oh this. Poor people lose their job because of an arrest. Arrest = homeless = dead sooner.

Best outcome is he successfully sues for the violations.

If you're against an academia for further police militarization you're a terrorist apparently.

And people are still convinced that's the land of the free, when it's a distorted non-representative democracy on top of a police state.

US is closer to South American banana republics than Iceland or Japan.

Yes, this is something more people really need to take to heart. As Americans are seeing, a lot of rules are unenforceable and really came down to norms and pressure. I have been thinking about this a lot over the last few years and it is roughly encapsulated in this tweet I saw a while back.

When I was a kid I wanted to be a police officer because I wouldn't have to follow any laws or rules. Then I got a little bit older and realized that wasn't how being a police officer actually worked in practice. Then, I got a little bit older than that, and realized that it actually does work like that.

This has always been true and there has never really been perfect justice. Ultimately, power and violence have always superseded the law. High trust societies with less corruption and a strong justice system try to limit these circumstances.

> Law is effectively a weak gentleman’s agreement we tolerate

Not all of us do. To be honest, the older I am, the less sense many laws make to me, and the more I'm willing to help people break them.

well, the status quo is also violence, just directed at some people and not others

If there were fewer laws, there would be less to disambiguate.

> what other possible explanation is there for someone putting a PIN visible on their phone that wipes it while crossing a border?

Two obvious answers:

1. It's for the general case of lost/stolen phone.

2. It's for the owner. I can't remember numbers I don't type in, might as well keep it visible on the device.

>what other possible explanation is there for someone putting a PIN visible on their phone that wipes it while crossing a border?

For thieves, obviously.

There’s no way to prove intent if you keep your mouth shut and don’t answer anything.