alt Hacker NewsEveryone please read Surveillance Self Defense from EFF [0]
My advice, take a burner phone to the airport (and elsewhere?), and since devices are subject to warrantless search anywhere and everywhere, via exceptions to the fourth amendment [1] (the constitution seems designed to be bent or outright ignored), keep your data at home and encrypted. The "cloud" is a government data supermarket.
For example.
> While the Fourth Amendment is the foundation, federal and state laws can add layers of complexity. For example, the Patriot Act expanded the government's ability to conduct surveillance and searches, particularly in national security cases, sometimes with a lower burden of proof than traditional criminal investigations.
MUCH lower.
Replies
When I travel internationally, I do not take any electronics with me.
If I need a cell phone, laptop, etc., then I will buy or rent something cheap at the destination.
I got into the habit while traveling back and forth the mainland China as it was our corporate policy (and we never brought any electronics back, either).
has anybody ever challenged the PATRIOT Act on compliance with the 4th Amendment?
Not that it really matters, with the current Supreme Court being what it is, but still...
"Hey Mr. Border Guard, this is a burner phone, have at it!"
"Okay can you login to your email for me? If not I'm going to have to keep you here until you do."
The resources you link to are helpful; however, this is not really practical advice for most people most of the time. To the extent that our smartphones are a very helpful device to have in our day-to-day lives at home, they're even more useful in a foreign country where they become our only available computing device; indispensable for keeping in touch back home, navigation on unfamiliar transit systems, translation of unfamiliar languages, and so on.
Of course, with great effort and moderate expense, you could setup a burner phone with access to many of your same accounts and resources, but the more features you add to the burner phone, the more it begins to look like the device you're leaving "safe" at home.
I'm traveling overseas tomorrow and my partner and I will both be taking our phones with us as we do every day in our home country.