They have shown this very thing on the show where they found on their device that they were making these arrangements. It seemed very invasive and disturbing. They got their password and were looking at their phone and laptop in a backroom. The traveller didn't even get to see what they are doing or anything.
I don't have anything to hide, but I would never feel comfortable with ANYONE having free reign over my unlocked devices, especially not a government border agent doing it behind closed doors.
that’s not for you to decide (unfortunately)
For some goals it can actually be useful, though I'm not sure if this is done during regular border checks or just in the context of asylum requests or similar: Accessing location histories, picture metadata or social media profiles on your device can be a fairly easy way to check that you're not giving them false information about where you're coming from or where you've been. This can be done automatically, so the officer doesn't need to figure out themself what they're looking at.
I had my laptop searched at the border once. It was my work laptop. They told me the same thing, if I didn't share the password they would confiscate my computer.
It felt wrong that they should be able to search my computer, but I also felt bullied because I was going to need my computer the next day if I wanted to work and I think most people, including my boss at the time, would not see a problem with the search, so I let them search.
All they did was open up Windows Explorer and do a search for *.jpg. Then she looked up at me and said, "What kind of images am I going to find on your computer today?"
I don't remember what I said, but basically it took about 30 minutes for Windows to display all the results. She looked through them all and then I was free to go. I got the impression that they were looking for child pornography, but I don't know that for sure.
Either way, it was a pretty innocuous search, but this was also about 10 years ago. From what I understand, they now pull all the files off your computer and index the contents. They likely have a list of keywords that it searches against immediately and then it's indexed for when they add more keywords later.
Never have faced any search, but interesting stance there.
You and I disagree wholeheartedly there, that's an extremely invasive search.
It's extremely invasive for some random civil servant to execute an unexpected search on a device that most reasonable people assume is private.
That said, under nearly any other context, I agree that it would be harmful and offensive.
I think they are just looking for crimes like drug mules, people coming to work with tourist visa etc. Everyone here talks about nuclear plans but I doubt.. probably bully too but against simple minded criminals it can work. Texts of arranging work or when is the package going to arrive etc.
It saddens me that we think of federal governments as benign protectors of our rights. The States did not need and did not want a federal government. We feared they couldn't protect our interests. We had to be persuaded through the Bill of Rights to accept their "protection." The feds have some idealistic people within their organizations, but their stance is to utilize state-level resources for their own needs, such as international warfare wealth accumulation. This includes domination of individuals. We have only our states and the Bill of Rights to protects us from the feds.
Computers represent a very real threat to federal power. People could use them to rise up against federal governments and make their lives very uncomfortable, which is to say, much like our own. These dreams of small groups contacting one another and creating world peace beginning through networked communication were made explicit in the 90s and early 2000s. The maintain its dominion, international governments from around the world simply have to assert themselves in every aspect of our lives. With state protections, one of the key places feds can insert themselves is at borders, where reaching out to people from other nation-states happens.
Efficiency is for little people, like you and me. Federal governments print the paychecks for the border patrol, tax they money the pay them, then tax the people the border patrol buys all their worldly possessions. They care about efficiency less than google cares about disk space. I know I sound like a paranoid libertarian here, but I'm actually only a slightly-light-of-center person trying to bring a little reality and clarity to the situation. We are essentially pets.
It sounds like you're just skeptical of a powerful centralized state, and it's coming out through the lens of historical American federation/republicanism. That isn't wrong, but it's as much a history of competing factions as it is an strong intellectual basis.
You're not the only one skeptical of a powerful, centralized state. Try reading Kropotkin or Luxemburg. You might find the ideas resonate with you. Those authors have a coherent ideological basis, and suggest paths to decentralized democracy that has been realized in various forms in recent history, but is radically different to the current American government.
It's huge! The power to drive international trade and warfare, for starters! Also, the ability to create laws that don't reflect people in your area/community.
Also wrt this thread, states don't (generally) enforce searches at their borders, because states aren't fighting for domination with nation-states. States are only trying to control their geographic area.
Thank you for the references, I'll check them out.
However, I think the answer is that I'm way too optimistic. There must be lots of people who voluntarily do carry incriminating information with them across borders because they either don't care or they're just stupid. Others have mentioned emails or text about a job when you're not travelling with a work visa.
If this is true then I think border control is also just being merely pragmatic.
With a bit of questioning and informal profiling they can spot people whose story doesn't ring true: next they just need a way to figure out what's false with that one particular person. A success rate of 38% for electronics searches was quoted: that is very high and certainly makes mobile/laptop search to the top of the list of what to look at when you bring the traveller in and start investigating. I think they'd do it even for a 10% success rate: checking a few emails and messages is fast and apparently a low-hanging fruit.
That's pretty much what I would do if my job was to figure out what's wrong with a person's story.
It's akin to starting debugging by enabling asserts and running the binary in a debugger to catch any obvious issues live with a stacktrace, or something similar. Won't help with most of the trickier bugs but sometimes it points right at the culprit and it's a cheap test to run.
They wouldn't find the folder containing your blueprints for that bomb but they'll see you'll be meeting some people next week in a place that is very, very far from where you said you'd be vacationing.
A far harsher and less charitable theory is that border control is where paranoids, xenophobes, and authoritarians accumulate and the point is control and punishing "the other" instead of actual effectiveness.
Most government can't do that (in theory...) when you are a citizen or maybe even just a resident, except when you cross the border. So if they want to watch you politically, they do that (at least) at the border.
Edit: given the source, the 38% could also be inflated (perhaps by not counting certain false positives) since it comes from the department looking to justify their work.
There's TV shows that follow border agents for various countries during their day-to-day work.
So the actual reason customs agencies perform these searches is that they are allowed to do so because of the way the laws are written and precedent is set.
The data may be a by-product of using the device. I suspect they are primarly looking for communications data that is bound to be on every device that is actively used to communicate.
The more end-to-end encryption is used the more interesting the ends become.
>And even if you had the data on a laptop, how does border patrol even know what they are looking at?
Maybe they just copy everything for later analysis in case communications data hints at this being a person of interest.
That is such a great line that encompasses about why more and more the ends of the end-to-end encryption are being attacked.
Because most people don't have the technical know how, or desire to spend the effort to ensure that the data they _are_ bringing across the border is safe to disclose.
Even elsewhere in the comments here is a long debate about the "safe" way to deliver data across borders, some of which are actually terrible ideas.
Yes, theoretically, people could avoid bringing any sensitive data physically across the border, but most do anyways and I bet you do too.
Which ones?
"Prank them with an undecryptable random file" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19834934 and "prank them with 20,000 goatse images" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19837896 as they can get you back by seizing your electronics. Of course, those sound like jokes not serious suggestions.
"Have it remotely locked by an administrator" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19835097 as they won't understand that technical mumbo-jumbo and will just seize the laptop.
"Have a hidden dual-boot system" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19836135 as if they take a disk image and spot it, they'll be particularly suspicious of you.
Some posters also think "Send your encrypted laptop by mail" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19835019 is not good advice.
It's not like you need to 'smuggle' any form of data physically.
I mean, any data considered to be dangerous (like terrorist attack plans, atomic bomb designs or political inside information) can be accessed across borders via the internet. You don't need to have those on any of your devices.
And even if you had the data on a laptop, how does border patrol even know what they are looking at?