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Any time I travel out of country, a week or two beforehand, I pull an old phone out of a drawer, factory reset it, and move my SIM card over. I don’t sign it in

Any time I travel out of country, a week or two beforehand, I pull an old phone out of a drawer, factory reset it, and move my SIM card over. I don’t sign it in to any cloud services. I’ll install a few apps (browser, news reader, YouTube, maps, stuff like that) but nothing of any real substance. For the couple weeks until I travel I carry both phones, collecting a bit of data, the odd text message from my mom, snap a few photos, receive an assortment of spam calls, get a few destinations in the maps history, etc. Anything important still happens on my main device (can always tether through the old phone). By the time I hit the border there’s enough data to not be an immediate red flag, but nothing that really matters. If anyone compromises the phone while I’m away, it’s at least reasonably limited to only collecting data on me until I get back and throw the thing back in a drawer. It’s not foolproof, but it’s a reasonable balance for me between risk/effort/expense travelling to places like China.

alisonatwork 2y ago
The stupid thing about this whole security charade is that this is exactly what any serious actor would do if they actually had sinister motives for entering the country, so the policy is only punishing ordinary people who were no threat in the first place or occasionally by accident catching a dumb criminal who probably would've been caught eventually anyway.
- Hizonner 2y ago
  A serious actor would have a cover phone that was their main phone and had truly been used for everything they did, other than eee-ville, for months or years. Either that or they'd be a completely in-character business traveller with a blank corporate loaner phone in accordance with the actual policy of some company they actually worked for. Whatever best matched who they claimed to be. Their eee-ville devices would stay at home. If they needed ee-ville data, they'd download from the cloud, probably into a new device, after passing the border.
- nucleardog 2y ago
  I mean, yeah? No non-idiot criminal or terrorist was going to ever get picked up at the border. It’s the equivalent of getting arrested with 60lbs of pot in your trunk when you got pulled over for speeding through a red light in a car with a burned out headlight. It’s especially hilarious going though this shit as a Canadian crossing into the US. Like, if I drove a mile east or west I’d literally have to “off road” my way through a dozen feet of grass and I’d be over the border. I mean, shit, look at places like Point Roberts. Literally crossing some roads moves you between countries. In others the only reason you’ll know you moved between countries is a vaguely angry sign saying if you walk past it it would be illegally entering the US. The whole thing was only ever going to catch dumb criminals. And yet it’s done well enough that they keep doing it.

alisonatwork 2y ago

The stupid thing about this whole security charade is that this is exactly what any serious actor would do if they actually had sinister motives for entering the country, so the policy is only punishing ordinary people who were no threat in the first place or occasionally by accident catching a dumb criminal who probably would've been caught eventually anyway.

Hizonner 2y ago
A serious actor would have a cover phone that was their main phone and had truly been used for everything they did, other than eee-ville, for months or years. Either that or they'd be a completely in-character business traveller with a blank corporate loaner phone in accordance with the actual policy of some company they actually worked for. Whatever best matched who they claimed to be. Their eee-ville devices would stay at home. If they needed ee-ville data, they'd download from the cloud, probably into a new device, after passing the border.
nucleardog 2y ago
I mean, yeah? No non-idiot criminal or terrorist was going to ever get picked up at the border. It’s the equivalent of getting arrested with 60lbs of pot in your trunk when you got pulled over for speeding through a red light in a car with a burned out headlight. It’s especially hilarious going though this shit as a Canadian crossing into the US. Like, if I drove a mile east or west I’d literally have to “off road” my way through a dozen feet of grass and I’d be over the border. I mean, shit, look at places like Point Roberts. Literally crossing some roads moves you between countries. In others the only reason you’ll know you moved between countries is a vaguely angry sign saying if you walk past it it would be illegally entering the US. The whole thing was only ever going to catch dumb criminals. And yet it’s done well enough that they keep doing it.