Hi all,
I am travelling soon to the US, for my vocation and as a long-time private person I will be taking some steps to maintain my privacy as I enter the country.
As this is an interesting area of the topic, I have decided to throw the question open to all of you.
What precautions (IT, physical, mental, otherwise) do you undertake when travelling internationally?
M.
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Don’t
A lot of the comments here are straight up nuts. Do what you do at home. If that’s a VPN, go for it. If you rawdog it, whatevs.
Https is on almost everything at this point, so just be smart like normal.
I doubt anyone cares enough to bug you that much.
What you can do is setup a VPN to your home at least. From their it is the same as you always would.
You weren’t kidding, holy shit. Like, I understand wanting to make sure that your privacy is protected at all costs, but at the same time some of these suggestions sound straight up tinfoil hat.
The US is not some fucked up dystopian police state where everyone is “out to get” the next person they see on the street (but I’ll wholeheartedly agree that some parts are absolute shit). No, there aren’t cities where if you blink all your shit’s gonna be stolen (parts of some, sure). In fact, most people will actually actively try to lend a hand, the worst that might happen is a total stranger ignores you when it’s obvious you may need help with something.
Idk, as an American who’s travelled the US quite a bit, I guess it kinda pisses me off when I see generalizing statements like those. Just like it would literally anyone else.
Edit: if you’re truly worried, why not just stay home or something?
Here are some helpful links from the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) on the topic:
https://www.eff.org/wp/defending-privacy-us-border-guide-travelers-carrying-digital-devices
https://www.eff.org/files/2017/03/10/digital-privacy-border-2017-guide3.10.17.pdf
https://www.eff.org/files/2018/01/11/border-pocket-guide-2.pdf
https://www.eff.org/issues/border-searches
I’m sure there’s more that I haven’t put here, feel free to sift through the search page
Having lived in the U.S. my whole life, (and this doesn’t speak for everyone), it’s not the dystopia people make it out to be all the time. In fact, people will likely judge you for wearing a face mask. If you care about hiding your face, sunglasses and a cap is enough. Remember to be reasonable with your threat model!
Are you an ambassador or dignitary? No? Don’t worry about crap, take the same precautions you’d take when visiting any other place you’re not commonly in. The United States isn’t a hell hole, despite what libertarians like to fantasize.
Yes, maintain whatever your normal security posture is while traveling.
Imagine you’re visiting a dystopian police state with ubiquitous surveillance and a non-zero chance to be thrown in jail without due process, because you are.
When dealing with the police, be very, very careful what you say to them directly. Be polite, be patient, but be pithy.
Doesn’t the US have the right to remain silent? Serious question—I thought it did. The advice here is to always stfu when cops try to speak to you, until you either get advice from a lawyer or very specific questions you can answer to expedite your release. If you have the right to remain silent I’d always suggest you exercise that right, and not even make “polite” small talk, just say nothing or “no comment”.
And don’t be black, make sure to generously apply white face
Anything email or text related on your phone should be printed off. If you hand the border agent your phone they will take that opportunity to read your recent texts and emails.
They don’t have time to give a shit about each individual that goes through customs
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It happens frequently if you’re bussing into the US. Using a poor person’s method of travel makes them very suspicious
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Burner phone. Cheap laptop with nothing on it (like a Chromebook). Burner Gmail address and birbsite profile in case they ask you to log into your accounts. Remember the 100 mile border zone.
Bring your own router. Don’t plug things directly into the ethernet jacks in hotel rooms. Plug your router into there and connect to it instead. If you can then VPN into your home network, even better.
DD-WRT is fairly easy to set up and has VPN support. I recommend using Wireguard as opposed to OpenVPN due to efficiency, ESPECIALLY WITH CHEAP WEAK ROUTERS.
I mean, it’s a huge difference from my tests. With OpenVPN I hit 100% CPU usage on my Cisco Linksys WRT160NL at just 5Mbps. With Wireguard I was doing 25Mbps with just around 20% CPU usage (reported by
top, not webUI).You know those movies were the main character blinks and their stuff gets stolen? That’s pretty much true in some of the cities.
Also if someone is asking you for gas money, help at the atm, trying to sell you something random - leave.
lemmy.one/c/scams seems to have a lot of the common ones listed. It might be worth lurking on r/scams to see if there’s anything more current to watch out for.
Soooo the data on your phone isn’t gone because you delete or reset the phone. You literally need to write a blob of zeros or random numbers to fill the space again.
And even that is questionable as there are areas of the storage you are not allowed to write too – and those areas could contain identifiable data like contacts, SMS, etc…
Just a FYI
This is not true. As soon as the key is wiped from the TPM-like thingy, any data left on the flash is unrecoverable.
Not quite true for phones or anything with SSDs with trim enabled - in most scenarios the data is unrecoverable except for tiny fragments or if you go through some huge effort of pulling the flash chips out and also are lucky, true enough for memory cards or spinning disks though.
On Android for example, trim only runs every 24h, if the battery is above a certain charge level, and maybe some.other conditions. So it’s not entirely bulletproof either. Recent things can be recovered.
Definitely not bulletproof - but unless they’re after you specifically, and this is the only avenue remaining, the cost of attempting recovery and the risk of alerting you that they are in fact after you, when in the vast majority of circumstances it would yield very little, one would think there’d be cheaper ways to get your data directly from cloud providers or through other, more traditional methods.
Then again I could be naive about this.
Either bring a burner phone, or make sure you disable biometrics before you land. You could also consider wiping the phone and then restoring from a backup later on.
Also, learn about your constitutional rights and any relevant state laws (e.g. the CCPA in California). You probably won’t have to mention them, but they’re good to know.
buy a burner phone when you get there and leave your phone at home… also use cash and not credit cards… it would help to know exactly where you are going to be able to give more tips…
Right. Going to Boise is a lot safer than going to Detroit.
exactly. each states, cities or even neighborhoods can be completely different…
Downtown Atlanta, moving just a few blocks can put you in a hell hole. Some stores need to have multiple cops guarding them at all times, for example.
Pay in cash, wear sunglasses and a covid mask, VPN and limit personal data on devices.
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If you can, a GrapheneOS phone would be a good investment. It allows for multiple profiles so you can switch to your travel one and just call it [your name], have a few dummy ones, and have your actual main profile be something inconspicuous like “kids’ profile” or just any name that they wouldn’t deem necessary to search (what border patrol would actually dig around that much in your phone).