I’ll never bring my phone on an international flight again

I read the comments here and I&#x27;m reminded of a Tweet I read yesterday:<p>&quot;Next programmer bro who explains his clever travel information security hack has to change his name to Mohamed Hussein Ali and try it at LAX&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;thegrugq&#x2F;status&#x2F;831316334973579264" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;thegrugq&#x2F;status&#x2F;831316334973579264</a>

Fun fact - the &quot;border zone&quot; in which your 4th amendment rights are suspended and you are subject to search, is 100 miles wide and overlaps where the majority of Americans live and work<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aclu.org&#x2F;other&#x2F;constitution-100-mile-border-zone" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aclu.org&#x2F;other&#x2F;constitution-100-mile-border-zone</a>

I suggest mentioning in the title that it concerns the US-border, I travelled across a lot of international borders, that didn&#x27;t care. Only some international borders are a problem, one of these, the US one.

Phones should load different profiles based on the password provided, with some activity logged across profiles so none of them appear stale.

Until you&#x27;re detained for not having a phone to turn over. I&#x27;m only half joking.

I have a prepaid plan that only works in the US anyway.<p>I never bring my US phone on international travel, because it just won&#x27;t work. Instead, I carry a cheap Chinese GSM phone that&#x27;s wiped before every trip and preloaded with some music and entertainment videos (TV Shows, etc.)<p>I buy the sim-card at my destination and throw it away when I go back to the States.<p>I&#x27;m not sure this solves anything, but then again, I don&#x27;t work for a company that makes me required to be able to access sensitive data from any point in the world. YMMV.

This might have been suggested before, but I think it&#x27;s novel enough to repeat:<p>You should be able to create two passwords for all devices. One, your password, would allow you to use the device normally, the other, your lastword, would start a silent erasure of the device. The device could even present a fake successful authentication, like dumping you to some fake desktop, while it erases your data.<p>While in this case it would not really benefit someone in situations like US border crossings who have almost no rights, I think it would be very effective at discouraging attempts to force people to divulge their passwords, as the person entering the lastword would effectively be informing the device that it was under attack. With something like this I would think that questioning people for their passwords would be pointless.

Signed up to pose two questions :-<p>1&#x2F; I legitimately do not know a lot of my usernames and passwords. I sign up with a unique email that includes the name of the site (I&#x27;m not particularly religious about the format of this and usually end up checking previous email to figure it out). Passwords are saved in Chrome and I mostly don&#x27;t remember them. I&#x27;m sure I am not unique. Where would one stand with this scenario?<p>2&#x2F; Wherever I can, I use a U2F device as a second factor. Could one be compelled to provide this along with the passwords (providing I can remember them)? Where would one stand if the key was unavailable - i.e. lost&#x2F;left at home? Assuming they have a PC nearby for checking your social media accounts, I&#x27;d very much doubt it had it&#x27;s USB ports enabled so, even if I did provide it, I would suggest they probably couldn&#x27;t use it. Is there any documented precedent for how this is handled?

<i>&gt; Since most of our private data is stored in the cloud — and not on individual devices — you could also reset your phone to its factory settings [...] Then if you’re asked to hand it over, there won’t be any personal data on your phone</i><p>This makes me wonder: is it true? Is the data truly unrecoverable if you factory-reset your phone? I doubt so. But maybe there&#x27;s some special tool to truly wipe a device (say like the equivalent of DBAN)

I&#x27;m interested to see how Apple will react to this, given their history with the FBI. Right now, you can connect your iPhone to a computer and get all the information off it - doesn&#x27;t matter if you are iTunes or Cellebrite. It&#x27;d be good to have a permanent way to disable this ability in the future, so that your phone data cannot be siphoned out, even if you provide the PIN. Of course, that&#x27;s not the only way for data to be extracted, but all other options would be considerably slower and less practical.

&quot;And you can bet that countries like China and Russia aren’t far behind&quot; - I am a Russian citizen and I cross the border of Russia very frequently and I cannot agree with the statement. The worse thing I&#x27;ve been asked about was &quot;what is the goal of your trip&quot;. Getting your phone on the border of Russia is something impossible, it&#x27;s just unimaginable. I&#x27;ve never been asked to show anything except for my passport. At least now and for the time before this moment.

How sad that by now it&#x27;s far easier to simply mail your stuff to yourself, pick it up on arrival to destination, and mail it back to your house before departing. I am beginning to hate my country so bad I can&#x27;t wait to get out. It feels nothing like the country I grew up in.

In this age of digital instant copy, Facebook has made a lot of things the norm. I watch TV shows and cyber stalking is seen as normal.<p>A good friend of mine was blackmailed by her boyfriend that her sensitive pictures would be released on the Internet if she didn&#x27;t return his calls. It was the first time she realized that what was considered silly can really be very serious. She deleted her Facebook and Twitter account.<p>I really want to see a big hack, sort of a global financial crisis level on the surveillance govt is collecting for people to realize this shit can really fuck society up.

If your rights are suspended at the border, then whose rule of law does apply? Clearly not the US, then would it be the neighboring country like Canada? Or is it some sort of no mans land? With more and more of these stories bringing up the lack of 4th and 5th Amendment rights, I&#x27;m becoming curious as to what can legally happen at the border. How would common crimes be handled in this area?

Once customs and border patrol is holding you is there any way to back out? Could you say something like &quot;Uh... I think I&#x27;m just not going to enter right now.&quot;?<p>(then back up your data, ship the computer device with an insurance policy, and give the border crossing another shot)

If you have a Nexus Android phone, just change to guest mode or add another user. It&#x27;s a seldom used feature and limits what people can see or do with your primary account - inspectors are unlikely to know as it&#x27;s fairly low-key when users are swapped

My current plan is to wipe my phone before travel and restore it on destination. Nothing to unlock because there&#x27;s no phone there.<p>Forcing you to restore your entire account is a whole &#x27;nother level beyond simple forcing you to unlock your phone.

OK, those of us who know better travel without phones, what about people who don&#x27;t know better but have received information from me? The data about me on their phone cannot be protected by me.

<i>They may choose to detain you anyway, and force you to give them passwords to various accounts manually. But there’s no easy way for them to know which services you use and which services you don’t use, or whether you have multiple accounts.</i><p>This would seem to imply lying, or at least deceiving, a federal agent. IANAL, but <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Making_false_statements" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Making_false_statements</a>

It would be nice if there were a feature built in to phones to facilitate this. Like, on the lock screen, an emergency wipe button that runs a procedure you specify (log you out of everything, obfuscate which services you subscribe to, etc) and this way as you&#x27;re going through customs, you can gauge your risk and at any point you feel uncomfortable, you discreetly click your button before smoothly handing over your phone and password with a warm smile.

They can detain me indefinitely if they want, I will never give my pin to border security. I&#x27;m not going to bend to this bullshit by not carrying a phone.

“Land of the free.”

<i>&gt; Then if you’re asked to hand it over, there won’t be any personal data on your phone</i><p>That would probably look even more suspicious.

When someone creates a dumb phone with a great camera and GPS this won&#x27;t be a problem for a lot of travellers.

Seems to me Apple and Google should be working on &quot;roaming profiles.&quot; You can reset your phone to factory settings, or even get a rental phone at your destination, and then quickly restore it from your profile. After all it&#x27;s the data you&#x27;re interested in, not the device per se.

Can border agents force me to reveal my personal email address and password?

Feature Request: set auto-wipe on your phone that cleans it unless you enter your cancellation code within the next x hours.

I had same strange situation a week ago when passing Ukraine border. Whats purpose of this?

I wish Apple would have a duress password that when entered would wipe the phone.

The factory reset seems more practical to me than leaving your phone at home.

Why not ship your phone to yourself at your destination?

Try &#x27;I am a born in America citizen on american soil, I want to talk to my lawyer, no i&#x27;m not giving you my password. No I won&#x27;t tell you why.&#x27;