"It has always been this way, this is normal" is the typical first response to tyranny. It puts you on their side, which is fine if that's where you want to be. Just be aware of it. If you think it's wrong, you definitely don't want to be taking the side of "it's normal," because whether or not it's normal is irrelevant when your government is doing immoral and tyrannical behavior in your name.

It has always been this way; but for the hundreds of years before computers that fit in the palm of your hand that have your entire life on them, it was to ensure you weren’t bringing dangerous goods or produce into the country. It was a physical search of physical items.

The issue now is that my entire life is literally on my phone.

The issue now is that there is a 100-mile ‘border search exception’ in place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception

Now, within 100 miles of the border, should CBP choose to, they can search me without a warrant and search everything in my phone, and even retain it if they’d like. If I want to challenge that, I need tens of thousands of dollars and time.

This is the very definition of an unreasonable search; but to change that we have to change the politicians and change the judiciary. It’s up to us, but until we get it changed, we may as well consider the 4th amendment a dead letter, and that means trouble for all of us.

I've been hearing about the US searching phones for many years, but not a single time for any other (non-dictatorship) country. The advice for travelling to the US in my circles is "wipe your device, install some believable bullshit, restore from backup when you're through". Not for any other "normal" country.

Only new-ish because cell phones are now not only ubiquitous but also contains troves of typically private information. Historically, individuals didn't have their entire lives, financial details, personal details, etc on their bodies when traveling. The border exception to the 4th was used primarily for enforcing customs/trade regulations. That carve out is now used to harass citizens.

It is pretty certain that not every country exercises this power, though it seems that a few other English-speaking countries also do this.

During the last quarter of century, in many hundreds of border controls through many countries of Europe and Asia, including in places with tight security like Israel, I have never seen any case of searching for information in any belongings of the travelers, like computers or smartphones or even notebooks or the like.

Israel is a country that long before 9/11 had extremely effective methods for testing travelers at border control, and unlike the Americans they kept their methods unchanged after 9/11. Unlike USA, they have never relied on technical means, like X-ray scanners or SSD/HDD searching, but they have relied on trained humans who interviewed the travelers and assessed whether they lie about their purpose or not.

GPT compiled stats, treat with caution:

  Fiscal Year | Device Searches | Travelers at POEs  | Rate       | Equivalent
  ------------|-----------------|--------------------|------------|------------
  2012        | 5,085           | 351.6M             | 0.00145%   | 1 in 69,200
  2013        | 5,709           | 362.3M             | 0.00158%   | 1 in 63,500
  2014        | 6,029           | 375.0M             | 0.00161%   | 1 in 62,200
  2015        | 8,503           | 383.2M             | 0.00222%   | 1 in 45,100
  2016        | 19,033          | 390.6M             | 0.00487%   | 1 in 20,500
  2017        | 30,200          | 397.4M             | 0.00760%   | 1 in 13,200
  2018        | 33,296          | 413.9M             | 0.00804%   | 1 in 12,400
  2019        | 40,913          | 410.3M             | 0.00997%   | 1 in 10,000
  2020        | 32,038          | ~238M              | 0.0135%    | 1 in 7,420
  2021        | 37,450          | ~179M              | 0.0209%    | 1 in 4,780
  2022        | 45,499          | ~316.7M            | 0.0144%    | 1 in 6,960
  2023        | 41,767          | >394M              | ~0.0106%   | ~1 in 9,440
  2024        | 47,047          | >420M              | ~0.0112%   | ~1 in 8,940
  2025        | 55,318          | >419M              | ~0.0132%   | ~1 in 7,570

These stats aren't also capturing who gets stopped and why, which is pretty important, especially given the current government.

You're getting downvoted because you didn't anticipate and properly defend yourself against angry people who don't understand the is/aught fallacy. They mistake "is this true?" for "this should be true". Actually, it's not even the is/aught fallacy, it's something weirder. I have yet to figure it out. Still working on that one.

The core issue is that on one hand, police needs power to protect the citizens, but at the same time the power might corrupt them.