tl;dr: only applies to NY Eastern District, and likely only US citizen can enjoy
Always turn your phone off before crossing international borders. And use a >20 char boot passphrase.
They will detain you. I know the US procedure because i was instructed as i worked there as a representative for an overseas company in Europe.
If you’re a national of the US they will detain you and hold you in detention to ask you questions. During this time your phone will either be cloned or confiscated to be decrypted at a later date. You will be released after a few hours. They will likely not bruteforce it, but rather attempt to use security flaws present in your device/firmware. They will do the same to your laptop.
If you’re not a national of the US, you will be denied entry and flown back to where you came from. This is common practice in a lot of western countries.
What you should do is not carry sensitive information across borders, by using a cloud service to sync at your destination or use hidden encrypted containers in your device. Unless you’re involved in terrorism, white collar crime, CSAM or drugs, they will never have people smart enough to find out hidden containers on you.
Even if my phone is empty, I’m not going to give them a password out of principle. And I’m not saying anything in detention. No questions will be answered.
Again if I really need to get into the country, then I’ll try again at a different port of entry. Usually land crossings are easier.
if you’ve flown for 12 hours with all that entails to go to the US (for a reason) and are presented with the choice of unlocking your phone or be denied entry, you will cooperate. Especially if you moved all your sensitive info beforehand.
Nope. Definitely won’t violate my standards, even if they throw me in prison.
You’re free to do that, but seems like a good way to be put on a list to be harassed more in the future. You make a cop/border agent feel stupid and he/she will make sure to make your life harder.
The records will show you’re trying different ports of entry and if a border guard doesn’t like you, you will be selected for investigation and getting off that list may take years. Worse, you can be banned from entry for no reason and good luck appealing that.
Personally i like to treat the customs agents real nice. I call them sir or ma’am, i follow their instructions and i show them a squeaky clean phone and they let me off with a smile at the first port of entry. Being combative with an agent will not change the laws. Moreover if you have obligations to a company, they will not look kindly to this sort of attrition causing delays and will pass you over next time they need someone. This of course means you won’t get paid as much (or, depending on circumstances, at all).
I agree with the other poster, picking battles is the way to go.
Dude, if you willingly gave your company phone to a border agent, we’d fucking fire you. We train employees not to do that.
I always say “no thank you” when they ask me to do something I don’t want to.
And, yes, protest does work to give us rights. History shows this. Ffs resd the article
I guess your company trains to different standards than my company then. A multi national globe operating company can never afford to fire employees for refusing to cooperate with authorities during border checks. At most it can train them to secure data during border crossing.
If the company i work for did what you suggest, they would fire all their employees in the space of a week or have them all detained or refused entry to countries. They’d lose billions in business. Only a domestic or low volume company can afford having their employees routinely detained at borders in such a manner.
It just doesn’t make any sense what you’re saying, but you do you bud. All the best.
which borders are they crossing where that’s mandatory? Very few countries require this. In most you can just say “no thank you”
They can still ask you to trun on and have it unlocked. Refuse and you being an international traveller? They probably will deny your entry.
In the very unlikely instance that happens, fly to the nearest country, make a backup of your phone, factory reset it, then fly back to a different poet of entry
The port of entry that originally denied you entrance immediately notes that in the system and you are “Flagged” at all other ports of entry.
Sure, but that doesn’t mean the person is going to be an asshole at the other point of entry.
I flew into NYC one time with a joint. They always target me because of how I look, so I got all my shit searched. Dude found half a joint (yeah I fucked up). He looked at me and then put it back and continued the search, pretending be didn’t find it.
People in NYC are nice people. Their city doesn’t care about weed. His employer (CBP) did, but he made a decision not to fuck up my life over a stupid small thing.
I’ve also crossed borders in Israel when doing human rights work. Its easier to go by land than by air. The environment at different ports of entry is just different than others.
aren’t they going to ask you to unlock it, or do as they do in China and run a quick scan using their special software?
They can ask. And you can say no. Some countries might torture you, but that’s honestly low risk. And for that we have duress passwords.
Special scanning software can’t defeat strong encryption with a strong passphrase
Again, rubber hose cryptanalysis is, in fact, defeated by a duress password. We do have counter forensics tools that work against torture.
You don’t have rights when crossing a border. If you’re not willing to have customs rooting through your data, delete it and restore from backup after you arrive.
Oh, you definitely have rights when crossing many borders. But, of course, it depends on the border.
