Always travel with a burner phone. A brand new dumb phone with just a handful of pre-programmed emergency numbers, not a "wiped" old smart phone.
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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I opted against taking a burner phone—a move that some legal experts had advised, in the press—believing it would provoke suspicion, and simply decided to give my phone and social media a superficial clean.
But C.B.P. had prepared for me well before my arrival. They did not need to identify me at LAX as someone worthy of investigation: they had evidently decided that weeks before. [...] In either case, a U.S. government officer must have read my work and decided that I was not fit to enter the country. Because Officer Martinez had apparently read all of my material so long ago, he didn’t even know that I had taken all this material down. What this means is that, by the time a foreigner cleans his social media in preparation for a trip to the U.S., as much of our news media has been urging us to do, it may already be too late.
This had nothing to do with recovering any data from the phone. The information was already known to them.
Keep reading. They had a nice browse through his dick pics.
Sure, which served to help with cruelty and embarrassment, but there's no clear connection to some legal condition for deportation being met by finding anything on his phone. Possibly the CBP agent's bluff about drug use was easier to pull off with the phone in hand.
They'll likely be suspicious if you have a burner phone. Fascism works in reverse, they figure out what they want first then come up with an excuse second.
You are using the same faulty logic the article's author confesses he did.
Though I did not know it then, I was participating in an interview that I was never going to pass.
If you got pulled, assume that they are already suspicious and are now just looking for more rope to hang you with. The question is, how much rope do you have on your person?
According to my wife, I do indeed have a decent amount of rope on my person. Though I don't know how that has anything to do with entering the US, I'll take the safe route and stay home.
not a “wiped” old smart phone.
Why not a “wiped” old smart phone? What isn't wiped at a factory reset?
The hardware identifiers like IMEI and serial number are the same, which means previous use of the phone can be linked to you.
Almost everything is recoverable unless you do a deep scrub of the onboard storage with special tools, and even then I wouldn't guarantee it. You cannot recover what never existed.
The encryption key is wiped and overwritten on a factory reset. Encrypted data can be recovered, but good luck decrypting that.
It would take a classified amount of capability to get through that, likely isn't possible at all, and isn't likely to be used against random dissidents.
They will get your IMEI, which doesn't change. This can be used to see where you've connected to cell phone towers in the past.
For nearly everyone a factory reset of the phone is just as good as a burner phone, unless you need to hide your IMEI history.
Both a factory reset phone and a burner phone are vulnerable if you use them to sign into existing accounts.
Both a factory reset phone and a burner phone are vulnerable if you use them to sign into existing accounts.
This defeats the point of a burner.
Are you citing something specific, as in a toolset that has been leaked that the government is known to use with what it can retrieve or do you mean theoretically? I mean, sure, if an organization went to the extremes and desoldered the NVRAM from the phone and dumped the contents from an external reader they could likely get much more than fragments.
Unless you do a proper secure wipe the data is recoverable. In recent versions of iOS, Apple has implemented a method whereby they encrypt the data without a decryption key before "deleting". This should be impossible to recover if we assume some vulnerability in this method hasn't been found and exploited by some Israeli infosec company...again.
If your freedom and safety are on the line, spend the $35 of the dumb burner.
Do phones actually cost $35?
Cool, thanks.
You can run a direct disk copy of a phone and then recover "deleted" data. You need root access to do it. I'm sure they have plug in tools to do it on most phones. Just don't give them your access password or don't use your old phone.
Just say that you brought an old phone in case it gets lost or stolen since you don't have cell access anyway, no point in bringing your good phone.
From the ACLU, it sounds like having an attorney's number and asking for a supervisor might have been helpful steps. Still seems like obvious free speech suppression by CBP though.
Refusal by non-citizen visa holders and visitors to answer questions may result in denial of entry.
If the officers’ questions become intrusive or improper, you should complain and ask to speak to a supervisor. (This goes for citizens, lawful permanent residents, or non-citizen visa holders and visitors.) Although CBP takes the position that you are not entitled to an attorney during primary and secondary inspection, we encourage you to have the telephone number of an attorney or legal services organization with you and ask to contact them if you feel your rights are being violated or if you have been detained for an unusually long period.