Here’s my tip: One of the places that you are at highest risk of having law-enforcement try to inspect your phone is customs. Turn off your phone on the airpl

Here’s my tip: One of the places that you are at highest risk of having law-enforcement try to inspect your phone is customs. Turn off your phone on the airplane before you exit the plane and head to customs. This puts the phone in the most secure mode, requiring it to be booted before it’s accessible electronically, and requiring the passcode to be entered before biometric unlock will be enabled. Note that this might not provide complete protection, as local laws may require you to unlock the phone at customs if the officer demands it. In such case you could either claim to have forgotten the passcode, or if you’re brazen and the officer lets you hold the phone rather than tell them the pass code while they hold the phone, you could enter it incorrectly and quickly several times to lock the phone. If you have biometric unlock, you should not be using a four or six digit passcode, you should be using a strong password. Entering the password one time at boot (and once per week on iPhones) is a very low effort defense against brute force attacks that can be implemented electronically against the phone. If you are super paranoid, you could reset your phone as you land (it takes a few minutes) and then restore the phone from cloud backup once you’re out of the airport. If asked by law enforcement, just tell them it wasn’t working right so you reset it. with either solution, if the phone is confiscated, it has maximum protection at that point.