Re:EFF's Fight to End Warrantless Device Searches at the Border
by giancarlostoro on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @07:34AM
(#16264736)
Whose to also say that we can trust the people doing the searches? What if someone who has top secret government documents on their phone and it gets compromised? The person sells said documents to another state, or worse yet, one of them (or their systems) is compromised by foreign hackers? Now it's a data mining point and who would suspect them to be the root cause? I don't know enough about their systems or their hiring requirements to trust them with my phone. I much rather buy a travel phone that I can pop in a SIM card when I reach my destination and isolate the information available on it.
It's a way government can eschew all constitutional protection for private data, by simply waiting for the target to cross a border, practical for a majority of citizens. Data is substantially different from physical possessions because it's very portable and most people do indeed carry vast amounts with them when traveling.
Furthermore, in the modern world data import or export offenses (espionage) do not employ physical border crossings, so there is almost no reasonable offense the search could uncover.