4 ms·
Won't it arouse suspicions to have a clearly used, but blank phone?
by smegel 9y ago
Won't it arouse suspicions to have a clearly used, but blank phone?
- foldr 9y agoYes, this advice is daft. You are far better off just letting them read your boring emails, however much it (justifiably) irritates you.
- pesfandiar 9y agoAnd let seemingly innocuous things incriminate you in their eyes? I think this advice should hold true in this case too: never voluntarily talk to a police or let them in your home without a warrant.
- wuliwong 9y agoThat advice is very different than suggesting that every time I cross a border follow all those steps. The advice that would be similar would be to always have your home wiped of any information just incase the police come knocking at your door with a warrant.
- jliptzin 9y agoNo, when you cross the border you are at very high risk of having your electronic devices searched. It has happened to me crossing into Canada. If I got a call from the police saying that next Tuesday they would be executing a search warrant on my house, you can be sure I'd wipe everything clean just on the off chance someone planted something illegal without my knowledge.
- __jal 9y agoSure. And freely talk to cops with no lawyer - your life if boring, right? - too. Don't make waves. Keep your head down. The nail that sticks up gets the hammer. You can do whatever you want. Some of us prefer to live in a free country of laws and are willing to make a little noise now and then.
- foldr 9y agoIf you want to wipe your phone as a protest, fine. I am just pointing out that it is not good practical advice if you just want to avoid trouble, which is what most people want to do. For the majority of people, a wiped phone will trigger much more suspicion than their emails or Facebook messages would.
- bigbugbag 9y ago> Some of us prefer to live in a free country of laws and are willing to make a little noise now and then. Exactly, that's why I choose not to live in the USA. Also if you're not a US citizen you have no rights whatsoever at the US border.
- xeromal 9y agoYou could have a fake backup.
- smegel 9y agoIsn't the point of this to get your real phone across the border, not just any phone?
- turc1656 9y agoFake backup, not fake device. Specifically, I think they meant that you backup your device to the cloud, then wipe the device and restore using a backup of bogus stuff that they will believe is the real device. So you are taking your real device across. Then when you get across, you wipe it again and restore from the cloud. Problem is getting a backup where the timestamps are up to date. Otherwise, it would be very easy to see that all communications on the device stopped at the backup date. Someone else here mentioned that they see a market opportunity for generating fake data to load on your phone for exactly this type of purpose. Something like that could work because you would be generating a fresh "fake" to load on your phone the day or so before you cross the border.
- bigiain 9y agoWhat is "your real phone" these days? I think it's a lot less the physical hardware than the collection of data/apps/credetnials stored on it. (Cloud phones? Phones as cattle instead of pets?)
- lorenzhs 9y agoLots of people buy used phones. If you install a bunch of apps and set a photo of your dog (or a random internet dog) or kid as the background, it probably wouldn't be all that suspicious.
- jliptzin 9y agoMaybe, but it's trivial to take a few pictures and send a few boring messages if you're concerned about this. Also just tell them the truth. You don't want government agents going through your private personal data. We need more people standing up to this crap.
- wuliwong 9y agoWhat if the only thing that is ever on your phone is a few pictures and boring text messages? Seems like a lot of trouble just to be not insane.
- jliptzin 9y agoHow can you be so sure? Has anyone borrowed your phone? Have you ever left your phone out of your eyesight? Are you sure you don't have any malware on your phone downloading all kinds of content without your knowledge? Has anyone you emailed or texted years ago suddenly become the subject of an investigation without your knowledge, now subjecting you to interrogation?
- s73ver 9y agoIf you're that paranoid, perhaps you shouldn't have a phone at all.
- bigbugbag 9y agoIt's not paranoid, it happened to me. I lent my phone 18 months before crossing the border, the person sent a few messages, some of which were incriminating. I had no idea as I do not use the stock messaging app. The border agent believed me when I said I had lent the phone and do not use this to text message (had not been used in 18 months, was used to send message to numbers not from my country, had an encrypted messaging app full of messages)
- droithomme 9y agoYes it does. There was one recent case where possession of a factory reset phone was considered obstruction of justice. No I don't have a link or citation, so feel free to ignore.
- dawnerd 9y agoIf you knowingly did it to hide evidence then I can see how that would be obstruction. No different than wiping your hard drives if you think you're going to be raided.
- droithomme 9y agoHide evidence of what?
- yladiz 9y agoA crime.
- droithomme 9y agoWhat crime? Are you assuming there is some crime?
- dawnerd 9y agoThats what I was trying to say. Casually wiping drives I agree shouldn't be suspicious but if you're doing something that may be unlawful and you're wiping - can't really complain they nail you with obstruction or worse.
- bigiain 9y agoSimilar circumstances in the "It gets worse" section here: http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2017/02/22/immigration-searching-phone/ http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2017/02/22/immigratio...
- yladiz 9y agoYou can just say your friend gave you a phone for the trip since yours just broke and you haven't had a chance to set it up.
- bigiain 9y agoYou wanna make sure you don't get caught in the "lying to a federal agent" trap there. That's one time a network locked phone might be handy "Yeah, I've got a newer phone that I use all the time, but it's network locked to Telstra in Australia, so I'm using an old phone for travel."
- bigiain 9y agoCheck the "It gets worse" section of this: http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2017/02/22/immigration-searching-phone/ http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2017/02/22/immigratio...