Courts close the loophole letting the feds search your phone at the border
Courts close the loophole letting the feds search your phone at the border
Customs and Border Protection insists that it can search electronics without a warrant. A federal judge just said it can't.
Coming from a district court, I think this ruling could be appealed, but it's welcome news nevertheless.
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It's still an excellent idea to power off your phone whenever you are in the vicinity of a border guard and never voluntarily unlock it anywhere close to the border. You can't (generally) be compelled to unlock your phone but you absolutely can have an unlocked phone grabbed out of your hands by a border guard with no legal right to lock it.
never voluntarily unlock it anywhere close to the border.
Isn't that defined as 100 mile from the border (including international airports)
I believe it's 100 miles from the border including coastlines but does not include a 100 mile radius around international airports. I don't remember the source but Ive seen a map that represented it that way.
Also worth noting, this ruling only benefits citizens in that specific district, as other districts aren't bound by its rulings. Personally I'd recommend having a 2nd device you can use to record your interactions because if they violate your rights your chances of getting their body cam video of it aren't great.
What if you’re 99 miles and 5279 feet from the border while being questioned? Can you take one more step and be safe?
And are those statute miles or nautical miles?
They'll probably claim "hot pursuit" as a justification for arresting you.
Evading arrest is likely the charge, however I'm being pedantic.
Sorry I meant hot pursuit would probably be the justification for why they'd be allowed to chase you outside their jurisdiction
Sure, like I said I was being pedantic.
It would depend on where they initiated contact. For instance, let’s say a cop from City A pulls someone over on the boundary with City B. Even if you pull over on City B’s side, it’s still a valid stop because they initiated it (turned their lights on) while still within their own legal jurisdiction. Even though you’re outside of their jurisdiction at the moment, what matters is that they first initiated contact when it was legal to do so.
Not according to Dukes of Hazzard logic.
100 miles from the border or coastline is like 90% of the population of the country. And I assume that’s a feature, not a bug.
To add, the Great Lakes count as coastline because you can navigate to an international boarder from any of them. That's how you cover the vast majority of the US population with this loophole.
Not because nearly every major population center is next to a coast?
You get a lot of the population by that alone. You get 90% by including the Great Lakes.
So I should be glad I'm in Indiana for once?
I'll take it.
About a quarter of Indiana is within that zone. https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
I’m not in that quarter thankfully. Look, let me take my wins when I can. I’m in Indiana.
I’m in Indiana.
Hey, at least you’re not in Ohio.
I'd rather be in Ohio than Indiana. They're both terrible but in slightly different ways. I always cringe a little when I go into Indiana but I have been to some great concerts around Indianapolis.
This is important - power OFF your phone. Your phone is more secure before you unlock it for the first time after booting. Use a strong password as well.
You can also force your device into Lockdown mode, which does the same thing, without needing to shut it down or restart it. It's easy to do quickly once you know how.
On Android it's enabled by default, you just hold the power button and press Lockdown.
https://www.lifewire.com/use-android-lockdown-mode-6287933
Iphones have a way to disable biometrics as well with a button combo, but its more a side effect of activating Emergency SOS, not a dedicated feature and how you activate it varies depending on your device model.
https://thenextweb.com/news/how-to-quickly-disable-biometrics-iphone
Lockdown mode is NOT the same. This disables biometrics, notifications, etc. But what FULLY rebooting does is protect against more sophisticated attacks like those of Cellebrite which is a company that sells devices to law enforcement that break into phones. I know border crossings often have access to a device of this type.
Your device is encrypted pretty strongly, and before you put in your password for the first time after boot your data is essentially useless. But after that first time your device keeps the decryption key in memory so that it can be useful even while locked, serving you app notifications and processing in the background. This leaves your device open to many more exploits that could get around your lockscreen and into your unencrypted data. Leaked documents show that Cellebrite can very often get into devices after first unlock, but in the "before first unlock" state they can often only use brute force which you can protect against by having a cryptographically secure password.
Looking at lockdown mode it's pretty clear that it isn't resetting to the more secure "before first unlock" state because it unlocks instantly with your password whereas after first boot there's a small pause.
I don't think the lockdown mode is the same. It looks like it just disables biometric unlocking. I just tried, and it was far too quick to unlock, so it must keep the encrypted partition unlocked.