We all read about the attempts to charge a US Citizen for destruction of evidence for using the distress pin on his GOS phone. So what is safe to do if you know you will be traveling internationally? Are people getting a burner phone and leaving their normal phone at home? What’s to stop you from saying you dont have a phone if you are stopped at a border crossing?
Rule #1 Don’t travel to the usa
In this case USA is origin.
I assumed so, world wide web though.
I mean, agreed for anyone who has that option. Dont travel there. But in this case if its your starting and ending point that doesn’t address the question at hand. How to do this as safely as possible.
If the usa is your starting point, then stay there.
And if you’re a flight attendant or pilot? Or any other profession that involves international travel?
The usa should be completely boycotted.
Flight staff are obviously a very fringe example that you have chosen while trying to make a point. Even they would not have to deal with that mess, and would not be supporting it, if the rest of the world stopped travelling to the usa.
Decent people = a decent planet.
Flight staff are obviously a very fringe example that you have chosen while trying to make a point
While I respect the sentiment you’re trying to convey, the point I was trying to make is most folks aren’t willing to upend their careers and livelihood for their personal beliefs.
Fathers/Mothers who are required to travel for work aren’t going to drop everything and starve their families all for a protest.
No one is forced to travel to the usa. If the usa were boycotted as it needs to be, no employer would be sending staff there, and no staff can be sent there is everyone refuses.
People need to stop making excuses
“all for a protest” …protesting the evil empire seems kid of important, it’s not like the people of the usa want their country to be anything aside from evil, they just keep waving flags for red evil, and for blue evil. The rest of the world needs to shut that shit down.
OP probably needs to look at a burner phone, and would also need to put some ‘i love trump’, ‘blow up the world’, or ‘usa for pedophiles’ posts on it just to be on the safe side.
As an American, I want it to not be evil, and as a commie, I hate the Republicans and the Democrats.
The problem is I can’t get out. I wish I could get to safety. Someplace where the government won’t attack me for being a trans girl.
If you have any advice for me, please share it.
There are good people everywhere, somewhere like the usa would have always been a problem for them, now even more so. I would assume leaving by land, is easier than air? I do not live there though, so have no idea what the land border situation is now. It is still a question of having the finances and somewhere to live when you get to the other side.
Internally the democrats are no doubt the lesser evil, especially when compared to trump. Long term the people of the usa really need to kick them both out.
Internationally the usa is war on earth either way.
I agree land is probably easier than land, it let’s me avoid the TSA, which is very transphobic right now to say the least.
Financially I need to just… wait. I’m gonna get a better job, then I can save up to move near the Northern border while I wait to get in to Canada (I would die of heatstroke if I go South.
My family still thinks the Dems are great. It’s absurd. I wish I could convince them somehow. But they aren’t wrong about the Dems being better than Trump.
Individuals arent the US government
the usa has been war on earth for many decades, the people are why.
I have two phones which is only because I wouldn’t be upset if this phone was stolen or lost or broken unlike my main phone. My travel phone is an older and cheap Google pixel phone on which I installed Graphene. I use it regularly to read books from my local library. I do not bring it with me anywhere other than travel. On this phone I also:
- Do not log into anything other than the library app which uses a random username as the login. No email or anything attached to it beyond my home address.
- Ensure that ADB is NOT enabled.
- Require a pin to unlock the phone. No biometrics alone. Ever.
- Install signal for all communication. Lock it behind a pin that is not my phone unlock pin.
- Any and all files that I create on this device have their exif stripped and are automatically encrypted using automation software then sent to my S3 bucket or home server depending on the nature of the files and their size after I connect to wifi somewhere.
- Transfer my service plan to this device.
- Install apps only from obtanium that are verified to match the hash signatures from the distributor.
- The phones drive is encrypted
- While in line for TSA I turn the phone off to which it will remain until I am at my gate.
I have had issues in the past with TSA and my phone with a “random” search. They requested I unlock my phone. I did not, and requested a warrant and will not speak more than my rights and that I will only speak through legal counsel should they be able to produce a warrant. They searched me and my belongings over the course of a few hours. They can eat my ass.
In addition all of my personal machines including my steam deck and my laptop are also encrypted and secured using FOSS software including Linux as the OS. I have nothing to hide, but I’m also smart enough to not provide them with anything they could twist out of context or use against me.
Wow, that quite a setup !
I am sad it’s required for any level of privacy and sovereignty
I turn off biometrics and power down. They can ask for the unlock pin, I can decline until they produce a warrant and I can request an lawyer. My risk profile is sufficiently accommodated.
I can see someone with a different risk profile, say, an online presence showing vocal criticism against Trump and goons, and/or not white and/or not a native born US citizen and/or has a travel history to muslim-majority countries might want to take further measures.
I’ve just skimmed headlines and seen a short or two on the guy who gave LEOs the distress pin. I’m not sure why he didn’t decline to give them his pin until they produced a warrant, but I think giving a destruction pin was not the brightest idea. But also, fuck the cops and double fuck border cops playing these racist, fascist games with people’s lives.
I mean thats what its for. Maybe, like playing dead, he thought they’d get tired of fucking with him. Also, all of that seems like a hassle when you have the distress pin right there. And prior to this, no hint at the potential consequences. Also, you just want to go home at this point. Its been a little while since I read about it, but I think they said you can give us the pin or we will crack it with XYZ software (idk what its named). So there’s a risk at that point if you think it might work. Idk, I’m not going to judge the dude.
Also they were saying that normal rules didn’t apply at a border. No request for lawyer, no need for warrant.
also they were saying that normal rules don’t apply at a border
Yeah, and call it my middle class white American audacity but I’d be willing to go toe to toe with them on that BS for quite some time. I’d be focused on keeping control and being the most pristine accuser in a civil rights lawsuit that there ever was.
I’m read up enough on US Borders and customs policy to know them confiscating and hooking up my phone to a laptop to try to crack my password is a different thing than manipulating me into volunteering my pin. That’s what they’re trying to do, pressure people into “voluntarily” giving their pin, which gets the cops off the hook for following their protocol for conducting searches within their more restrictive rules for cracking into a device. Same as letting them in the front door of my house, if a person “voluntarily” lets cops into their house when the cops apply pressure, the homeowner has allowed them out of all the rules and oversight that come with getting a warrant.
I think you’re right, it is important for people to know their rights, but also understand that these people are making it up as they go.
In the activist example, they claimed they had evidence he had child pornography. Do they even have to find anything real to fuck up your day if they want to?
I recently traveled and I brought my old iphone 6 and made sure my physical SIM was compatible with both and checked with my carrier as well. One issue I keep running into is that the digital boarding pass and email communications for updates from the airline just make issues like flight delays, reroutes, lost baggage, or missed flights so much faster to deal with, especially if there are minute by minute updates and a time crunch in an airport I’m not familiar with. I guess the best answer there is to have a dedicated email address for airline comms and make that the only connected account for your backup smartphone.
If you’ve got the money, blank burner phone and/or laptop. If you get questioned just say your regular devices are expensive and you were afraid of losing them/damaging them while traveling
Cloud-backup your phone, factory reset it, set it up again with a phone number, a different messenger app to the one you currently use and download your idk, 20 most recent pictures to your galery and set one as your background.
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You will still be able to make phone calls if needed
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You will still be able to send messages on for example Telegram even tho you usually use Signal
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The phone will not look like a burner as it has some personal content on it
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The phone will look personalized and thus less suspicous together with point 3
Edit: You don’t even have to actually set them up or even open them at all, but maybe even download a shopping list, a notes app, two games, all in all it should take like 10 minutes to make your phone look less suspicous as opposed to the other advice to just factory reset it.
Cloud backup not by Google or Apple of course.
Not sure how you’d do a whole OS backup without using the vendor cloud because apps dont have access to the entire phones ecosystem
Now they do.
On ios? Not sure thats true. On android im sure some sideloading could work
No, i meant i made the backup app have access to the entire system. Rooted it.
Why do that? If they ask you why you have a fully factory reset device with you, just say it’s to keep jackboot thugs like you from being assholes.
Trust me, I would LOVE to insult my way through these assholes, but man, you need to realize noone wants every airport visit to include multiple hours wasted in interrogation. Your comment is absolutely useless.
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If you have good backups of the phone to say something like nextcloud or a other cloud service. Wipe the phone clean before travel. Then just give them the pin. Nothing to see at all. Then pull down a backup once passed the border control.
Wipe then restore from backup when you get back
I typically back up everything important on my phone the week before. Then uninstall all Apps I don’t want scanned if needed (password managers, banking, etc.) This allows me to worry slightly less…🤏
I was outside the EU in Scotland. I had the fortune of being privileged enough for the UK Border force to divert us to the ePassport gates so that the only thing I had to show was just my passport and look at the camera.
Same in Thailand, but there we had to go through manned passport control and they also asked for my fingerprints and my passport but they didn’t searched my personal belongings.
In Schengen they don’t even check what you have with you, unless you don’t look white enough and don’t know wtf you’re doing here.
Also just read that an appeals court upheld the government right to search your phones and retain any data they find despite the 4th Amendment and other privacy protections.
I can’t travel anyway because my passport has the wrong gender marker now despite my appearance, genitals, etc. But last time I traveled domestically even, I backed up my phone with the built in GrapheneOS backup as well as some manual backups to a NAS I have at home. Then wipe the phone, install only the basics including not installing my Vaultwarden client which would potentially give them access to all of my passwords, and then restore everything when I get home. It’s not perfect and takes a lot of extra work. If I ever get to travel more, next time I upgrade my phone I thought about not trading in the old one and keep that only for travel. Problem is that everything is eSIMs these days, so it’s harder to just switch phones out than it used to be. I do wish backups were as easy as they were back when we could root phones without breaking so many apps. Being able to backup the entire partition was so much easier.
