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The question then becomes whether or not they can prove you are lying. They still have the burden of providing proof. For someone who is not a US citizen it wou

The question then becomes whether or not they can prove you are lying. They still have the burden of providing proof. For someone who is not a US citizen it would not help as they can just be denied entry, but I imagine it would be much more difficult for them to reasonably hold a citizen for something they suspect but cannot prove for more than a few days. I think about this issue sometimes, and it always ends up coming back to how much power enforcement has if they do not yet have proof. If they can torture you without any sort of proof, then no hardware or software solution can protect both you and your data. It sucks that it has come to this, but short of legislative changes I don't think there is any other practical way to guarantee security of data at the border other than sticking it in the cloud and downloading on arrival, or using hidden volumes and not mentioning them. Even the cloud isn't really safe compared to hidden volumes - they can always ask about those too.

roywiggins 7y ago
The burden of proof for being charged is just probable cause, which is quite low. You wouldn't be held very long- unless you're deemed a flight risk by a judge, you'd be let out on bail. I think the risk is low for a random person, but if you're Julian Assange or someone equally interesting to the feds, and are known to use relatively sophisticated cryptography all the time, and an image of a phone taken at the border turns up evidence of a large encrypted partition that you denied existence of, I wouldn't put it past a prosecutor to put it to a grand jury and come out with an indictment.