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I'm not a mod of any comm and I'm just a regular user. But in light of current GOP events I think we all need to be extra careful not to fedpost. We are going be under an even stronger microscope. What law enforcement (FBI, etc) views as "violent threats" is going to be far different for us than for chuds at a site like StormFront2Trump2028.com.
That's all. I don't mean to start a struggle session. I just thought it needed to be said.
This is more and more important as agents are increasingly going through people’s phones at airports. They’re checking all social media, browsing history, photo albums, etc. If you’re an American citizen you technically have a right to say no as long as you’re not using biometrics to unlock the phone. But you can expect a really long detention if you refuse. And this stuff will not be staying isolated to airports or to non-citizens.
Yeah so I was wondering about this—they’re searching Americans cellphones as well? And if they find, say, a JD Vance meme in a WhatsApp group chat, what can they do to you about it, I guess make you miserable by searching you for hours in secondary?
There’s a real horrible level of liability going on here where stuff that most Americans think is legal is being treated as a crime by CPB, to the point where it’s even almost retroactive crime, ie the fact that you said free Palestine 5 years ago means that you lied on your customs form 2 ‘’minutes ago when you said “you don’t materially support terrorist groups” because CPB has decided that Palestinians are all a terrorist group and that a typed tweet counts as material support.
I understand how they get away with this when it comes to visitor visa people like that Norwegian who got bounced over the Vance meme, because they have huge legal leeway to do whatever with non-citizens, but I’m less clear on how they approach doing this to standard US citizens, so curious if you know?
I saw that memo about going after naturalized us citizens guilty of “crimes” so it does seem like it’s basically open season on everyone very soon.
No one knows. Not even they themselves know. It's being actively developed and the policy and envelope actively and steadily pushed forward further and further. What the situation is now probably won't be what the situation is in 12 months.
The thing is as a US citizen they cannot deny you re-entry to the country (if you're non-white I wouldn't be positive they wouldn't try in the future to some amount of such people to detain and possibly deport them or something but if you're a citizen by birth at least that's a lot more difficult even then). They cannot hold you without charging you for more than I think 48-72 hours, one of those though I think unfortunately that might be guidance within the agency rather than law so they could possibly in future push and stretch that period out but at that point we may be through the looking glass entirely. They can take your stuff and resisting them by refusing to unlock your phone will be noted and probably result in future searches and enhanced scrutiny but then again may not.
In most cases in the past (things are changing obviously so who knows where this goes) refusing to unlock your phone as a citizen resulted in detention for a few hours which was considered punishment enough as by then you'd miss your flight and have lost hundreds or thousands of dollars. There were exceptions of course like whistleblower journalists, genuine criminals like pedophiles, etc.
If it's just those airport security TSA people they probably won't do a thorough search and most likely will just briefly look through your photos and apps including messenger apps and emails for maybe 5 minutes looking for super obvious crimes in front of you BUT if they take it to another room or its CBP or ICE they might try and use a graykey or other hacking device on it to download the contents or even in theory install malware as well. You have no way of knowing what direction the search will go once you hand over your unlocked phone so that's the problem and you can't exactly demand it back. They could start out searching it in front of you casually and take it out of sight to a back room with a hacking device and you'd be powerless to do anything about it.
One trick that MIGHT work (be careful, lying to these people could be a crime, I am not a lawyer, check with a lawyer) is saying it's a business phone. If your trip is for business this holds more weight and in most cases they'll give up because companies have rights to keep secrets that the government respects a lot more than the rights of their disposable proles. This works better for laptops as phones they might still assume you can unlock in order to use it. This won't work if you're specifically targeted.
Make a plan before you travel. Are you okay resisting them and accepting the consequences? How far will you resist? Will you really accept missing your flight? Will you accept missing your flight and being detained for 48 hours? Will you accept that plus them confiscating your phone? If you decide you might bend the knee if detained then decide what you need to do to minimize harm like deleting all your social media and chat apps off your phone BEFORE traveling (to reinstall on the other side) so that you're comfortable being able to unlock your phone and hand it over. Be warned some encrypted chat apps won't back-up their messages, look into the specifics of each one. The best thing to do is of course erase your phone before traveling and restore on the other side or when you get back home from back-ups. Have an explanation ready for why your phone is blank though, you had a problem with it for example and had to reset it. Try and create some activity on it so it looks a little lived in.
Lots of excellent info here, thanks for the detailed response—appreciated. When I went to China a while back, I brought and old iPhone I still had and got a Chinese sim so I could search and navigate—idea being ok I’ll sever iCloud and they can mine whatever they want off the phone, etc. the thing there was not immigration I was worried about, but having my phone compromised via the sim/software, so I still had my main phone also at the time, it was just offline and turned off mostly.
Almost makes me want to adopt a similar approach for any travel where I’m crossing boarders now—just kit up the old phone with a pay as you go sim, strip out anything non utility on it, etc. probably wouldn’t help that much for any really intrusive hacking stuff they would do back room, but might be boring enough to not interest them.