Feds searching passenger cell phones at SFO

&gt; The ACLU has become much more active in trying to protect the rights of travelers during the Trump era<p>&gt; in 2016, “the number of people asked to hand over their cell phones and passwords by Customs and Border Protection agents increased almost threefold over the year before.”<p>I mean, it&#x27;s great and all that the ACLU is working on this, but the repeated attempts to tie this all to Trump is becoming kind of maddening. Pretty soon all this stuff will start being referred to as &quot;Trump-era security measures&quot; in the press and most will forget who actually started most of it (the last two presidents).

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&gt; Gach resisted, but finally gave in when he was told that if he didn’t, CBP would keep his phone for an indefinite period.<p>The sad thing is if this happened to me I&#x27;d have no problems with just letting them have the phone and get myself a new one. In fact the company I work for would probably let me expense the new phone because they&#x27;d be happy I didn&#x27;t give away the passcode to a phone that has company emails on it that contain private info.<p>So this ends up punishing those who can&#x27;t afford to just dispose of a phone. Disgusting. Privacy should be a right, not something that you have to ask yourself if you can afford.

Apple&#x2F;Google: Help us out here. Put some container tech on the phones and have it driven by the entry of a &quot;regular password&quot; and a &quot;duress password&quot;.<p>Have the &quot;duress password&quot; bring up a container with plausible faked call, text, browser, camera, etc, history.<p>Oh, and allow for user defined number of container&#x2F;password pairs, for when the TSA asks for both passwords.

I would like to add the obvious that it has nothing to do with Trump. Things like this were being done and added all the time under Bush and Obama.<p>Simple proof: Why did the EFF and others already have extensive documentation on how to travel through airports securely? Why did people mention crossing borders with wiped phones&#x2F;laptops?

More and more it seems like we are slipping towards a dystopia. Inch by inch our privacy rights are slowly being striped away. Not just by governments but by corporations, and once they are gone it is next to impossible to get them back.

Prepare your phone before coming through. Backup, wipe and set the password to &quot;I am a panty-sniffing thug&quot;. Bonus points for filling it with nothing but articles about law enforcement overreach and pictures of pigs.<p>Encourage everyone you know to do similar, or whatever they&#x27;re comfortable with. Make being a trouble-maker a badge of honor.<p>If you don&#x27;t fight somehow, you are accepting it.

I am aware that this was also happening in previous administrations and is slowly getting worse, but as a European I can only describe this as &quot;communist-like&quot;, and wonder what the US citizenry, of all people, have come to that they accept such things? (Clearly this not some form of elaborate investigation, and they&#x27;re only harrassing random passengers.)<p>We are now in a Bizzaro world where we&#x27;re safer &quot;in our letters and effects&quot; when travelling through the airports of Communist-controlled China than in the US ones...

This is specially terrifying for non-citizens or visa holders. The border police has no obligation to let you in if you decide to not give them the password.

Does anyone have detailed instructions on how to make a full backup of my iPhone such that when I restore it, it will be exactly like it was? Every time I do a backup&#x2F;restore, things seem to get lost. It doesn&#x27;t seem to be a complete backup.

Can we have private airports, cooperatively owned and operated, and ban governments from them???

Even if I wipe my phone, I worry that they&#x27;ll plug it into some rootkit-on-demand Cellebrite device. What if I remove one of the data pins from the USB port so that it only works as a charger? Is that enough to protect the phone from one of those Cellebrite boxes?

We wrote a guide about this:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;wp&#x2F;digital-privacy-us-border-2017" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;wp&#x2F;digital-privacy-us-border-2017</a><p>However, the news is not necessarily that encouraging.

I would never hand over my phone or passwords at the border. The only reason customs can search you at the border is for any smuggling or immigration issue. Since no rational person would smuggle something digital on their phone, when they could transfer it over the cloud without physical possession, there is simply no reason for them to search your phone without a warrant.<p>If they threaten to take your phone, threaten to sue them for trespass and to go to the media.

Not that I agree, but Canada has been doing it for years: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.priv.gc.ca&#x2F;en&#x2F;privacy-topics&#x2F;public-safety-and-law-enforcement&#x2F;your-privacy-at-airports-and-borders&#x2F;#toc3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.priv.gc.ca&#x2F;en&#x2F;privacy-topics&#x2F;public-safety-and-l...</a>

All of you with your &quot;clever&quot; workarounds don&#x27;t get it. It&#x27;s you vs. someone who has been questioning people all day. Do you really think the agent will just go &quot;Oh you don&#x27;t have a device, you&#x27;re good to go!&quot; or &quot;This phone looks like it&#x27;s never been used, nothing suspicious here!&quot;?<p>That&#x27;s going to raise suspicions and make your life much harder. Unfortunately there&#x27;s not much you can do to fight it except at the legislative level. It&#x27;s a shitty situation, but telling people to do these &quot;tricks&quot; is going to make their lives even shittier.

This is how totalitarianism looks. Don&#x27;t try to brush it aside, hand wave it away or become an apologist.<p>People have been horrified by stories of the secret police in infamous regimes ruffling through people&#x27;s diaries to find out what they wrote. You can&#x27;t express moral disgust at that and live with this.<p>This is the exact same thing. No one has any business with your phone or your personal life.

I would not be okay with this. If faced with this situation, I personally would be compelled to refuse even if they seize my powered off fully encrypted iPhone. I would then have to obtain an attorney to fight the seizure on the principle of the matter. This would be so even if I had just bought the phone an hour before and had nothing custom on it at all.

Assuming they are using some OoTB software like Cellebrite. It would be interesting to use a vulnerability in one of Cellebrite&#x27;s file parsers and infect their machine. Would a mass dump of their collected data cause any public outcry?

I wonder if you can just stuff phone in carry-on and claim to have lost it.

Maybe just erase your phone then and there? Or set it to erase after 10 failed password attempts? Wonder how bad they&#x27;d make it for you in retaliation.

What are they going to find in that time period, with the person there? Are they just fishing? What&#x27;s even the point from their side?

I heard on the radio today that in Feb there were 2000 instances of the phone search which is appalling.

With all due respect, I think your grasp of American politics is quite weak. The POTUS has immense power, not just in theory (e.g. the ability to single-handedly launch nukes and basically end the world) but also in practice.<p>For one, he or she can nominate Supreme Court judges. This alone is <i>huge</i>, considering the SC is the final arbiter in the most important conflicts in the nation.<p>Aside from that, he or she can issue Executive Orders, which &quot;have significant influence over the internal affairs of government, deciding how and to what degree legislation will be enforced, dealing with emergencies, waging wars, and in general fine-tuning policy choices in the implementation of broad statutes.&quot;[1]<p>The POTUS can also veto legislation passed by Congress. Historically, Congress has been able to override these vetoes only 7% of the time[2], which means the POTUS has a serious amount of influence in the direction the country goes in as well.<p>And of course, he or she is also the Commander in Chief of the world&#x27;s most powerful military, and the country&#x27;s supreme representative in foreign affairs.<p>Bottom line: POTUS is much more than a &quot;punching bag.&quot;<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Executive_order_(United_States)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Executive_order_(United_States...</a><p>[2]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Veto#United_States" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Veto#United_States</a>

The most basic function of Customs is to know what is coming into the country. Customs has always had the right to search whatever and whoever they want.