Recent searches
Search options
A must-read for every Canadian - most especially those with American work or student visas. Powerful testimony about the soul-stripping consequences of being caught up in the American for-profit immigration detention system. Thank you, Ms. Mooney, for bearing witness - and leveraging your privilege to speak for those without voice. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/canadian-detained-us-immigration-jasmine-mooney #Canada #ICE #cdnpoli
I am curious: how frequently are devices searched this thorough? I haven't travelled abroad in decades, and US Customs only asked that I power on the device to prove it was what it was.
But to search contents?
@RoyBrander@urbanists.social@teledyn @Paulatics @dkmackinnon
Your question implies that nothing has changed from past administrations and we can rely upon our past experience.
Nobody has been told to pick out certain foreigners before just for political review, so they didn't.
Now, somebody "dressed like a leftist" might find your phone can be checked in 5 minutes flat by a computer, and of course the NSA has been recording your every email and post for 15 years.
It's what we were worried about when
Snowden showed it
@RoyBrander @Paulatics @dkmackinnon
My question assumes nothing of the sort: I asked how often, not what is believed, but what is, presently, fact. They found one at that search, but how many phones were searched before they found that one single target?
I find it also hard to believe that was the only phone onboard with anti-Trump material. But I also found wave-particle reality hard to believe until it was measured.
And I'm dubious of the five minute search, you have witnessed this?
@teledyn @Paulatics @dkmackinnon
I've done it.
A straightforward app uses the plug into the phone to copy every data directory to a faster computer that can search for keywords and combinations.
The "five minutes" does depend on how many GB are in the phone.
@RoyBrander @Paulatics @dkmackinnon
In five minutes?? I will accept that you have indeed tested this, but I remain dubious.
@teledyn @Paulatics @dkmackinnon
Well, I just pulled every photo, download, and document off my phone in 1.8 minutes, but then I only had 2 GB.
The speed it ran at would have carried 6.6GB off the phone in 300 seconds, five minutes.
Of course, it would depend on what you're carrying around. Even then, if they skip photos and movies an d just go for text files, emails, etc, 6.6GB is a lot.
And you can hand over your password or be refused entry, that's long established. No privacy rights.
@RoyBrander @Paulatics @dkmackinnon
So then likely not enough time to scan and discover that one juicy one. Would take longer farting about to choose folders and files, so a dump of the user partition as a block, and hope the pdfs are clear text?
@teledyn @Paulatics @dkmackinnon
If you grab everything, the copy runs faster, that might be simplest.
It barely rises to the level of "AI" to write a program that looks at folder names, email-titles, searches every byte of text for keywords or word-combinations; using a database of 10,000 confiscated phones to know every trick every drug dealer ever tried, and of course every smuggler. Tries top 1000 passwords.
Their every rule-of-thumb encoded in the program.
While U wait!
@teledyn @Paulatics @dkmackinnon
I'm your basic IT engineer who happens to know a bunch of the "OpenBSD" security guys, but not a security professional.
You might read:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/18/phone-data-privacy-customs/
...they keep the phone image in a database for 15 years.
I was giving the technical time-needed, but Newsweek says they take 30 minutes in practice.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/what-if-u-s-border-agents-ask-your-cellphone-n742511
..article notes how rare it is, bringing us back to my post that it may become more common now, because it's getting easier.
#Panopticon seems a far more likely culprit. Positive ID in the crowd, and so targeted not for merely seeming 'lefty' but as was said before, because they already had a dossier.
@teledyn @RoyBrander @dkmackinnon Let me tell you a story. In 2020, the Alberta Court of Appeal ruled unanimously that portions of the Customs Act were unconstitutional.
The court found the act violated the protection against unreasonable search and seizure by border agents, because it allowed for what the court called “suspicion-less and unlimited” searches of our personal digital devices. #cdnpoli #abpoli #Canada #Alberta #S7
@teledyn @RoyBrander @dkmackinnon
That violation, held the court, could not be saved by section 1 of the Charter, because it allowed unfettered and unrestricted access to people’s most personal and intimate information, and because it allowed the state almost unlimited latitude to dig around in the what the court called our “biographical core of identity.” The powerful judgment was written by Madame Justice Ritu Khullar, would would go on to become Alberta's chief justice.
@teledyn @RoyBrander @dkmackinnon The Court gave parliament a deadline to establish a proper standard to allow border agents to search phones and laptops. And so, the Trudeau govt. came up with Bill S-7, a badly flawed piece of legislation that would have established a new, a novel, threshold to search our personal devices - one of "reasonable general concern." Whatever that meant. https://www.readtheline.ca/p/paula-simons-the-government-is-trying
@teledyn @RoyBrander @dkmackinnon Well, we in the Senate had a reasonable general concern that Bill S-7 was unconstitutional and a wholly inadequate response to the Alberta court ruling. And so, we amended the bill substantively to change the new standard to "reasonable grounds to suspect" - a much higher test. And we sent the amended bill to the House. The government was NOT happy. And the bill died on the order paper.
@teledyn @RoyBrander @dkmackinnon So you could say that the Senate killed the bill - but only passively aggressively. The upshot? As I understand it, in Alberta - and in Ontario - Canada Border Services can't search devices. In other parts of the country, they can. It's absurd. But as we see these stories from the US, I feel more than ever that the independent Senate did the right thing.
@Paulatics @teledyn @RoyBrander @dkmackinnon That's interesting. I'm trying to recall from my con law studies, but brain fog is getting in the way. If it were a SCC decision, there is no question that the section(s) in question would be "read out" of the Act, nationally. But since this was an ABCA decision, I don't remember the effect. It's still federal legislation, and it doesn't make sense for it to be applied differently across the country. 1/
@Paulatics @teledyn @RoyBrander @dkmackinnon Even if it had that effect, it would only be a matter of time before the matter ended up in the courts in other provinces, and the Alberta decision would like be given a lot of weight.
@ECityMom @teledyn @RoyBrander @dkmackinnon Exactly. The Alberta court case doesn’t bind other jurisdictions. But it would carry great weight - as it did in Ontario.