If that happens I’ll call in favors with friends abroad and do a PhD. Civilized countries count that time towards permanent residency.
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SORRY. Didn’t mean to offend.
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I do pretty much what you do. I use a Linux computer and store all of my data on an encrypted file on an SD card which I remove and store discreetly. Can transfer all of my data quickly to a secondary login which I delete before going to customs. I use the primary login to look at the cute cat pictures that my older relatives post on Facebook to keep the computer looking unscrubbed. Also read the daily news there.
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Why carry a device across the border at all then?
Just get a burner wherever you land and ditch it before you come back.
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Dunno. I have severe doubts about carrying a concealed SD card with encrypted content. It might be better not to encrypt the card and then accidentally drop it into the bottom of a pocket or something. But it has to be deniable.
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Because only weirdos and terrorists don’t carry a phone around with them. Which are you?
Joking aside, these days its very unusual for an adult to be travelling through an airport without a mobile phone, so they’ll either assume you’ve got something to hide, so they’ll hold you for questioning to find out what that is. Or you’re doing it because you don’t think that they should be allowed to snoop through your phone, in which case they’re going to hold you as punishment for not ‘respecting their authority’.
Edit, for funsies, take a borken phone with you, then accuse them of breaking it, “it was working fine when I left!”.
What could possibly go wrong?
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Stuff like this is why I won’t go to the US.
If the Democrats win the election in 2020, purging the customs and border security apparatus and rebuilding it from the ground up as something sane and accountable should be high on their list of priorities.
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I have been to the US multiple times before and I enjoyed every trip. At this point I wouldn’t even consider going there voluntarily.
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It should be but it won’t be, especially if someone like Biden is the nominee. The best we can hope for is that the ICE unions won’t feel that they’re the President’s most loyal troops and a return to Obama-era policies, which while demonstrably more humane than the current ones weren’t all that great for those seeking a path to citizenship. There’s more potential for change if Warren or Sanders is elected, but they’ll face the inertia of the Dem party establishment and the obstructionism of the Republicans.
I don’t see the kind of change we’d both like to see as being realistic until Ocasio-Cortez is old enough to run for the Presidency. No guarantees then, either.
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Just gunna leave this here, for reference;
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I was born in the US, but left as a child. I have since renounced my citizenship and have accepted that unless things change fairly drastically, I will never return. There’s a lot to see outside the US of A.
For not carrying a device they can search.
Yeah, well, I guess we just don’t have a right to travel at all then.
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Restrictions on travel are a hallmark of totalitarianism.
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I respectfully disagree. . . The world is full of people who think “Those People” have no rights as citizens. “It can’t happen to me. . . as long as we keep oppressing those we don’t like, everything is fine. He’s just a stinkin’ journalist, he deserves it.”
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Different framing but basically the same thought.
I wish there were a way to impose a daily reality on everyone that reflected the worst of what some of our citizens have to go through on a daily basis.
If it were possible to create a drug that forced people to have empathy I would buy a crop duster
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Empathy, but only for “our citizens”? That will be some intricate pharmacology 
Empathy, human empathy, period. Not political koolaide. Just empathy.
Real empathy for actual suffering people would change most of the evils of this world to opportunities for understanding.
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