nrgiii

Interesting article about an incident at IAH. Seems that CBT has the power to search your phone but not the power to force you to unlock it?

I'm guessing that a GE member refusing to unlock a phone means GE status goes bye bye?

http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/12/14...ump-travel-ban

mymilesandpoints

i saw that too. I have a trip abroad soon, and will perhaps delete or suspend social media accounts and messaging apps just to be cautious.

Yoshi212

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/guide-...mbid=social_fb

This came up in my FB feed today. Some are a bit too far for me but I do have the autodelete function after 10 tries on my iPhone. Did backfire on me once when my nephew got his hands on it and pressed buttons until it reset.

redadeco

Time to put back my 3310 into service to connect with people when on trips abroad.

Smartphones are for domestic use.

GUWonder

Segregated devices work well enough, more so if they are used as client devices.

FliesWay2Much

For years, I have thought about what I would do in this situation. As a USG Fed, I frequently travel overseas with my agency's IT property: a travel laptop and a smartphone. As was the case with the NASA guy, they are barcoded as well with my department's name on the barcode. A couple of years ago, I reached out to my department's CIO for guidance and the silence was deafening. There is also the factor that the IT stuff is signed out to me as accountable property.

Since I don't have GE, I don't know if you can register more than one passport in one account. I'm sure the JPL guy has two passport: A brown "Official" passport for his official NASA travel and a regular blue tourist passport. I'm purely speculating, but he could have been targeted because he used a passport that wasn't registered to his GE account?

Back on the subject, I decided that I would not submit to anything the CBP demanded for my accountable government property until I contacted my agency's CIO. This includes handing it over to them without the proper departmental personal property paperwork, turning it on and certainly includes divulging passwords. I wouldn't care if I stayed there until they blinked. There's simply not a chance that I am going to compromise government property and information, even for another government agency.

I just passed a copy of this article to our deputy CIO asking for guidance. Perhaps they will respond this time...

Maxwell Smart

One can register both an official and personal passport to GE.

Would be very interested in hearing your CIO's response/guidance.

GUWonder

I wouldn't be surprised if he was targeted due to concerns about leaking or selling "secrets" (or facilitating contacts that may be seeking to be in that market) with regard to one or more Asian country -- perhaps India specifically. Sometimes that is why certain people in the governmental sciences sector with Asian ethnicity and affiliations get selected for such searches.

It is within the realm of the routine for some FBI counter-espionage investigations to use the CBP as a means to further an investigation.

Loren Pechtel

Now, that actually makes some sense.

Section 107

Yes, and the pax might not have been the target of the investigation.....

FliesWay2Much

It would have made infinitely more sense for the Bureau to contact the NASA CI people (many of whom I know very well) and coordinate the proper thing to do. Most agencies (including mine) require you to bring your IT device to the Help Desk for scanning after an overseas trip. The CI folks could have simply done their thing back at JPL in a routine manner, nobody would have noticed and whoever needed the data would have gotten the date with their investigation still intact.

Instead, DHS decided to go "cowboy" and take matters into their own hands. This could have been a completely low-key and unnoticed investigation. Instead, it's now all over the internet.

Great job, CBP. You've lived down to your reputation and perhaps have blown a case (if there is one now or ever was a case) to smithereens.

GUWonder

Still, the passenger may be a subjected party to the investigation. And even if the primary target of the investigation may be another person or group of persons, the person searched like this may well end up under substantial governmental pressure -- including to participate in entrapment/sting operations -- despite otherwise not having committed any serious crime.

The DOJ/FBI do this kind of stuff and even mess up from time to time by getting CBP to do what CBP would otherwise not have done. If this is an FBI CI driven search, I would not point the finger of responsibility for this at the CBP, for the CBP is just being a tool for the DOJ/FBI.

I consider it a good thing for Americans to know what all the CBP does for other parts of the US government, including its role as a tool to be exploited for IRS or DOJ/FBI purposes using the border search as a way to do things that can't be legally done to those not crossing the US international borders.

buylowsellhigh

http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/13/us/cit...t-border-trnd/

I don't know about everyone else but having someone look thru personal electronics (computer/phone) feels worse than someone searching thru your home... I mean, all of our personal/financial details, including pictures, personal/work emails & files, social media, instant messages, phone logs, the whole 9 yards.

Our phones these days are basically encrypted and backed up to the cloud.. so if you get a new phone, mostly everything gets synched to it. However, after they force you to give up password to your phone, and take it away for 30 minutes, EVERYTHING gets copied off.

In light of this, does anyone think of possibly pre-planning what they would do to safeguard from this sort of intrusion into our personal lives?

Maybe we can start a list of the "practical" things we can protect ourselves with... Among the things I can think of...

• Disconnect / uninstalling social media (fb/ig/twitter/linkedin/etc)
• Disconnect / uninstalling work related stuffs (gmail)
• Disconnect / uninstall / limit personal media (I would think that its fine to search thru 2-3 weeks worth of photos, but NOT cool to look thru 2-3 years)
• Dropbox (Unsynch folders, uninstall from phone/notebook computer)

Me: US Citizen w/ Global Entry, Precheck, ABTC Card, int'l travel every 4-6 weeks (no Europe/middle east). I've earned my SSSS stripes coming back from Japan/Singapore/China trip so as I'm on the watchlist now, somewhat paranoid, lol.

s0ssos

It is weird nobody here mentions the obvious. He was targeted because he isn't "white American", whatever that is supposed to mean.

Loren Pechtel

There are a lot of people that aren't white but don't get that scrutiny.