Summer Travel Tips To Not Get Detained
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If you're thinking about traveling internationally this summer, there's a chance you have heard stories like these. A real estate attorney, an American citizen returning from Canada, says that he was detained without explanation. In recent weeks, we've seen green card and visa holders being detained by the federal government. Should people... Countries have updated their travel advice to the United States in the wake of a

People being questioned, searched, even detained as they travel back into the United States.

There have been some publicized incidents of people you wouldn't expect being stopped, you know, at U.S. border crossings and just tourists flying in for vacation, you know, for pleasure to visit the U.S., things like that. Just very surprising incidents.

That's Lily Hay Newman, a senior writer for Wired, who covers information security. And the thing about these incidents is that they don't necessarily end with a conversation. They go deeper, to the heart of our digital lives, our phones. Just imagine the things your phone knows about you. Now imagine a Border Patrol agent reading your texts, looking at your Instagram, trying to understand that weird Slack joke you made with a coworker.

Maybe they don't care, but there's a chance they do. We are in a time now where the U.S. presidential administration has said very, very, very clearly that they are doing an immigration crackdown and that they are scrutinizing everyone who enters the U.S. very closely.

So today on the show, if you are traveling this summer, listen up. With Lily as our guide, we are going to teach you how to keep your phone and your digital life safe when you're crossing the border. I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around. ♪

Lilly recently wrote a guide for travelers on how to keep your phone safe when you cross the border. And that could mean a land border or getting off a plane in the United States.

It's important to understand, first of all, that law enforcement has different types of powers at both physical U.S. borders and places like airports than they do in the rest of the country. And particularly, Customs and Border Protection has the power to search you, your devices,

and sort of take you aside for interrogation, things like that, without a warrant. Like, they can just say, we want to search your phone. And people do have the ability to decline a search like this, but that can have consequences, right? It's not just like, oh, okay, never mind, you can go right through. Those powers mean that

People just need to be aware that this isn't the same situation as walking around in a U.S. city on a regular day with regular expectations. There is a lot more that can happen very quickly without a warrant. What can they do? Like, you know, they say, hey, hand over your phone. Is this superficial? Is it like a deep digital search? What can they do?

Conceptually, in terms of thinking about what could happen and how you might want to protect yourself, I sort of think of it in two buckets. And there are kind of two types of things they could do. They could do a superficial search where they're just kind of flipping, you know, this is a person, an agent, just taking a cursory look, flipping through. Maybe they go into...

let's say your text messages or a messaging app that you use and search certain keywords, you know, just a little bit of tap-tap looking around. But the other thing they could do is look

like a much more invasive, involved inspection of your device, offloading data, taking an entire image of your device, you know, forensic assessments. They could go really deep into your digital life. If you're an American citizen, you know, coming home in an airport and CBP wants to look at your phone, do you have to give it to them?

U.S. citizens and green card holders can decline a digital search, you know, or a search of devices and cannot be deported for doing so. But

The fact is, you know, it could arouse suspicion. It could lead to further detainment or interrogation, which is not to say that people, you know, shouldn't be aware of that, right? You know, if they're U.S. citizens or green card holders, it's just to speak realistically about, you know, what that could entail if you do decline. And then U.S. visa holders or

visitors can be deported or sent away, sent home to where they came from for declining a search. You talked a little bit about the physical versus like deep dive digital searching. How much has the tech changed in terms of what CBP can do digitally? I would imagine that that's very different than it was even five or 10 years ago.

Yeah, I would say that that's true. On the other hand, operating systems, you know, that run on our phones, on laptops, have also gotten more sophisticated in terms of being locked down. Like, for example, if you say, you know, I'm declining the search, I'm not going to unlock my phone for you. It's much harder for law enforcement to

access your data anyway, like use tools to get around your phone's encryption and access your data than it used to be. Right. Famously, Apple's pretty hard to break into. Right. And so, you know, there's always some chicken and egg going on. And I would say also,

There are kind of more options and it's potentially a bit easier now than it used to be for people to take some proactive measures to protect their data so that it's not there to be discovered in a search. So there's sort of pros and cons, but certainly as all of this has kind of matured and just the concept of CBP searching devices at the border has been

been out there. And as they've been doing more and more of this, they've also like honed their methods essentially and, you know, kind of streamlined the process. So, yeah, I think you're totally correct and people should be aware. We're going to get into some of those sort of privacy measures in a bit, but I'm curious whether, and I recognize this is a loaded question, whether we know what they're looking for, what

gets you into trouble if there is a digital search of your phone? I definitely don't, you know, want to say specifically and tell people here's the checklist or something because I don't know. And I'll say, you know, as is always the case, probably the biggest point of context is who you are, how you look.

you know, your religion, your political beliefs, like thing, you know, profiling characteristics. Unfortunately, that's sort of the reality of policing in the U.S. in general a lot of times. And with CBP searches, I think people

just need to understand their own context and thinking about the degree to which they might be targeted and what agents might be looking for. But broadly, you know, like we were saying, even in a cursory search, just swiping through and a little bit of, you know, searching, things like that.

Like anything, they could be looking for, you know, secure messaging apps, apps that, you know, delete your messages, maybe things that show that you care about your security and privacy, which does not actually indicate anything that you might have done, quote unquote, wrong or anything suspicious, but, you know, could flag that way to an agent. If you have had

speech critical of the current, you know, presidential administration. Perhaps that could be a flag. All sorts of things. They might say, you know, they're looking for extremist content or that they're looking for radical, you know, indications of radical ideology. We

Which is in the eye of the beholder, certainly. Exactly. So that's, you know, I'm hesitant to give people a list specifically, but just trying to characterize broadly, like the way to think about what could be in their crosshairs. When we talk about who is and has been detained, you've said there was

There is an apparent increase in foreign visitors, U.S. visa holders being detained, questioned and even deported at the border. And I feel like that word apparent is so interesting because it shows the ambiguity about trying to keep track of exactly what is happening and to what degree that information is actually available.

One thing I can say is that CBP does publish some data about phone searches that hasn't shown like a marked increase yet. But, you know, the data is published on a delay and more may emerge. I think the key thing here is to...

go back to what we were saying that, you know, actually this has been an issue and a concern for quite a while. And device searches are extremely important

invasive because our digital lives are so deeply entwined with our physical lives. You know, laptops, phones are sort of this repository all in one place for our lives. Everything's just right there laid out on your phone. And so...

I think just the fact that these searches are possible has been a potential privacy concern for people all along and, you know, an issue for quite a while. And now the sort of intensity of this moment and increased rhetoric by the administration just means it's even more important for everyone to just give it some consideration.

Yeah, I'm sort of trying to figure out what that would look like plotted on a curve. You know, obviously, post 9-11, secondary screenings went up in airports at points of entry. You know, you talk to...

People about flying while brown and they will tell you all of those stories. Is there a way to parse out whether there has been an actual increase now or is it still, as you say, we've got lagging data and anecdata and it's hard to get a more complete picture?

That's where I'm at for now, but I do think it's going to continue just even in the next week's months to become more apparent how much Border Patrol is or sort of is not expanding how much they're leaning on this.

It's just a situation where the administration is pursuing so many different projects and initiatives simultaneously, and law enforcement and, you know, different divisions of law enforcement are just sort of working on so many different administration priorities that it kind of takes time to see, like, which techniques, which methods they're going to be leaning on most heavily.

When we come back, is it time to get a burner phone for travel? One way to keep authorities from looking at everything on your phone is to just not have it, or rather to have a backup device that you use just for travel. And if that is financially feasible or, you know, there's an option for how you can have additional devices and do that, it's a really good approach because you can...

only have the data on the device that you really need for the trip. And it doesn't mean necessarily having nothing. You know, let's say you're going on a work trip and you want to have your work email on there and you're like, well, you know, my work email is my work email. I don't, you know, I don't really talk about anything personal on there anyway. Yeah, that isn't necessarily a problem. What is a little tricky about the

alternate devices or the travel devices, though, is if they're completely sparse and bare and it's like just your work email and, you know, one bookmark for a restaurant and that's it. If someone were to do that cursory look that we were talking about, just a preliminary flip through of the phone, they would say,

this isn't your phone. Like, this isn't your real device. Where's all your stuff? What's going on? Right? And that can arouse suspicion in itself. Oh, man. So the one thing... I know, the layers here. So the one thing about having a travel device is taking a little bit of time to kind of seed the device. People sometimes call it or populate it with, like...

If you have a Finsta that's just your, you know, cooking and your dog or something or some photos from your last trip or, you know, just some stuff there. Sometimes people will suggest using the device for just a few days before you leave. So there's recent text messages, things like that. But that is something to consider is like,

a true burner device that has no connection to anything in your own personal digital life is going to arouse a lot of suspicion. A half baked, pretty empty old iPhone is also going to potentially flag as like, well, is this really your device? Of course, the second device is expensive.

maybe impractical for a lot of people. Lily says, if you're going to travel with your main phone, you're safest if you pair back and take some things off it. I mean, think about like your photos, your messages, and something that the, like a travel device is really good for is, you know, if you think about it,

It would be great to take your contacts off the phone and just have kind of like 10 people or, you know, whatever, you know, 20 people in the device. But that can be it can be more complicated. You could be more nervous or it just takes more work to do it online.

on your primary device because, you know, just everything is there. It's just trade-offs about how to approach it. And I think for someone who wants the sort of what's the simplest thing I could do to sort of like make a little bit of a dent in this or make a gesture, but, you know, I like my odds. I don't think my device will be searched or whatever. I don't really want to

you know, take hours and hours and a lot of money invested in dealing with this. I think things like removing apps you don't use, removing apps where it's easy to just re-download them later, you know, and the data will be there. Things that they're not making

Maybe storing things locally on the, you know, the device, like any low hanging fruit where you're like, oh, yeah, I could get rid of that or I don't even care, you know, what's in there. And unlinking like extra social accounts, you could always log back in once you're back from the trip. I think those types of things like just doing even a once over a quick pass can really help.

I am a journalist, so I tend to be on the more privacy-conscious side of things. My husband traveled out of the country not too long ago, and we had this conversation when he was getting ready to go, and he bristled at it. He kind of said, like, I'm an American. I'm not going to comply in advance just because some CBP officer might want to look at my phone like, F you. And

I thought, oh, actually, that's an interesting argument. I wouldn't think of it that way. I wonder how you hear that. Taking measures to protect your digital privacy is not complying in advance. They do not want you to do this. They want, you know, everything to be available for the taking, for the poking and prodding when they want to look at it. So...

I personally don't think of it that way of like, well, I'm bending over backwards to make it easier to be in compliance. This is really the opposite. It's a lot of effort. It's annoying. You're trying to get ready for a trip and then you're like, oh man, I didn't even think about my phone. Now I'm going to stay up late, like taking apps off my phone. But

You know, that's because it's a proactive measure to protect things you hold dear. Is it possible to know how much of this is a product of the Trump administration? Or have we been creeping inevitably toward this place ever since our phones became such an integral part of our lives? And is this here to stay?

I would say it's the latter. There is sort of a slippery slope. And at least in the U.S., we have been creeping closer and closer, you know, to these dystopian worst case scenarios. But I also want to say that that is not inevitable inherently in these technologies or any technologies. I don't think. I think it is possible

possible to construct a society that cares about privacy as a fundamental human right and is willing to grapple with the tough, the admittedly very challenging tensions between

the public good and the personal right to privacy. When in those gray areas or conflicting areas, it's difficult. There aren't like easy answers, but I think it is not inevitable to completely disregard and cast aside

personal privacy, even in digital technologies. There are people who will listen to this who have never had an issue at the border coming in and out of an airport, maybe because they're white, they're cis, they don't kind of flag in the system. And I think some of those people are for the first time paying attention to this issue. Why should they care now? Why should they listen to this advice?

People often say in general about digital privacy, like, well, I have nothing to hide. Right. And, you know, in terms of anything, but certainly concerns at the U.S. border, like I have nothing to hide. Right. I haven't done anything wrong. I'm a U.S. citizen. There's no reason that I'm

you know, a search of my phone would produce any evidence to the contrary. But we don't know what we may want to hide later. Like, as, you know, the goalposts move or, you know, the field changes or whatever we want to call it, things that we thought were totally fine can be to our detriment or can even become illegal.

And so it's just one of these situations where you can't do it after the fact. There's a time when you can take some action and then there's a time when it's too late and you can't. Lily Hay Newman, as always, it is great to get to talk to you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. Stay safe out there, everyone.

And that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Patrick Fort and Shaina Roth. Our show is edited by Evan Campbell. Slate is run by Hilary Fry. And TBD is part of the larger What Next family. And if you like what you heard, the number one way to support our independent journalism is to join Slate Plus. You get all your Slate podcasts ad-free, including the one you're watching right now.

including this one, as well as access to exclusive bonus content. Just head on over to slate.com slash whatnextplus to sign up. All right, we'll be back next week with more episodes. I'm Lizzie O'Leary. Thanks so much for listening.