Even if this works for now, for you, you have only solved the problem for yourself. But the problem of privacy is a collective problem in society, so unless most people have privacy, you don’t have it, either.

This would be like commenting on censorship/non-free speech laws that you’d solve it for yourself by using Tor or some other anonymizing method. That would not solve the problem of a society which will lack free speech, and if a society did not have free speech, you would have problems, even if you’d manage to somehow get free speech for yourself.

Most likely solution isn't either/or between two options but rather both. Lots of people will start doing this and make it more accessible for the common man while others are getting the law changed (if).

I've been doing this while going between the US and China. Once you get used to it, it is only a few minutes of hassle to restore everything. If it is so suspicious, they should have no problem articulating that to a judge and getting it from my email provider or my storage provider. But I suspect they only do it because they can and if you add even a tiny bit of friction, they won't bother unless there are other things that make them suspicious.

They'll just consider that suspicious and confiscate the devices ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Dunno about CBP, but I know the Canadian border agents are restricted to searching the phone only.

So anything in the cloud (e.g. webmail) is off limits unless you download to your phone.

Do they put it in airplane mode to enforce that?

I think officially that’s supposed to be step 1. Makes sense so you can’t remote wipe it.

Legally they are only allowed to inspect what you are bringing into the country, so stuff in the cloud is out-of-scope.

It’s an open question about whether they can compel you to decrypt anything or get you to unlock. They could always seize to inspect later though.

Worse they might flag and track you meticulously.

Docker for phones. Encrypt and upload image to server. Wipe. Cross border. Download and decrypt. Image.

It could probably be implemented as a one-click service on some devices.

This is the present day experience of wiping an iPhone and restoring it from iCloud. It’s really that simple, but in general it’s unencrypted