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CNN and a a lot of other outlets are reporting that JPL engineer Sidd Bikkannavar, an American-born citizen, was detained at the border when returning from racing solar powered cars overseas.
The border guards demanded he turn over his government-issued NASA phone and its PIN and held him in their detention area.
Bikkannavar also was interviewed by The Verge:
"It was not that they were concerned with me bringing something dangerous in, because they didn't even touch the bags. They had no way of knowing I could have had something in there," he says. "You can say, 'Okay well maybe it's about making sure I'm not a dangerous person,' but they have all the information to verify that."
Bikkannavar says he's still unsure why he was singled out for the electronic search. He says he understands that his name is foreign — its roots go back to southern India. He didn't think it would be a trigger for extra scrutiny, he says. "Sometimes I get stopped and searched, but never anything like this. Maybe you could say it was one huge coincidence that this thing happens right at the travel ban."
Land of the free? Home of the brave?
(Score: 2) by number6 on Wednesday February 15 2017, @12:18PM
my thought #1 was meant to overcome such a situation;
as the phone boots, it ALWAYS boots with the same-looking screen, there is no such thing as guest screens and other screens.
The boot process and display take X amount of time (X can be user-set, let's say 15 seconds);
during this fifteen second boot period, there are underlying hooks in the boot process which will capture keyboard input;
if you type "s3cr3tsauce" (for example) during the 15 second boot, the phone boots to the PRIVATE partition.
if you type nothing or some other password during the 15 second boot, the phone boots to the PUBLIC partition.
To overcome the fact that smart phones don't have keyboards, we could make the boot screen a keyboard, or maybe use voice input.
If somebody types (or voices) unrecognized patterns during boot, the phone continues booting to PUBLIC.