What could happen if you refuse to unlock your phone at the US border?

Re:What could happen if you refuse to unlock your phone at t... by Steuard on Thursday February 16, 2017 @12:37PM (#13661856)

I thought so, too. But the advice I've seen, quite strongly, is that you do not want to lie to federal officials about anything, ever. Even if you're just using a hidden volume on principle rather than hiding some terrible wrongdoing, the moment you say "No, I don't have any other hidden files on here" or "There, you have access to all my files now" you've committed a federal crime. If they spot the slightest evidence showing that you've lied (which, heck, might not mean much more than finding TrueCrypt installed), they'll throw the book at you.

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Re:What could happen if you refuse to unlock your phone at t... by iak8god on Thursday February 16, 2017 @01:08PM (#13662112)

> the moment you say "No, I don't have any other hidden files on here" or "There, you have access to all my files now" you've committed a federal crime.

So then you don't say those things. This covers the much more common (I'd imagine) case where a traveler is asked to turn on his device and enter the password, but possibly not the case where the traveler is being grilled/interrogated on the contents of his device.

But plausible deniability is one of the purported features of TrueCrypt hidden volumes. How would you prove someone had an encrypted hidden volume on his device?

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Re:What could happen if you refuse to unlock your phone at t... by tptacek on Thursday February 16, 2017 @04:04PM (#13663560)

If you're a US citizen, go ahead and try to outsmart them with TrueCrypt. My guess is most of the time you'll succeed. But if you're an alien --- and, especially, if you're a brown-skinned alien --- don't have TrueCrypt on your laptop.

You can make an encrypted backup of your machine and store it in some innocuous place in the cloud, or have it Fedexed to wherever you're staying. There's just no good reason to play games with TrueCrypt at the border.

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Re:What could happen if you refuse to unlock your phone at t... by iak8god on Thursday February 16, 2017 @05:34PM (#13664219)

Just so we're clear, I think the right strategy for anyone who could reasonably expect to be targeted (journalists, certain types of researchers, people with funny names, those who've sent mean tweets about the POTUS, ...) is to avoid carrying sensitive data when crossing borders.

What I think all US citizens should do is use whole disk encryption (but everyone should do that), and refuse to comply with requests to provide their passwords, even at the risk of missing flights / losing equipment / spending a day in a room talking to unfriendly people. Frankly, this is just an egregious and pointless violation of our 4th amendment rights.

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