I’ve never once been asked to unlock my phone at a TSA checkpoint. How common is this?

Happened to my wife’s close friend as she crossed the border. They found years-old texts between her and her ex-bf joking about marrying for a green card and she was denied entry into the US and given a 10 year ban for immigration fraud even tho she had been living there under H1B (which was close to expiring) and had to fly back to her home country with just the clothes in her suitcase. Her sister who was a citizen had to sell all her things for her. It was a disaster.

To be clear this is about going through customs as you enter the country through an airport, not domestic flights. I’m not sure if that organization falls under tsa or not.

Common enough for the EFF to have an article about it.

The EFF article never mentions the TSA once.

Given that the only TSA reference in that article also mentions the Bush administration, I would hope there is more up to date information now. I wonder why EFF has not updated a top level issue page in so long.

The article may not mention the TSA by names but if you were in doubt about the entities that you could encounter at the US border then probably the article wasn't meant for you anyway.

Maybe the parent poster means US Customs and Border protection? That’s different from the TSA which could potentially search you leaving the country, or on internal flights.

Fair enough, for travelers the distinction is useful so let's spell it out: TSA: the guys that mess around in your luggage, make you throw away your water so you can buy new bottles at 5x the price as well as your nailclippers. CBP: the guys that check your passport and possibly your fingerprint, take your picture and invade your privacy as much as they feel like.

Both of these can be found at US airports with international flights(and most countries have equivalents). Going on an international trip you will encounter both, for a domestic flight you will only deal with the TSA.

The EFF article is aimed exclusively at people crossing the border so it about the CBP, not about the TSA. If you never leave the USA or never travel to it then you will encounter none of this.

Happened to me.

Went to secondary to get more information on my trip, then just routinely searched my bags and electric devices. I was allowed into the country after they got more information.

Uhh... you’re a sample size of one?

Nah, he’s a US citizen that understands the TSA is the entity that handles security for flight boarding, and has no relationship with ICE handling security at the border. Some other people in this thread seem to be okay conflating the two, but I’m not sure that’s very helpful —- everyone knows that border controls for all countries are massively more strict that controls for domestic travel.

>on iOS you can get around the automatic grab by pair locking your device

Not really? In the same guide it says

>If you later want to remove this restriction you can Remove -> Profiles... in Configurator, analogous to step 15.

Basically, you're just hoping that the minimum wage employee at the TSA doesn't know about removing the profile.

Isn't that a step that has to take place on the paired laptop?

Earlier the article says

> This setting controls when someone can remove the profile from within the phone itself. If it’s left as the default value of “Always” then anyone with access to your unlocked phone could remove the pair lock (which would defeat the entire purpose). You can either set it to Never to never allow removing the profile, or With Authorization and set a password to allow removing the profile with the given password (this might be useful to remove the pairing restriction if you do lose access to your laptop).

That step can't be performed from a computer that's not already trusted by the iOS device. I.e., it can only be the one it's pair-locked to.