Well, they aren’t coming to my house and I live within that zone.
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The point is that they could, and it would be completely legal under today’s laws.
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Knock knock
Who’s there?
Landshark…
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What if the phone/laptop has no charge? Or the battery is not there?
What if you brick or corrupt yoir windows install, on purpose? (Assuming you can fix it later)
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I don’t lock my phone and will login to my laptop if required. In both cases I delete/wipe all social media accounts, email, browsing history, cookies, passwords, etc. What they get is pretty much a clean system with no data on it. In truth, I don’t do any of that stuff, and have never been asked to “unlock” my devices, though I haven’t traveled to the middle-east, africa, etc. My phone is unlocked (not much interesting there), and I only password protect my laptop because of my work as a software consultant. I suspect that if you aren’t going to extreme measures to lock your systems, then ICE won’t be much interested in looking for stuff that isn’t there.
I went to Mexico this winter with two phones and my laptop, and ICE didn’t seem in the least interested in my data.
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What if they don’t believe you so they hold you in detention indefinitely? If you’re not a citizen, they can hold you as long as you want. If you are, they can confiscate your devices and still hold you for a day or so if they really want.
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I take it that you don’t, say, have a “foreign” sounding name or are not of a darker complexion?
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I think you mean “they can’t legally keep you from entering the US as a citizen”. They can do a lot of things. They might not be able to prevent you from entering the country, but can’t your country detain you indefinitely on suspicion of terrorism? Sure, a lowly border guard doesn’t have the power to do that themself, but when it comes down to it, if you piss the wrong person in US law enforcement off, even as a US citizen, the sky is the limit for what punishments await, up to and including a drone strike (probably not on American soil?!?).
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Dreadful developments in your country… Will not forget my donation to EFF this year :-). What about just swapping phones and laptops with co-travelers and make sure you enter separately. You can honestly state the device is not yours and therefore can not give any passwords. and what if the batteries are flat or missing? they are easily enough replaced.
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That sounds like a great way to get you are and the person you swapped with detained until one of you admits what the other one’s terrorist plot is.
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Carrying something that doesn’t belong to you through an airport was not OK even before 9/11. I can recall being asked if I packed my own bags, or accepted any items form strangers back in the 80s.
I think this swapping strategy would just bring down more hassle upon both parties.
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Well, clearly you know more than me. I only know what my lawyers have told me and what people who have been detained have done to eventually be let go…
According to all sources I have and people who have gone through it, barring exceptional circumstances, if you are a US citizen and get detained by Customs with a demand to unlock your phone, you can stand your ground and refuse. Eventually, they’ll have to let you go, usually within 12 or so hours. They may keep your devices if you don’t comply but for US citizens, they can’t keep you out of the country without other cause.
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If you didn’t know that the US government has the authority to detain a person indefinitely on suspicion alone or that they have used extra-judicial execution against at least one American citizen then I indeed know things you don’t. I suspect you did know those things, though, you just don’t think they’ll happen to you. You are almost certainly right.
I think I’m talking about the exceptional circumstances that you are barring. I cross the street a couple times on my way to work, Maybe a 1 in 100,000,000 chance of dying each time. But I don’t let the low odds of dying cross the street convince me it’s a good idea to walk out in front of oncoming cars, or cross at red lights at busy intersections. The odds that an American citizen will be detained indefinitely on suspicion of terrorism each time they enter the country are pretty damn small. I feel like choosing not to cooperate is just crossing the street without worrying about traffic, figuring they’ll stop for you (which will still work most of the time).
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I am so tempted to create and “surrender” a clown car worth of useless data to CBP. (eg, an impossibly large amount of data on a small device.)
I am thinking of a hard drive/USB drive with custom firmware that can make the file outlook.pst or other interesting files be an unlimited stream of data from /dev/random or hand crafted repeating data using a deliberately corrupted NTFS file system to create these results.
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You know what your reward for this cleverness would be?
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The brilliant part is that you accuse CBP of the data corruption.
(The belief is that the custom firmware/corrupt NTFS file system is the last place they can inspect under their time constraints. If they discover the corrupted NTFS file system, thank them and say that it is going to the IT service desk to attempt file recovery.)
The goal is I want CBP to start “copying” the data and then realize that the copy process is still going on after 4-6 hours and the end is nowhere in sight. Bonus points if the connection is USB 3.0, SATA, or Thunderbolt (something that can deliver 5Gb/s), and realize that after 5 hours, the copy process is still not done after 100 TB of garbage is copied.
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Brilliant because they don’t give a shit?
You realize that they’ll be holding you the entire time they are copying this data, right?
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Bin Laden is not the relevant bad guy here. The “they hate our freedom” story was always stretching the truth - turning the US into a police state wasn’t one of Bin Laden’s goals.
The bad guys who won are Americans of a certain political persuasion.
It’s right there:
Article 12.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, […]
Article 13.
- […]
- Everyone has the right […] to return to his country.
That is, citizens do have the right to return to their country without arbitrarily having other rights violated.
And I know, those are not articles 12 and 13 of the US constitution.
I take it you meant that @waetherman should research which of his rights are actually respected by applicable local law.
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