> Of course, with great effort and moderate expense, you could setup a burner phone with access to many of your same accounts and resources, but the more features you add to the burner phone, the more it begins to look like the device you're leaving "safe" at home.

The trick is to have alternate accounts, and not have your "real" ones configured as you transit sensitive locations like borders. Once you're past, download your apps and log in to your real accounts.

With LLMs that's even easier. I suppose you could set one up to populate your fake Facebook account with convincing, up-to-date "local sports team" fan activity.

Don't call attention to yourself, make noncompliance look like compliance.

> the more features you add to the burner phone, the more it begins to look like the device you're leaving "safe" at home.

Wouldn't a sensible way to do this be to create an encrypted backup of your device on a VPS, then restore it to the "burner phone" once you're on the other side of the border, and wipe the device again before you come back?

The idea being that whenever you're at the border crossing, the device contains nothing, and the passphrase for the backup is in your head.

I find modern smartphones more and more unusable, both OS becoming more hostile towards the user, and applications widely moving to dropping logins in regular intervals. That has been happening for years already, so I slowly moved more and more stuff back to a computer.

By now I'm at a point where I no longer even backup my phone - there are a bunch of apps, but I can just install them and log in again on a different device as needed.

The final step to make it truly throwaway was me doing a custom matrix bridge for SMS earlier this year - I had voice routing setup for a while already. So now my old SIM cards are in a 4G modem at home, and the phone I carry around with me just has a data SIM. Huge quality of life improvement, as I can terminate as many numbers as I want there, and have access to both voice and SMS data from my computer as well.

I tried that once.

Then when I tried to log in to my Gmail account at my destination, it flagged it as a suspicious login attempt and wouldn't let me in without entering a code they texted to my American phone number, which meant I was locked out of my email for the duration of the trip.

Plus travel day realities often require your phone and accounts - plane tickets, Uber/Lyft, hotel reservations or updates from Airbnb with check-in instructions, door codes, etc.

It's a tremendous challenge and hassle for any regular person. We really just need to push back on the government overreach. It's tragic that half of the Trump voters proclaim to be "small government" and "Don't tread on me" but then tolerate things like this. There's certainly a bipartisan group of people opposed that are large enough to effect change if we work together.

The issue, as I understand it, is that someone with standing to sue over the 4th amendment would be prosecuted under a FISA court. Those cases due to how the court was created and structured, do not end up in front of the supreme court.

It's one of those weird things in the US constitution which allow for congress to create new federal courts which don't ultimately fall under the jurisdiction of the regular federal courts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurisdiction_stripping

If you’re talking about a US citizen returning home, they can’t hold you indefinitely. If you disagree, I challenge you to find a counter example.

All bets are off if you’re a non-citizen entering another country, it depends on the laws and customs there.

You have to set up trivial, low value “burner” email that you use for your emailing activity when overseas, and other related social media accounts, and make sure to keep them “warm”.

A spare old Pixel or iPhone SE is $20-$50 you can use for this purpose.

Note also that that 100 miles _is a radius around your nearest international airport_ and need not be what you think of as a border, i.e. a line drawn between two land masses.

That concerns more than 220 million people in the USA, who can be arbitrarily stopped in the street and searched.

Be afraid...

I assume journalists would already do this actually maybe they don't?

There dosent appear to be any import/export controls on the current internet is there?

If they say import export control gives them the right to search citizens maybe they should be aware of this giant gapping hole that the internet created 30+ years ago?

How is the law subverted if one doesn't make all data immediately available?

I mean, that's what the State tells you to stop uprising, but there has never in history been a state that served the people it governed, it serves the people who govern. It's all just big gangs with weapons, and sometimes one gang takes over another's territory. Everything else is window dressings to prevent other gangs from forming.

It does not, this is not in the law. This is a false misunderstanding that somehow keeps getting propagated. A few civil rights people have looked into it and don’t see it as a likely problem, and there haven’t been cases where the government was able to use this argument.

Worse though, is that the definition of border is hella loose. CBP can be many MANY miles away from an actual border and do this.

So the argument is basically that Americans already consent to allowing customs to search anything and everything that they are physically bringing across the border, whether a US citizen or not, and now that is also affirmed to include the digital contents of electronic devices.

> It should probably be noted that this specific case led to a conviction of an actual crime (Bank fraud and money laundering).

That's pretty much irrelevant to the discussion. Of course a lot more crimes would get prosecuted if we lived in a total police state.

East Germany built a wall to keep their citizens "free" of "fascist elements"...