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And now you're extra suspicious if you don't have one at all
Customs has always been able to search everything without a warrant or suspicion when crossing the border. I guess this is saying that they can search the digital contents of physical devices/media as well?
It says they can manually search them. According to this, the ruling explicitly doesn’t say if they can digitally search them.
digitally also means “using the fingers”, so never consent to a digital search without prior clarification
You using the whole fist, doc?
Breathe easy.
Not everything. From the case itself:
"To be sure, nonroutine searches, which are “more invasive searches, like strip searches, require reasonable suspicion.” Id. But we have held that “the label ‘non-routine’ should generally be reserved for intrusive border searches of the person (such as body-cavity searches or strip searches), not belongings.” United States v. Levy, 803 F.3d 120, 123 n.3 (2d Cir. 2015) (emphasis added)."
So carry a separate device while traveling. Or wipe your phone, then restore after the border. This is just going to lead to a service that does this for you and the overreaching feds won’t be able to do anything about it.
And as far as I can tell you still don’t have to give them your pin code.
They don't need your pin, they can just hack the phone take all your data anyway. ICE has a contract with Cellebrite
Not really. Cellebrite isn't magic. If you have an up to date OS and a strong password not pin, encryption functions as it should. The best thing to do is simply have a travel phone.
the worry is that this will be interpreted as tampering and cary consequences.
This would not be tampering, because you haven’t tampered with anything. The “evidence” is simply at home.
The law isn't a computer program. Intent matters.
Try proving intent when it’s a common practice. I’d even say it’s a best practice these days, especially for business.
You’re fearmongering. Find me a case of someone getting prosecuted for having a burner phone. It doesn’t exist.
It's been somewhat established that having a wiped or basic phone is in itself sus and reason for them to investigate you further.
They can investigate all they want, they can even detain you briefly, but if you are a citizen and there’s no evidence of a crime then they have to let you in.
They have more guns than you do, and these days, most of the judges are blindly and shamelessly on their side. They don't "have" to do jack.
You’re fearmongering. Despite what some may say, it’s not Nazi Germany. Rule of law still has sway.
Find me caselaw where a “basic” phone was used as valid evidence. Or where the phone was already empty when someone began to approach the border.
Rule of Law was very strong in Nazi Germany. Everything that regime did was legal in Germany at the time.
Have not heard this, whats your source? I don't see how they could determine that because "its a new phone" is hard to dispute.
best case scenario is that a higher court overturns this but not holding my breath.
Do you have any references to this?
The problem with these laws isn't that they can search you at the border. It's that they can search you within 100 miles of the border (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception). The total number of people who live within that zone is 213 Million people, or 2/3 of the total population (https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone).
Seems like a generally terrible idea. Why this cannot be one day changed to 200 miles on a whim?
It will, one day, be changed to 200 miles (or more) on a whim
The best time to delete all social media accounts and never post anything online with your name attached ever again was 10 years ago. The second best time is right now. This stuff can and will be used against you out of context 10, 20, 30 years into the future.
Completely agree.
Does HN comply with CCPA requests?
It is insane to me that judges consistently rule that the constitution doesn't apply because there's a "border" within 100 miles.
The 4th Amendment says, exactly:
I do not know how that could be unclear. My cellphone is my effect, and arguably, also a "paper". Which SHALL NOT BE VIOLATED. But apparently, I'm too dumb to understand the sentence[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception apparently
So the main argument is that in the time that was written and immediately afterwards we can look to see what they mean by that by how it was implemented. At the time it was understood that the government could and would search goods as they enter the country without warrants to enforce things like tariffs. I think that's a fairly reasonable interpretation of the meaning. Where I think this goes wrong (and maybe deviates from history?) is the conflation of papers and other digital records now with physical goods, historically were people's papers searched as they entered the country (beyond say looking through them to find hidden goods, I mean reading and examining letters and records)?
But the 100 mile rule? That covers damn near everybody in the US (>200 million, or 66%, give or take) subject to warrantless searches on the whim of whatever the police want?
Yeah, where does this come from? Who keeps defending this, has it been challenged?
About 213 million people live in this zone, so 2/3 of people in the USA. So I guess the 4th amendment doesn't actually apply to most US citizens?
Two main cases and the interpretation there-of [0]. The most expansive interpretation of the 100 mile zone that includes all coastal areas hasn't really been tested and AFAIK CBP mostly uses it in a more justifiable area around land borders so far relying on other justifications for more inland operations.
[0] ^f Supreme Court: https://forumtogether.org/article/explainer-u-s-border-patro...
It's more than that, it's being "close" to a border (you can argue if 100 miles is "close") and not on a whim but reason to believe you recently crossed it.
I've heard (but can't back up) that any city with an international airport counts as a 'border' for this purpose.
Probably. If international flights are arriving, why wouldn't it?
Because you can't exactly sneak on/off of an international airplane. It should be pretty trivial for customs to funnel travelers through a checkpoint where they can search at the time of the actual border crossing.
Likewise we now have the technology to automatically surveil the border 24/7 (maybe modulo tunnels, though I wouldn't be surprised if we could detect those too?), so a 100-mile exception only ever becomes more and more dubious. We could've built the wall and lined it with a surveillance system for less than the cost of this Iran war (never mind all the m̶o̶n̶e̶y̶ ̶p̶r̶i̶n̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ stimulus this decade), shutting up the whole border debate once and for all, and ending justifications for internal surveillance for trafficking.
I'm actually pretty curious about this. You can't easily sneak on/off a commercial international airplane, but that's because they've got the gates set up in the airport to funnel you through a specific path that leads to customs. Showing up on an international charter or GA flight seems squishier. http://www.canada.eaachapter.org/FLYING%20TO%20and%20FROM%20... The process seems to be that you schedule an ETA, taxi to a CBP station and wait there until a CBP officer arrives.
On the other side of it, it looks like CANPASS would let you land in Canada even if the CBSA station is closed...
That's a separate issue I don't support outside of situations where they can reasonably prove/show you crossed without alrady going through the search. Luckily, at least so far afaik, it hasn't really been deployed in the maximalist way that turns the whole country into that zone. It's a lot easier to justify near physical land borders like Canada and Mexico than it is if it's being used within 100 miles of very controlled impermiable borders like international airports. Has it been used outside of the land borders?
The problem when you rely on unclear laws that haven’t been modified for 250 years is they haven’t been modified for 250 years.
The scale of surveillance now wasn’t even thinkable back then. The ability to encrypt. The bandwidth and latency of communication. The sheer nunber of people, the research into manipulating minds. Does the second ammendment apply to an f35 or a tank? Well it doesn’t really matter, they clearly weren’t in scope when it was written. There were no wiretapping laws in the constitution because there was no wires. unreasonable in 1780 was different to unreasonable today.
The US has famously failed to update its legal framework via the legislative branch, so It’s upto the judicial branch which seeks to be about interpreting what some wealthy farmers from 250 years ago thought, rather than asking what laws make sense today.
The Constitution gives you some rights but maybe not this one (to not be searched without warrant at a border). The problem is not The Constitution but the legislative branch that didn't make laws to ban it.
It's not the job of judges to invent laws or ponder what laws make sense. That would be legislative branch.
As you snipped out
Yes but it's still not the job of the judges to do that for them.
Yeah the plain language is unambiguous. That there is an historical border search exception simply doesn't matter to me. We fought a war for this, and it's bullshit.
I mean... yea we also have some shaky interpretations of the 1st amendment (see especially, assembly), 2nd, 5th (e.g. the incredible pressure for plea bargaining), 6th (which, paradoxically, is a major reason for aforementioned pressure on plea bargaining, so I kinda get it), 8th given how bad some prisons are, arguably 10th (even if I am personally not a fan of the 10th amendment so much), and arguably still the 15th (though it's obviously orders of magnitude better than the first 100 years of its existence).
And also various other parts of the construction, like the interstate commerce clause does some comically heavy lifting.
If you torture the US constitution enough it will eventually confess.
There are a lot of issues that fail the constitutional grep test yet somehow they are deemed (un)constitutional. The constitution was written to protect the people and states from the overly zealous congress. Not to fix the situation in which the congress is so dysfunctional that the judiciary has to replace it.
Anyone still crossing US borders with electronic devices that aren't fully wiped? This is company policy for some European companies for a long time. Even during the Biden administration.
Most employees just receive a wiped phone/laptop for the duration of the trip. Depending on the country its either a device that only has access to the bare minimum of Services, or for countries like Russia they issue a dumb phone that can only call and text.
Half of the commenters here seem to believe that nobody has ever done this successfully because it must be “suspicious”. Despite it being a common practice for many organizations.
It might be suspicious, but they don't get any incriminating evidence that way. It's also much easier for people visiting. Most of the time entry is denied and you can take the next plane back home. I'm fine with that, don't care. I only care if I would get taken into ICE detention. This risk grew significantly, so I simply won't go.
It's frankly insane that y'all have to do that, and yes Americans cross the border, perhaps haplessly.
Is there any difference between US citizens and visitors? It just seems like US citizens think those charades are normal and don't question them. In my home country I can just deny getting my devices searched. They might be allowed to seize and seal them, awaiting a court order for searching the device. Which I could appeal. Basically the same process as anywhere else in the country, international borders are not some special place that gives the police superpowers.
Ps: we also don't have some special paramilitary border police. Just regular police stationed at the border.
It's not routine. Most tourist visitors don't have any trouble. I'm a US citizen, but I've never had my phone searched at an airport or border crossing, not that I cross the border all that often.
I know it isn't routine. But it does happen. I know two people that had to go into secondary inspection and I think they had to unlock their phones. Both of them were completely normal business travelers without anything dubious in their life or their business. One was a medical doctor another one a government employee going to an international conference hosted by a US federal institution (which required some extensive clearance and background checks to even attend). Both Western European citizens with a completely spotless CV.
all of our police are essentially paramilitary now. There's nothing special about ICE or CBP other than they're federal rather than local. Even local cops have become hyper-militarized and think they're patrolling the streets of Fallujah
Yes, the vast majority of US citizens returning from international travel cross the border with their regular personal, unwiped phones every day.
This is confusing; what happens to you if you refuse a warantless search of your property?
I'm a US citizen returning home. Do they just... send me back out of the country? :) I don't suppose they'd have the grounds to arrest me since there is no law that I can see being broken. I suppose they could keep the device until such time that a warrant could be obtained to digitally search / break into the device (but that requires some reasonable suspicion - simply refusing a warantless search isn't it).
They let you in and keep your property. I've never had an issue at a border, but I still keep my devices encrypted and powered off when crossing.
They detain you, probably take and keep your stuff, and within a relatively short amount of time release you.
Well, they probably release you. If you're brown or just dealing with the wrong people they may unlawfully beat, kidnap, and exile you anyway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportations_of_U.S._citizens_...).
They can put you in custody.
Not for this they can't. They can seize your belongings but they can't detain you for something that isn't a crime and they cannot prevent you from entering the country if you're a citizen. You have an absolute right per Supreme Court rulings to enter the country unconditionally as a citizen
As a citizen they cannot block you from returning to the country. What they can do however is seize your devices (and briefly your person) and other property.
It's a massive swing and a miss that GrapheneOS has a religious opposition to a VeraCrypt-style hidden volume arrangement that allows different passwords to unlock different OS volumes.
It would be vastly superior to their current solution, which basically guarantees contempt charges.
I hope they change their mind soon!
This. There should be a password that unlocks to a fairly minimal, but not too minimal configuration that wouldn't have anything of interest on it.
What do you imagine being on your phone that is "of interest" to CBP at a border crossing?
The problem is it will be detectable and detected and then the password demanded and a failure to provide it will result in charges. I think unfortunately the answer is the phone has to be plausibly empty when crossing the US border, they should focus their efforts on being able to store the full state of the phone remotely and encrypted and being able to restore it easily.
Would it be detectable to some goon at the border? Probably not. They'd put in the sanitized password, see nothing, and let the person go. If it gets seized and an FBI or CIA analyst gets ahold of it, then yeah the smart guys are going to see it but you'd be in that situation anyway, so why not have an out that may avoid it?
Hidden volumes are impossible to detect, even with the password to the 'clean' volume and full device access.
Hidden volumes are not detectable and impossible to prove, even with the password to the clean volume and device access. That's the entire point.
This happened to me last month in Halifax Canada, I wanted to board a transfer flight to Amsterdam, going through Boston. I was stopped as I had salts with me from a buddhist relic I couldn't exactly identify. The machine said it contained a primary explosive (silver azide). I was ordered to give my access code to my iphone and 3 suspicious screenshots were found I made 2 years ago about the Iran/Israel war. I said I'm interested in geo-politics and watched the news. I was barred from the US for life - it was said that it could have been much worse. When I wanted to go to the main airport hall a number of canadian police officers arrested me and drove me handcuffed to a cell. I was asked if I wanted a lawyer and they arranged a phone call. The lawyer said I would spend to nights in a cell and then she would come to prepare my case and was strongly advised not to talk to people before that. I was released from my cell 7 hours later that evening after a thorough and friendly conversation with the canadian special police. I can understand that security don't want to take any chances with people carrying supposed explosive powders on an airport, so the system was doing it's protective job. That day there was a threat alert I heard later. A week later I heard from the person who gave me the relic (I was on retreat) that the border guard contacted them and said it was a false positive (what I suspected at the time, but I didn't dare argue against the machine results).
I commend your understanding. I would have been losing my mind with rage.
You were barred for life over a false positive? That's crazy.
They were barred for life for having screenshots the current administration considers anti-American.
I'm a little confused. Canadian police barred you from the US for life?
Also sounds like you did not take your lawyer's advice not to talk. Regardless, sorry you went through such a stressful ordeal over a false positive.
You can pre-clear US customs and immigration in a number of Canadian airports, including Halifax
And just to clarify another element of the story: there is a significant legal difference between pre-clearance in a Canadian airport and landing in the US and proceeding through customs on US soil. At a pre-clearance station, you are still on Canadian soil. I'm sure there are exceptions, but you generally can "withdraw your application to enter" and basically just turn around and walk away from the border. If you decide you don't want to unlock your phone for the CBP officer, you can walk away. At that point they've already seen your passport and you're going to be flagged and may never be approved for entry again, but you're not going to end up on a CBP facility. Once you're through, you'll need to clear Canadian customs to go back, but if something happens it will be Canadian police that arrest you.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754687
Given that the US's economy is utterly dependent on tourism, do they just not want to have money any more or something?
Because who in their right mind is ever going to travel there at the moment?