Your thought experiment raises a good point, but I think your conclusions are still wrong. The boundary between what should be allowed and what should not be a

Your thought experiment raises a good point, but I think your conclusions are still wrong. The boundary between what should be allowed and what should not be allowed has nothing whatsoever to do with the state of technology. Freedom is not possible without privacy. As soon as you are in danger of privacy violation, you change your behavior. This is also known as self-censoring. You can already see it here in the forum: people report that they have nothing to hide, but they still reset their phones and use fake accounts when crossing the border. What is particularly insidious about border control is that there is no legal checks-and-balances system behind it. Police cannot search your home without a warrant issued by a judge. Border control can search everything without any warrant. In the past, you could yourself 'balance' this by not taking very personal things (e.g., a diary) with you when traveling abroad. But with our digital lifes, this is not possible anymore. You cannot leave your photo album at home anymore. What makes it so much worse is that criminals can so easily circumvent this issue. They anyway use throw-away phones. They don't need to carry notebooks with them, they can just buy a new one on arrival - if needed at all - and download encrypted files from the Cloud. So we now have established that border control has an unprecedented and uncontrolled access to our privacy. Shouldn't they be forced to prove that this pays off for our society? Please show me the cases of successful prosecution after digital search of a phone. To me, there seem extremely few of them. So it seems a high price for a marginal benefit.