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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday January 06 2018, @08:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-say-no dept.

Encrypt and lock your electronic devices, because the border agents want to touch them:

Customs officers stationed at the American border and at airports searched an estimated 30,200 cellphones, computers and other electronic devices of people entering and leaving the United States last year — an almost 60 percent increase from 2016, according to Homeland Security Department data released on Friday.

Despite the surge, Customs and Border Protection officials said the searches affected fewer than 1 percent of the more than 300 million travelers who arrived in the United States last year.

Homeland Security officials say border searches are an important investigative tool and are used sparingly by its agents. "In this digital age, border searches of electronic devices are essential to enforcing the law at the U.S. border and to protecting the American people," said John Wagner, the deputy executive assistant commissioner at Customs and Border Protection. Mr. Wagner said the agency was committed to preserving the rights and civil liberties of travelers whose devices are searched.

Also at ABC.


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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday January 06 2018, @10:49PM

    by frojack (1554) on Saturday January 06 2018, @10:49PM (#618921) Journal

    border without anything, then purchase a throwaway

    Even that is getting harder to do. Especially in the US. Its getting harder to get a truly undocumented phone.
    We had a story about this last year https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/02/03/1315244 [soylentnews.org]

    Its actually smarter to have a cheap pre-paid in-country phone (or at least an in-country SIM) to call a taxi or order a pizza.
    Cheap candy-bar format cell phones start right around $30 in walmart and amazon. Who knows how cheap they might
    be on the street.

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