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"Under the Customs Act, customs officers are allowed to inspect things that you have, that you're bringing into the country," - Here's my phone, sir. - I see i
by udev 12y ago
"Under the Customs Act, customs officers are allowed to inspect things that you have, that you're bringing into the country,"
- Here's my phone, sir.
- I see it has a password, give me the password.
- Mhhh... OK. It is 1234.
- Oh, I see you have Dropbox app installed. I need the Dropbox password.
- Mhhh... OK. It is 5678.
- Oh I see you have a GPG encrypted file in Dropbox. I will need to decrypt that. Give me the password.
- Mhhh... I can't... It's encrypted with a public key and I don't have the private key on me.
- Ok, boys! Take this guy! He is clearly obstructing.
- toomuchtodo 12y agoCould you not backup your device, wipe it at the border, and then when they request the password simply say "There is no data on the device. Its as it comes from the factory" and hand it to them? You could then perform an over the air recovery once safely away from the border.
- MagicWishMonkey 12y agoThe whole point is that sort of thing shouldn't be necessary. The government shouldn't have the authority to demand you hand over the contents of your phone/laptop without reasonable suspicion in the first place.
- toomuchtodo 12y agoI'm not saying it should be necessary. It SHOULDN'T be. I shouldn't have to pay $100 every 5 years for Global Entry/PreCheck even though I'm already not a risk on the air transport network, but I do because the time savings is ridiculous. What I'm saying is: Can X be done until sanity has been restored to Y? It appears that, yes, it can.
- lugg 12y agoThere is a reason people call it a theater..
- Zigurd 12y agoIf you have an Android device and you automatically upload pictures, doing a factory reset before crossing a border will remove all your data. Then all you need is an empty/dummy Google account, in case you are asked to log-in.
- grecy 12y agoYes, you can do that, and many business people now do exactly that when flying in/out of the US knowing that any data they carry across the US border is fair game.
- jackweirdy 12y agoChina too - a friend’s dad works in chip manufacture & flies regularly from the UK to China - he leaves his personal phone at home and gets issued a new phone by his company every time he goes, which is wiped when he returns.
- kazinator 12y agoAnd now consider the bitter irony of your "China too".
- manicdee 12y agoI am not sure I understand the irony of comparing China to an authoritarian state. ELI5?
- spacemanmatt 12y agoThe bitter irony is, when talking about authoritarian states, as Americans, we didn't used to reflexively include our own country.
- kazinator 12y agoI think manicdee was pouring on added irony there.
- bigiain 12y agoI know a few people who've worked at (different) places which have a rule that says "any hardware you've taken to China is never allowed on the corporate network again". They get "burner" laptops and phones before leaving, and dispose of them when they come home (usually by giving them to family/friends or selling them on eBay).
- Spearchucker 12y agoI do this (reset and reformat to factory spec) with my phone and my laptop every time I cross a border. On the other side I download a TrueCrypt file which has everything (and only what) I need whilst abroad. I started doing this in 2010, after my phone got taken into another room for a half hour at Ben Gurion in Tel Aviv in 2010.
- Magi604 12y agoI've been wondering about how to do this. The problem I'm having is that I have a ton of widgets and custom settings on my phone (Android). If I were to wipe my phone before crossing a border, it would take quite a while to get it set up the way I like on the other side. I am just using stock android though. I wonder if there is a way to achieve what I want with a rooted phone.
- discreditable 12y agoYou can completely backup most apps and your sdcard with adb on an unrooted phone [1]. The tricky ones are apps like Google Authenticator, which disable adb backups. You have to be patient and not use your phone for a while. It takes a long time. If you root, a nandroid backup is the way to go. [1] http://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-nexus/general/guide-phone-backup-unlock-root-t1420351 http://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-nexus/general/guide-p...
- tempestn 12y agoDo you use Android or iOS? I'd love to find a way to image and restore an Android phone, both for better backups and things like this.
- tempestn 12y agoTo answer my own question, it looks like rooting and then using a custom recovery like ClockWorkMod or TWRP is the way to go for a true whole-system image.
- tempestn 12y agoJust make sure you wipe it before you cross. If you try to do it after they've asked you for the password I'm sure they'd consider that obstruction too.
- astrobe_ 12y agoIs "Sorry, I forgot my password" an option here?
- pyrocat 12y agoThat depends, do you like waterboarding?