Encrypted phone check at the airport

I should clarify my comment, I am talking about boarder agents not police on the street. But I am no expert so it’s just an opinion.

Thank you for your feedback :smile: Yes, I meant “bill is being considered” = “it might be”. Nevertheless I am cautious as for the first travel with too much knowledge about privacy, I gues. :sweat_smile:
Sometimes it is easier to know less :wink:

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Interesting topic, and just out of that interest:
Is it usual when traveling to the US that phone/computer data is checked somehow?
Will go there in August for the first time…

Yes in USA and Canada at least they can demand to have you unlock you phone and look through the contents if your are not from that country.

I am unclear if your are returning to your own country if they can seize your property to search it. But these days you never know.

What happens if you refuse to unlock your phone?

Great question. Anyone knows that?

Detective can do whatever he wants, If he has reasonable what? Reasonable suspicion :slight_smile: They can make up whatever, most probably indecent child pictures to make you look really bad. When you “forget” the password to your encrypted data, they can put you into jail indefinitely (do a google search), at least this is happening in the USA. That’s why real bad guys have several passwords, one they give out voluntarily, other one they give out when they are tortured and also the real one for data they want to protect :slight_smile: All this is possible with a pc, no one can really prove you how many levels of encryption you actually have.

I’d settle with two passwords on a phone, one for police / airport check, so I will look cooperative, other one for my data. But I haven’t found a good solution yet.

According to this article (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/18/phone-data-privacy-customs/) they can deny entry and hold you in jail for 5 days. If you are a US-Citizen youc an still enter the country without providing access to your device.

If you have other information Im happy to read about it. The problem with recommending to search for yourself is that we get vastly different answers with the same search questions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Personalized_Search) if we havent configured the search to match.

I heavily agree with your statement about encryption. Encrypt your devices (I dont think its possible on mobile atm (?)) with hidden parts where you need an extra key to access and one key which only gets the user to unsuspicious data that is irrelevant. Just to keep any law enforcer at bay.

5 days of jail look too good in the light of events that already happened. Just did a quick search: man was jailed 4 years for not providing password and then released, see https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/man-who-refused-to-decrypt-hard-drives-is-free-after-four-years-in-jail/
Whether he deserved to rot in jail is off topic and outside this discussion, I’d let the God decide, but police can accuse anyone of whatever crime to get you where they want you. At least in the USA. The point is they jailed him for so long without having any usable evidence. Creepy.

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Ok wow thats messed up. Thanks for sharing.

Indeed. I actually did not do “a google search”, I used a search engine, startpage, duckduckgo, whatever, google returns what he wants you to find. And that is one of the reasons we are here, right? :slight_smile:

Well, you typed about googling searches so I assumed so :slight_smile: But yeah, I also use Startpage although google tends to do better in specific searches than Startpage and DuckDuckGo sadly…

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