Hi all,
I am travelling soon to the US, for my vocation and as a long-time private person I will be taking some steps to maintain my privacy as I enter the country.
As this is an interesting area of the topic, I have decided to throw the question open to all of you.
What precautions (IT, physical, mental, otherwise) do you undertake when travelling internationally?
M.
You absolutely can opt out of facial recognition at the TSA! But you have to be on your guards and make sure you request it! They might fake not knowing so you should insist!
if that’s true, you are probably opting out of them telling you they are using facial recognition… but they probably still use it… how else would they know how to exclude you?
I wore a proper N95 mask the whole time. Told people I have cancer and am immune compromised so I can’t take it off (ok that bit’s true). Never had any problem avoiding facial recognition; but it’s possible that their particular facial recognition works around masks.
Guessing you’ll take a burner phone? On arrival and Dep in Aus they can demand you open it and they can search anything. If you refuse they quarantine your phone for 14 days and prob use some Israeli software to access the contents
Last time I completely re-flashed my phone and only loaded it up with some “travel” accounts that were very basic. It was quite a lot of hassle, though.
This time I think I will just sign out of and delete any cloud services/accounts of concern (including my password safe) from the phone. I will sanitise it of anything I don’t want getting into anothers hands.
Once I am safely across the border I can re-download/install what I need.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)
Not quite how that one works, but I believe that was the intended reference.
You know those movies were the main character blinks and their stuff gets stolen? That’s pretty much true in some of the cities.
Also if someone is asking you for gas money, help at the atm, trying to sell you something random - leave.
lemmy.one/c/scams seems to have a lot of the common ones listed. It might be worth lurking on r/scams to see if there’s anything more current to watch out for.
Encrypted personal devices, and VPNs, mostly. It’s really difficult to maintain real privacy when travelling through customs, the best I can do is make sure my persisted data is safe, and my internet traffic is obfuscated.
EDIT: I keep an encrypted USB pen drive with emergency information on it, should something happen to my phone or laptop, I can quickly get back off the ground.
How do you have that pen drive setup? What are you using to encrypt that drive? If it’s a third party encryptor, do you have the encrypt or install file downloaded on that drive also? Basically, what’s the process to get back up and running again?
I use VeraCrypt to encrypt the whole partition, with a password. I then have on the encrypted partition a backup of my phone contacts, as well as a restricted access wireguard config file pointed at my server. That server hosts VaultWarden, where I can log in with an additional password, and download a wireguard config file with higher access. I then connect using said higher access VPN profile and can download phone backups, access a VaultWarden account with my actual logins, etc.
Either bring a burner phone, or make sure you disable biometrics before you land. You could also consider wiping the phone and then restoring from a backup later on.
Also, learn about your constitutional rights and any relevant state laws (e.g. the CCPA in California). You probably won’t have to mention them, but they’re good to know.
