Last month, US-born NASA engineer Sidd Bikkannavar was pulled into additional screening when he entered the US after a two-week vacation in Chile.
He was taken into a room and told to hand over his phone and passcode.
He said that the phone belonged to NASA and contained important work-related data, but immigration officials insisted and handed him a document stating that the penalty for refusing was “detention.”
He eventually complied and they took his phone into a another room for 30 minutes before allowing him to leave.
Bikkannavar never found out why he was chosen for additional screening. He had not traveled to any of the Muslim-majority countries included in US President Donald Trump’s travel ban.
Cases like this are exploding. According to data from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), searches of mobile phones by border agents grew from fewer than 5,000 in 2015 to 25,000 last year.
The DHS told the Guardian that there is an anomaly in last year’s data, but did not reveal how that changes the figures.
Anecdotal evidence indicates that searches have risen further in the wake of the election of Trump.
US border agents carry out these invasive searches without any warrant or even suspicion, going through text messages, social media accounts and photographs, while asking the owner about the people they are interacting with, their religious affiliations and travel patterns.
Experts credit the rise in searches to the increase in technical capacity at the US border.
“They are building capacity to routinely search as many devices as possible,” said Alex Abdo, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
The lack of transparency over the process has led the free speech watchdog to file a freedom of information lawsuit, seeking to obtain the DHS’ rules for “suspicionless” searches of mobile devices.
The institute wants to know what exactly immigration officials are looking for and how they decide who to target.
‘RIDICULOUS SITUATION’
“There’s a basic privacy concern with forcing people to be subjected to a digital strip search simply for having crossed the nation’s borders,” Abdo said.
“It’s a ridiculous situation. The entire thing is terrible. All it’s doing is greatly exacerbating the racial profiling problem at the border,” said Asian Law Caucus staff attorney Christina Sinha, who provides legal representation for those unjustly impacted by sweeping US national security policies, many of whom are Muslims.
“People are incredibly vulnerable at the border,” she said. “People are coming off 20-hour flights, completely jet-lagged and stuck in this limbo land of the border and there’s an armed agent in front of you preventing you from coming into the country.”
In addition to going through people’s smartphones in person, US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement can also confiscate devices for a further forensic examination. In this case agents can make full copies of all of the data on the phone, which can be shared with other government agencies.
The DHS has published test results from dozens of tools it can use to extract data from phones.
This gives rise to business concerns, particularly if devices used for work contain confidential information that could be copied and potentially leaked.
“If someone works for a company in Silicon Valley and has trade secrets on their work laptop, we recommend they speak with their supervisor at work before they travel,” Sinha said.
What if individuals refuse to give over their passwords? Depending on your immigration status that could mean being turned away from the US.
However, “US citizens and returning green-card holders can’t be denied entry for refusing to provide a password,” American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Esha Bhandari said.
If your device is seized and if your goal is to prevent border officials from accessing your data, experts recommend using encryption and a strong password.
However, it is important to keep in mind that failure to cooperate can create practical problems. Immigration officials can detain people for hours of secondary questioning and seize their device for weeks.
“They can make your life very inconvenient every time you travel,” Abdo said.
For those entering the country on a visa or visa waiver, refusal to comply with border officials can mean being turned away or even having your immigration status revoked.
‘LEAVE YOUR PHONE’
So what can people do to protect their personal data?
“The ideal thing to do is to leave your main phone and laptop at home and go across the border with a burner phone,” Sinha said, referring to a simple device that does not have your e-mail or social media apps on it.
For those who cannot do that, experts suggest deleting data and apps from devices.
“With so much of our data is now stored in the cloud rather than on the local device, apps have become the prime conduit to our data,” said Paul Lipman, the Silicon Valley-based chief executive of security company Bullguard.
He offers the example of secure cloud storage app Dropbox, where he keeps personal and business documents. To prevent these types of documents from being searched by border agents, a smartphone owner can simply delete the app and download it again once they are in the country.
“A hassle? Yes, but hardly a big one,” he said.
A CBP spokeswoman said that the searches affect less than one-hundredth of 1 percent of travelers to the US and that they were “often integral to a determination of an individual’s intentions upon entry.”
“They are critical to the detection of evidence relating to terrorism and other national security matters, human and bulk cash smuggling, contraband and child pornography. They can also reveal information about financial and commercial crimes, such as those relating to copyright, trademark and export control violations,” she said.
Saudi Arabian largesse is flooding Egypt’s cultural scene, but the reception is mixed. Some welcome new “cooperation” between two regional powerhouses, while others fear a hostile takeover by Riyadh. In Cairo, historically the cultural capital of the Arab world, Egyptian Minister of Culture Nevine al-Kilany recently hosted Saudi Arabian General Entertainment Authority chairman Turki al-Sheikh. The deep-pocketed al-Sheikh has emerged as a Medici-like patron for Egypt’s cultural elite, courted by Cairo’s top talent to produce a slew of forthcoming films. A new three-way agreement between al-Sheikh, Kilany and United Media Services — a multi-media conglomerate linked to state intelligence that owns much of
The US and other countries should take concrete steps to confront the threats from Beijing to avoid war, US Representative Mario Diaz-Balart said in an interview with Voice of America on March 13. The US should use “every diplomatic economic tool at our disposal to treat China as what it is... to avoid war,” Diaz-Balart said. Giving an example of what the US could do, he said that it has to be more aggressive in its military sales to Taiwan. Actions by cross-party US lawmakers in the past few years such as meeting with Taiwanese officials in Washington and Taipei, and
Denmark’s “one China” policy more and more resembles Beijing’s “one China” principle. At least, this is how things appear. In recent interactions with the Danish state, such as applying for residency permits, a Taiwanese’s nationality would be listed as “China.” That designation occurs for a Taiwanese student coming to Denmark or a Danish citizen arriving in Denmark with, for example, their Taiwanese partner. Details of this were published on Sunday in an article in the Danish daily Berlingske written by Alexander Sjoberg and Tobias Reinwald. The pretext for this new practice is that Denmark does not recognize Taiwan as a state under
The Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan has no official diplomatic allies in the EU. With the exception of the Vatican, it has no official allies in Europe at all. This does not prevent the ROC — Taiwan — from having close relations with EU member states and other European countries. The exact nature of the relationship does bear revisiting, if only to clarify what is a very complicated and sensitive idea, the details of which leave considerable room for misunderstanding, misrepresentation and disagreement. Only this week, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) received members of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations