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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?
@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?
@RoyBrander@urbanists.social@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!