"I have to do this because of country X, you know that they're like, amirite?"
Makes no difference at all in the real world. You don't have to give valid answers, you need to get the guy across from you to not find you suspicious. That phrase is going to put a red flag on you, valid or not.
What? No, who cares about that? Let him find you suspicious, what matters is that he doesn’t access your data. And it is not suspicious to cross borders (esp. US borders) with burner phones. As others have said, it is standard practice.
Definitely.
> Maybe, if your data really is that valuable and a successful border crossing isn't.
Even if my data consisted entirely of cat pictures, it would be more valuable than successfuly crossing the border into a country that actively tries to invade my privacy.
(Not legal advise of course, just observation. Always check with the legal department of your employer, etc.)
After cornering themselves into being labeled an unsafe destination (long overdue imho), the US are gonna have to learn being treated as such.
the reaction you provoke at a border crossing, or an LEO encounter is almost entirely based on what profile you fit.
the vehicle, the state/contents of the vehicle, what you say, even how you move, are being evaluated for consistency with a profile.
That kind of history is already being collected about people. That’s what you should be worried about when it comes to engineering some scheme that sounds clever.
Before travel back up the real contents and restore a dummy travel backup with random games, stock photos etc. Then restore back to real contents.
So you can totally have different profiles with different backup servers/credentials and decide to nuke one before flying or crossing a border.
Obviously you can't expect having 2 whatsapp or signal accounts on same number but you can always have several SIMs.
The good thing is with profiles you can totally seed a profile for a few weeks before travelling.
If the regime is going to just start taking people then nothing will stop that, but the goal is to stop the usefulness of this sort of thing as an intimidation measure - or at least drag it to the forefront and overthrow the regime.
You don't avoid scrutiny by being wierd and hiding things, but by hiding in plain sight by being ultra boring.
Presumably they know quite a lot about you already outside your phone (yay, Palantir). I mean, the guy the recent post was about was an activist. An empty phone vs. a phone with just cat pictures and dumb games wouldn't really make a difference. They went on a fishing expedition, so anything that does not have contact information/messages of other activists or any information that they could use against the phone owner would be a win.
(F-you Palantir for reading this message and adding it to my online record.)
Hello Palantir. I orchestrated 9/11. Please come and arrest me.
completely impractical obviously