Amid the recent news of a U.S. citizen being asked to turn over his phone to authorities at a border crossing, Sophia Cope of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has tips on digital civil liberties.
Related, “Attorney representing a student protester detained by federal immigration agents”
When a man in Michigan was heading home on Sunday from a family vacation in the Caribbean, he was stopped in the Detroit Airport. Federal officers, border agents, detained him, interrogated him and pressured him to hand over his cellphone. The man is a U.S. citizen. He’s a civil rights and criminal defense attorney, and among his clients is an activist who has been charged in connection to a pro-Palestinian protest at the University of Michigan.
Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250410185452/https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5357455
Use a burner phone if possible.
Or you know, fix the country? Isn’t that a better way to deal with this problem instead of band-aiding every single thing?
I agree, so what are the exact steps I can take to fix the country?
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
We’re about to.
If you have an interest in fixing the country then you definitely need to have a burner phone system because you’re the exact kind of person they’re going to single out (like, this article was inspired by an ttorney for a pro-Palestine protester having his phone seized when he re entered the country)
Great advice, but what if you’re concerned about the possibility that you might be stuck in the other country permanently(not because of the search itself but because the U.S. Government could fall apart while you’re visiting the other country)?
Do you just give up on having your phone?
Don’t travel if possible. Foreigners should not travel to the US and Americans should not travel to foreign countries if they care for their personal safety. With the obvious exception that they’re uprooting and leaving permanently.
If that comes to pass the burner phone would become “your phone,” as much of a pain in the ass and potential cause of losing media as that would be
I’m not sure I’m understanding your question. The prior poster you’re responding to said to use a burner phone. So you have a phone. It looks like you’re asking: “If I get stuck in another country and can’t come back, how do I get the device (your primary phone) I left in the USA?”
Is that what you’re asking?
Yes.
Me personally, if I was stuck in another country I didn’t plan on being in long term, getting a phone back I spent a few hundred dollars on probably wouldn’t be very high on my list.
If your concern is not being parted from your primary phone because of its replacement cost, you could backup you data to the cloud on your primary phone, wipe it clean, then carry it across the border (not hiding it). If there’s nothing on it then if they ask for it they would likely hand it back to you fairly quickly when they see there’s nothing to snoop on it.
Alternatively, prior to your departure, mail it to your new location in the other country. I’d still wipe the data before mailing it though.
Yes don’t bring a phone with anything really private on it. Fixing the country is obviously preferable but sometimes you want a practical stopgap.