forensic software that plugs into a device and downloads its entire contents for search
That is, entire encrypted contents. Good luck.
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2026
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Always turn your phone off before crossing borders. Use a strong passphrase, never biometrics
America isn't like this because Trump is president.
Trump is president because America is like this.
Liberals believe Trump is the problem so they want to change the president.
Leftists believe America is the problem and want to change America.
Exactly. I’m so damn tired of many USians assuming that Trump created this madness from scratch in 2016. They have to read their own history….at least glance at it.
Yep it’s an authoritarian people that put in an authoritarian state. The war on drugs got us far, and the USA PATRIOT Act got us further. It’s completely bipartisan.
There are no true and viable classical conservative or libertarian parties in the US.
Unfortunately, with many peers in Europe at this stage. They were ok for a while when the memories of the war and later the east German police were fresh, but people eventually begin to demand perfect safety at any cost. And the cycle repeats.
"but if you have nothing to hide it's not a problem" says A LOT of people. It's so irritating to hear when I'm like, it only gets worse from here.
If you have nothing to hide why do you have blinds at home?
What would qualify as a problem?
We’ll tell you right after we make one up.
Time to fill my burner cross-border phone full of flaccid grandpa porn!
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Benjamin Franklin, maybe.
Doesn't matter who said it, it still rings true
They wonder why tourism is dropping
To illustrate with just one small example: all recent negative reviews of Yosemite National Park on Google Maps complain about the $100 non-citizen fee to enter. Teddy Roosevelt might be pissed off enough to climb out of his grave.
I’m profoundly ashamed of being an American
We’re just getting started too. :(
LOL, that land of the free
What a joke
US propaganda for itself is like a heavily marketed brochure for the world's worst theme park.
It's the freest land in the world as long as you're rich and white.
Is it really? I mean, just being rich opens doors everywhere... what can a rich white man do in the USA that they cannot do in Dubai or the UK or Spain? eat shittier food? gamble in piss-soaked Vegas?
Rape and murder kids, apparently.
sure and the USA is displaying all the signs that this is a new thing you can get away with openly… but you can do the same in many other countries, some are even known for their sex tourism
.. And get away with it.
There always have been various warrantless searches at the border, but recent political chaos shows how easily that slides down the slippery slope toward fascism
Feel the need to point out border patrol agents don't just work on the border. They've got a 100 mile permission outside of borders, and international airports. Nearly every piece of America is patrolled by border patrol.
Nearly every piece of America is patrolled by border patrol.
can be. Yeah that’s part of my point: the law defining the scope of their actions can be interpreted as applying to almost everywhere. We used to trust that it would be used only to police borders and customs but clearly we’re being naive
While that's true this seems to specifically be aimed out those crossing the border, and should not apply to anyone already in the country. The article seems to discuss the reason they would be allowed when crossing the border is because it is falling into a generalized warrantless search determined appropriate for those coming into the country.
So if I read this correctly, it would be illegal for border control to stop someone and search their phone in any other location without a warrant.
The article seems to state that was the 2014 supreme Court ruling
Yes as we all know there is no other way to get digital information into the Unitied States and criminals will never wipe their phone when crossing borders.
There's really no reason to search phones at the border.
It's not the criminals they want to scare. They want the innocents scared.
Lotta ground to cover hunting.
Seems more appropriate to search the agents' phones for evidence of domestic terrorism.
or CP since most of them are magats
Seems more appropriate to search the agents' phones for evidence of domestic violence.
Even before Trump border control officers already had way too much power.
I worked for a company that considered the US border only second to the Chinese border in terms of a risk to confidential information. If you went to China, you had to sign out a special laptop that was wiped clean of anything confidential. Going to the US, you were allowed to take your own work laptop, but they had special briefings detailing what to do in various situations to try to keep the company's data confidential while complying with the warrantless searches at the border.
What it comes down to is who cares. In this case, the general public doesn't care. The TSA / Homeland Security wants to be seen to be doing everything possible. At first it was about terrorism, then it became about child sex abuse imagery that apparently people were going to take across the border, unencrypted on their work laptops. So, the boundaries of what was reasonable to search for just kept getting expanded. A few civil rights orgs. and people who cared about privacy tried to push back, but even though they cared a lot about this issue, the general public didn't care, so Homeland Security got even more rights to search.
IMO it's the same reason why the US is essentially the only country that does citizenship-based taxation rather than residency-based taxation. The vast majority of citizens don't care because they never work outside the US. The government cares because it's free money, and sometimes they get to take money from mildly rich people who try to evade US taxes by moving to a tax haven. But, the vast majority of people who have to deal with these taxes are low and middle-income people who have dual citizenship and live in Canada, or are Americans who took a job overseas. They all hate having to file these taxes, and think they're completely unfair, but it's just too small a group for the government to care about.
Meanwhile we have employees regularly traveling to China with their usual work laptops, because the C-suite doesn't want to listen to IT recommendations when it stops being convenient.
oof
welp thats the end of that, I will never cross the border again to dumberikkka
You spelled dumb with a B. Not many people know it’s spelled with a B. I just learned that recently. (Not the B part, the “many people don’t know” part.)
I was surprised to learn that too.
To be clear, could I be denied entry into the country for simply refusing to give my phone's password?
If you aren't a citizen, yes. If you are a citizen they can't deny you entry, but they can hold your device for a period of time.
Better they steal my phone than I violate the privacy of all my friends and family by letting them unlock it
Does this also allow searching of a tablet or computer?
Because I could easily use a small tablet with cell connectivity and that isn’t a “phone” per se. Or even just have a hot spot.
You'd be cuffed and on a plane to El Salvador before you can even finish saying "well actually it's not a phone, it's a small tablet"
I looked it up. It’s “electronic device”. So anything.
Burner phone it is.
Does anyone have a good recommendation for the stupidest possible flip phone?
Not really worth the cost. Often times cheaper to buy a pixel and install graphene. Better security too. Just leave off Google play services and it's analogs. Basically a dumb phone at that point.