This seems like an insane thing to have to do for visiting a supposed first world country. If phones had been around during USSR times I imagine you would have had to do the same. Personally I will rather just avoid any travel to the US, and I hope others do the same.

who believes an empty phone?

I believe they can. I believe they can even request your social media credentials, despite that being against the ToS for those sites. It's not against the law to refuse, but they can and will reject entry on that basis.

> but then says he can't have me disrespecting and being a smart-ass to his cops

Maybe it's just me, but I am of the exact opposite opinion. Cops have enormous power, and any misuse of it should be pushed back on hard. Cops that misuse their power should not be respected. An informed citizenry is a wonderful asset in making that power imbalance less of a problem.

And what did this judge think (not much, apparently)? Punishing you will make you respect the cops?! This idiot confuses the fear of punishment with respect. Also, does not understand that respect is not to be forced but to be earned. Forcing it will erode respect and generate lots of pretension and covert hate. This judge basically endangers all cops (and the community) for giving revenge to this one prick lacking self control! It's mind-blowing that someone less mature than a teenager can become a judge!

Too bad you could not bring that judge up on charges of judicial misconduct - if he indeed told you that the charge against you had no merit, but decided to punish you anyway because he did not approve of your demeanor.

... or otherwise, that people in your community could not apply any counter-pressure to such judicial behavior, in the media and public fora.

Many countries now assume you have a phone. For example getting UK visa requires a smartphone. I don't think going without a phone is feasible nowadays.

Another question is if going with a burner phone that has just sim card and bank card, sufficient. But then you need appleid/google account on the device, and this again links back to your phone number, and it's not easy in practice to have proper clean device.

Yes I thought this was the standard solution?

People have been doing this since way back in the TrueCrypt days - IIRC you could configure it to run a whole fake version of Windows if you wanted without easily revealing your actual main volume.

Most hardware crypto wallets also have a "duress wallet" feature where you keep a low balance for the same reason.

Wiping is obviously extremely suspicious and asking for trouble

Or that just selectively wipes only stuff you have marked for deletion. That way the profile stays up to date and believable.

Or travel with a diary containing a post-it note labelled "p4sswd"

This. If any country won't treat you like a guest, avoid travelling to it.

If it's your own, that's harder to do – time to fight and change the system before it gets worse and will swallow you whole.

I live in the U.S. (as, I think, does the person who is the subject of this article).

Note that border searches of electronic devices are extremely rare overall. There were some statistics from CBP implying a base rate lower than 1 in 10,000 (I think lower than 1 in 100,000) border crossings.

I do know two people who have experienced them as a result of the government taking a personal interest in them, so it's certainly not impossible. However, it's not a common experience.

I've personally experienced searches of my suitcases about four times in about 100 U.S. border crossings (as a U.S. citizen, but the people performing or directing those searches generally didn't know my citizenship status), and zero electronic device searches.

It's also quite surprising that all socials need to be declared. And presumably them AI vetted in time for you to get to the border.

> Federal prosecutor success rate is over > 90%.

This is a misunderstood statistic.

Federal prosecutors won't even pursue cases unless they think there's a high chance of success. They don't operate like two private parties suing each other to force the court to decide something. If the evidence is there or the charges aren't fully formed, they don't waste resources on it.

This leads to a contradictory set of complaints that the legal system lets too many people go or doesn't have enough teeth.

> Federal prosecutor success rate is over > 90%

Prosecutors pick their cases. Defense doesn't. The cases that aren't 90%+ sure aren't charged.

Some of us report for jury duty just itching to nullify something. Don't you? Checks and balances...

Is the high success rate because they are good at winning or good at picking winning cases? Does that 90% include plea bargains?

Yeah, but without a jury O.J. Simpson never would've walked out of court a free man.

For example in Europe when someone dies somebody always has to go to jail, even if they were defending themselves or responding to a potential threat. A jury could show compassion or empathy. Judges are extremely stoic in that regard.

It is not surprising. They just don’t go to court unless they think they have enough evidence for a conviction. In a perfect world the conviction rate would be 100% because in a perfect world the prosecutor would drop the case before if they don’t have enough evidence.

> Remember what happened to Aaron Swartz.

Indeed. There are certainly parallels between him and Sam Tunick. But I'm not sure the public is ready for all the parallels.

If it’s a malicious prosecution by the country/state then Jury is your best best over a Judge.

There is a reason that Elon Musks companies and others put a ‘you agree to not have a jury trial…’ clause in their terms as Judges are easier to influence - when a legal case is filed it’s allocated to a judge and certain cases will go strategically to a Judges with certain bias

Exactly. People complain police dont prevent crime, but dont realize that is not their purpose. The police exist to protect the government, not the people.

> It's people who couldn't get out of jury duty.

But that's good no? People who got out never would have taken it seriously.

I sat on a jury trial and was highly impressed with how seriously my fellow jurors took it - especially the presumption of innocence. When they started to go down some incorrect logical path, someone would step up and correct it.

Not to mention the public defender ripped apart the DA's case. It was the exact opposite of what I was expecting.

> Prosecutors have high success rates.

You're forgetting that the prosecutors don't bring cases they think they're going to lose to trial, they either drop the charges or try a plea deal. So you'd entirely expect the success rate to be high.

> Take the right to a jury. It sounds noble in theory. But when they say judged by your peers they don't mean your actual peers. It's people who couldn't get out of jury duty.

What? A jury system is far from perfect but this is about as intellectually rigorous as “the lottery is a tax on the poor”. Many people are thrilled to do jury duty because they are invested in their community, your nihilism is not a universal truth, jury duty isn’t a burden, it is a civic duty, an honor.

> It's people who couldn't get out of jury duty.

It’s not even just who couldn’t get out of it. It’s filtered for people who answer honestly. I was disqualified for a grand jury because the judge asked me if I would believe the testimony of police officers as truthful and I said it would depend on the police officer.

The system already had their hands forced on accepting that some cops lie with Brady disclosures but the fact that I didn’t just naively accept police testimony meant I was an unscramble juror.

Even if you’re a true believer in the system you won’t be allowed to participate because you didn’t lie.

Indeed, but should he say his real code was one digit swap off, could you prove intent? Color matters, but you can't paint with only one

"Color" absolutely can be represented digitally; C compilers were doing it before we even knew they were doing it. We just like getting away with shit. It's part of the hacker ethos. Probably.

For one example of this, around 10 years ago there was a company called Aereo that tried to act as a "cloud television provider". The idea was that they had thousands of tiny antennas hooked up to servers in a warehouse, and they would lease an antenna to each subscriber. This gave an experience similar to cable TV but without Aereo having to pay broadcasters cable transmission fees. The major broadcasters sued Aereo and ended up getting it shut down for exactly the reason you mention. Despite Aereo technically being a TV antenna leasing service, it functionally acted like a cable TV service so they were violating copyright by not paying transmission fees.

> A lot of engineer types forget that the law is not code, and reductionist arguments almost never actually work in practice because it's a human interpreting the law.

It's worse than that: a lot of engineer types reason about almost everything as if it were code. It's a manifestation of Engineer's disease.

It reminds me of tax law in many countries. You can follow the letter of the law, but if the vibes are off, you can still be found to be in breach of a vague catch-all provision (e.g. economic substance doctorine in the US, GAAR in Canada/UK, Part IVA in Australia, etc).

There is a strong bias by the courts to interpret the law in such a way that it makes sense, and achieves the goals the legislature had when enacting it.

Maybe this is because of the TV dramas where a genius lawyer saves their client through an obscure technicality. It looks exactly like hacking a system using a 0-day exploit.

It's not that there's a human interpreting the law. It's that there is a politically motivated human interpreting the law, or in other words, you are sol if the state wants to get you. The engineer's arguments aren't reductionist, they are idealistic.

Does anyone think law is computer code? I mean any courtroom drama (even if far fetched) shows it is not.

When talking about costs we should remember who is paying. Maybe overall the cost of the government getting that data is higher than the cost of them getting mad at you, but when a single individual is paying for all of it the equation might change.

I think it's a matter of personal privacy. You shouldn't show it to other people.

I favorited the comment for the same reason. It's a perfect way of describing it.

Why even choose a mental health condition as the linguistic pivot point for a zingy social phrase?

There's a chilling effect from even just the arrest.

Would it have been wiser if that person had, as a US citizen, just refused to provide a PIN?

Purely technically it would also depend on the state of the phone. Phones can be read out/exploited more easily after first unlock (AFU) than before first unlock (BFU). So, a middle path would be putting the phone in BFU. Much harder to use exploits against the phone and biometric authentication doesn't work. One way of fairly reliably doing this is setting the reboot timer to 10 minutes or turning off the phone in critical situations.

It's also relevant to take into account that he wasn't protecting himself by wiping the phone, but fellow activists. So, he may have taken the risk of potential legal issues by wiping the phone to project others.

This is a form of legal evasion similar to warrant canaries imho : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

i m not sure how legal a protection it is, and whether the courts would interpret your choice of OS as complicit in evidence destruction.

And all of those arguments are entirely academic, and subject to change depending on economic status, skin color, or nationality.

Law is effectively a weak gentleman’s agreement we tolerate because the alternative is violence.

(Well, law is enforced with violence too, I suppose.)

Well, you need to be eating a burrito or something

It’s impossible to remove (even just nearly) all ambiguity.

People already complain that there are too many laws on the books.

But if the prosecutors can make a convincing argument that your intent was exactly that all along, then you may end up convicted anyway.

Intent matters. It might be hard to prove, but it matters.

It may not even be that hard; what other possible explanation is there for someone putting a PIN visible on their phone that wipes it while crossing a border?

Or just make it your birthday. Though I'm not at all sure the agents will try typing random codes in without at least some idea that they may work, given that many OS's will quickly start to punish with tarpitting.

I wouldn't write it down, I would just make it 1234. They're bound to try that. Then they have absolutely no case against you.

Be funnier if you even write “do not enter 123456”.

The police will ask you if the PIN unlocks the phone before using it.

Why would agents think that a number written on your phone is the PIN? That would only make sense if it was a communally-used device, not a personal one. Also, no one would put sensitive info on a devices that has the PIN affixed to it.

I suppose it's possible someone might enter it without thinking, but the odds seem low. Also seems risky to put a self-destruct PIN on your device, lest a friend (or enemy) enter it by accident or as a prank.

This is my core question as well. At what point do you have to maintain property so the government can use it to testify against yourself?

If I have a dash-cam, and I wipe the SD card, can the government imply that because I erased the card, it must prove that I was speeding? The dash-cam automatically over-writes old footage - perpetually destroying evidence.

Given nebulous cases such as "hacking" a site by looking at the HTML[0], am I destroying evidence of crimes whenever I format my PC? I hope the government requires specific charges and more proof of a crime other than missing evidence. Say I destroy my diary - can the government claim that is the key evidence where I confessed to being the gunman on the grassy knoll?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28992667

Also, can they proof that there was evidence on the phone?

Edit for the confused and misinformed: 18 USC 1001. Also, is ≠ ought.

Lying to a federal officer is a crime, IIRC, and if the lie results in destruction of evidence, the person who told the lie is probably accountable for both crimes. This isn't a lie with plausible deniability: you have to set a duress PIN, understanding what it does, and then communicate that PIN instead of the unlock PIN.

A duress PIN to wipe the device don't exist to absolve the owner of liability... It exists for when compromising the device could get people the owner cares about killed or disappeared and the owner considers their own liability, disappearance, or death a preferable outcome.

It is an extreme solution for extreme scenarios. People need to be sober in weighing its use.

I’ve been arguing against some LLMs about this point for a good hour and there’s a whole lot of linking intent to action where you can be liable if a court can prove it. Not that an LLM is legal gold but it’s the best thing I have to pass ideas around with.

The entire situation is sort of nonsensical and boils down to lots of minutia in law that no normal person would know about.

For example having normal widely known security features like wiping the device after N failed PIN attempts is fine. Even having long standing security practices that can’t be related are fine, like having a timed touch point where if you don’t enter the PIN every… 15 days or whatever the device wipes, perfectly fine if it can’t be connected towards the crime and you’re not compelled to tell officers you have such a security mechanism.

Even if you were to set a trap where you use the same PIN for your bank, your laptop, and some other security devices in repetition then decide to set your duress PIN to that by assuming it would be discovered as a probable option they’d use, you’d be ok but it could be questionable if that was by design…

It’s so obscure really as to how and how you’re not allowed to protect your data, even if you’re not the one performing the action to clear destroy the potential evidence yourself. The entire thing seems pretty absurd a frankly arbitrary to me, and I don’t know how people could know which cases are and aren’t legal. I know not to destroy evidence myself but I wouldn’t know to tell someone to not use the duress pin or that even giving them my duress pin could somehow be my liability. It’s madness if you ask me.

You’re way off about when it’s illegal to start destroying your property that the police want to seize during an investigation.

To me it’s all quite analogous to walking up to, but not crossing, a border with, say, a fruit that’s legal to possess on the side you’re on, but not on the other side, and either eating or throwing away that fruit before crossing.

“Hey! I saw you holding that Mexican pepper in Mexico, and then you threw it in that Mexican trash can before crossing into Texas!”

“Yeah, so?”

"Evidence" has never been limited to the subject of a warrant. Destruction of evidence statutes typically include material that is subject to a police investigation.

> Who said it was evidence? Did a judge authorize or issue a warrant to collect said evidence? Absent that, it's just your property, and you can do with it as you please.

Why do people go sovereign citizen when reality doesn't work their way? Stop imagining that the way you want things to be is the way things really are.

Cops do not need a judge to authorize the seizing of evidence. Cops do not need judges to decide what evidence is. Tell me, why did you just pretend like these are real requirements? I can understand why you'd want it to be that, but you wanting it to be that doesn't change reality.

It's as if you've just learned about the Fourth Amendment but know nothing about the nuance behind it.

Your system wouldn't even work at all. Let's imagine the cops get a tip that a bald man with a blue tshirt shot a man. They patrol the streets and find a match. By your logic they should not have the ability to search the man and seize his gun as evidence until a judge issues a warrant.

Yes this is different than when law enforcement serve a warrant and the defendant wipes his computer before the agents can get a hold of it. In that case the warrant covers what you destroyed as evidence.

Though during traffic stops, if a defendant disposes of his drugs while on the run, that can also carry a charge of destroying evidence even though no warrant was issued.

IANAL

Not that shufflecake solves the issue you highlighted, but I found the shufflecake FAQ to be a good intro to the topic for anyone curious. It does a good job explaining the threat vectors and the relevant trade offs, in particular the TRIM and ORAM sections. It’s also just a cool project: https://shufflecake.net/

What does “block devices aren’t dumb anymore” mean?

I agree that trying to outcompete seems really hard, but also:

Given what the experience of using a non-rooted phone is like, how very very tight the sandboxing is and how useless it is a General Purpose Computer that will tell you anything: I find it very hard to believe the unlocked phone is going to let you start probing firmware & snooping on hidden volumes.

This post sent my BS detector on high alert. I'm struggling to take it seriously.

Meanwhile cops can and do regularly deceive and lie to citizen and not only don't face any consequences but actively benefit from it.

No, you're being very dramatic. Lying to cops is very often your best strategy.

I doubt this person will be found guilty. They will be able to prove he wiped his phone, but it will be hard to prove he destroyed evidence.

true, but in that scenario you're going to prison either way. If you legitimately use the dummy for daily driving and hidden for sensitive work, then it's better than nothing.

Obviously a good alternative is a dummy device but it carries similar risks, and the best option is to simply not go to authoritarian shitholes like the USA. Thankfully I've been able to avoid/push for US folks visiting us instead, but honestly the alternatives are as bad.

Its a shit situation where most reasonable actions carry real risks, its up to individuals to choose what is acceptable risk to them, but a dummy os you use as a daily driver for inconsequential work is, to me, an ideal midground.

I could be wrong, but my understanding is that the dummy OS views the remaining space as legitimate and accessible free space. Using dummy directly is of course dangerous, as you might overwrite sectors with legitimate data, but also, you can access dummy os from secret. so you'd drive dummy from secret to prevent that but can load dummy as main if under duress and it looks fine. Browser, logged into various inconsequential things, random files for inoffensive memes and other human stuff in downloads folder etc. maybe an email account you've signed up to a few newsletters and e-stores that send spam logging in via an email client that auto-launches etc.

Done well, I see no reason it should raise redflags in routine stops, so unless you're being targeted (at which point you've got way bigger problems) it should just seem like you're a run of the mill person who does not use their device to its full capacity, which is the majority of users.

at some point, having any mitigations even present is a problem. At some point being met with a boot password at all is a problem that puts you on a list. I have no solution there other than to not go to those countries or keep dummy hot.

But Veracrypt can be used for encryption of a volume, without creating a hidden volume. I assume it would often be used this way.

The $5 wrench decryption technique would be even more unpleasant if you hadn’t created a hidden volume, as there would be no way to prove you hadn’t.

Should people be sure to never use Veracrypt volume encryption unless they create a hidden volume? I have trouble even thinking this way!

Hmm. It looks like the government asserts that they can seize a device if the owner does not provide a password. This is a good point and answers my search v. seizure objection above.

You say CBP is "empowered" to seize a device if the owner refuses to provide a password but I can't find a statute that authorizes it or precedent squarely saying the 4th Amendment allows this. The scope of the border search exception isn't settled. So the next argument available is that the executive is wrong and CBP does not have the constitutional authority to seize a device merely because the owner refuses to provide a password. That's obviously a much bigger argument and who knows if it would work, though this case sorta feels like it could become a marquee 4A case.

"The ACLU argues that the Fourth Amendment does apply in these situations, at least to electronic devices, because they contain so much private information. But the law is very unsettled, and the Supreme Court has not addressed the issue."

https://www.aclumaine.org/know-your-rights/electronic-device...

Just being silly. Owner gave permission (and the pin code) that will give them access to an empty phone. No search refused.

It's a shame that the US appears on that list now.

They've been boiling that frog for 25 years now. Its flesh has long detached from the bones, it's the bones themselves that are now dissolving.

This is exactly my setup with GrapheneOS. The default / main profile is patriotic, with a sterilized Telegram account, state-adjacent banks and apps, etc. The second profile (that uses a separate PIN) is not so patriotic: it has foreign bank apps, crypto apps, password manager, 2FA app, personal records, and an alternate Telegram account that I use to discuss any potentially unpatriotic topics with potentially unpatriotic people.

This is extremely hard to implement in a non-superficial way that would be hard to detect.

Android switched from block device encryption to filesystem-based encryption (with encryption data and metadata). This provides many security improvements, such as per-file encryption keys and per-profile keys.

However, this also means that the main file system is readable and you could enumerate the available users. If you would encrypt/obscure that information, you could still infer the presence of other profiles from file system block allocations.

(Disclaimer: not an expert, but I read the relevant Android docs at some point.)

And wipes the main partition in the background at the same time

Also too patriotic is sus. Better to keep some minor offenses (that give you a fine or a week of jail at most) on that partition so they will think that this is the thing that made you so nervous during the search

I had this on a Xiaomi, maybe 10 years ago? Very cool feature! I hope they still do it. I think the wipe feature is also very cool, but not used in this way.

Impossible to implement securely, so they chose not to

leaving the actual evidence files untouched...

The real terrorist were the cops.

They need to prove you destroyed evidence, you have the mens rea component with the deceptive pin code but the defense can simply plainly say they didn't want the police to read their private device.

Your example is fabricated since the justice department didn't even bring forward a specific crime they believe was committed here.

If they charged him with a crime and had evidence his device had evidence of that crime (even if in reality it didn't) that would be a more interesting question.

But again where is the crime?

Destroyed evidence of what?

You have to prove it is an evidence of a crime to start with, speculation is not a fact. My property, my business, i can smash the phone and no one has anything to do or say unless there’s an undeniable fact that there’s an evidence there and it got destroyed, else, it’s no one’s business.

Well, good luck to them. If I'm on the jury and he argues "I got my passcodes confused" that's reasonable doubt for me.

> So if someone was doing insider trading, and the SEC came knocking, then immediately afterwards they start burning every document they have and microwaving their computers, do you think they should get off the hook?

Apples and oranges. They presumably already have some sort of evidence in order to get a warrant and are under criminal investigation.

According to the article the agents said it was just a normal part of screening.

They are not sending their finest to court it seems.

If your legal system depends on the benevolence of prosecutors, you've already lost before it began.

Attorneys are supposed to be adversarial. The system's soundness shouldn't depend on anything more than them trying to win and not doing anything illegal.

Before "prosecutor" became an elected/appointed office, prosecutors were independent contractors, hired for a single case only and serving at the pleasure of the Grand Jury. The Grand Jury's job was to decide how to spend the public prosecution budget. "Indictment" meant exactly that "prosecuting this person is a good use of tax dollars" and nothing more. We should go back to that.

No, he wasn't, what is your point?

This person was under "investigation" for protesting against cop city. The authorities were waiting for him to turn up at a place where the law would give them more power.

They were never going to let him just walk in. Eventually, they'd have to, possibly after lawyers and news would get involved, but it's not like saying "no" was going to end the ordeal right away.

The defense has a chance to educate the jury about it in a trial, and given how widely CBP/DHS is distrusted in 2026 it’s not difficult to see at least one juror having reasonable doubt.

Bonus for the defense: whatever is left of the DOJ, it’s mainly cranks, cronies, and people who can’t find work elsewhere.

'I don't want some sketchy phone mugger to end up with sexy photos of my girlfriend/myself' would seem like a plausible reason to me, if I was a juror.

Android has had multiple users for many years, though it's a feature most smart phone brands turn off for some reason.

You can switch users just fine, you just cannot hide the primary user from the secondary user. Opening up the device also makes it a lot more vulnerable to attacks to dump the keys and storage.

Having multiple users is quite handy but it's not going to do anything at a border checkpoint that'll save you.

Recent Android releases have a Private Space feature, where you can hide not just files, but entire apps, their data, notifications, etc.

https://support.google.com/android/answer/15341885?hl=en

You are incorrect, US border patrol can not arrest you for refusing to decrypt your phone (if you are a citizen). It is not considered obstructing a search to refuse to provide a password. This is not "autistic" speculation about legal technicalities, there are many many examples which support this. The worst they can do is seize the device.

I mean, yes?

If 1% of iPhone users are criminals and 5% of GrapheneOS users are criminals, border search agents are going to be interested in your GrapheneOS mobile.

I am pretty sure criminals are more likely to use a super safe and secure phone that is easy to obtain.

What they should really do is make the decryption key backupable.

Then you can keep it at home, and you can genuinely say that you don't remember it because it's like 128 digits.

And you're not "destroying evidence" in the jurisdiction in question because the phone is already locked. And you can't unlock it on demand.

Perhaps a defence to this is ensure that a copy of the encryption key exists in a location outside the jurisdiction of the state.

> To make a seizure all that is needed is reasonable cause that customs law/regs were violated.

What would be the reasonable suspicion that a USC bringing their personal phone on a trip with them would be a customs violation?

That doesn't sound at all reasonable.

In fact, the only "suspicion" they had was that he was someone who didn't like LE or Trump which is still not a crime, nor a customs violation.

Did he actually destroy any property, though?

The downvotes you get on this website for being completely correct never cease to astonish me.

I'd like some filter where if a comment is downvoted by IP addresses located in USA, they are considered as upvotes.

That isn't a crime in the US thanks to the first amendment.

I agree that it seems a simple argument for any competent lawyer to make that the phone isn't the "gold copy". The phone is just an ephemeral copy of the real data which is safely stored away in the cloud, and the authorities can request access to with the proper warrants.

Of course this argument will only work if the phone is indeed and a ephemeral copy of your real data.

Honest question: Does a wipe just wipe what's on the phone, or does it also tell the cloud to delete stuff?

There’s been a large uptick in immigration from the US to Ireland; almost ten thousand last year. In general, people would do this via employment; software engineers and similar would generally qualify for a critical skills permit. For critical skills, after two years on a stamp 1 visa (tied to a specific employment) you can move to a stamp 4 (not tied to specific employment). After five years working in the country you can apply for citizenship.

How do you manage data between your primary and travel-phone?

I _think_ you would need a fresh iCloud account (thus losing access to purchased apps and subscriptions). You also need to manually create fresh social media accounts, copy over contacts, etc.?

Any advice on how to automate this process or is this just a 2-4 hours exercise you do before your trip?

GrapheneOS is excellent but seems like it just brings unwanted attention at this stage.

Another plus is if you do lose the device the damage is minimal, its a bit of a hassle but nothing beats peace of mind

The US is known for it's freedoms and protections. It's one of the safest place to take a personal phone.

you could login to your stuff after but the point is to minimize damage when you do lose your device abroad

laziness isn't an excuse and if you do want access to your phone or device at home you could setup that as well

Wouldn't be surprised if they charge you with exposing yourself.

If they ask to open my suitcase and I say 'no' that is suspicious. I've done a lot of travelling and have been questioned more than once: being candid and transparent has always been prudent.