florianvk

riverko said:

May I ask where are you from? If from the US, than that’s understandable you have never experienced that even though it applies to US citizens too. But the probability would be much lower I’d say.


May I ask where you are from? I'm from the EU (Germany), I've entered the US > 100 times, and I've never been asked to hand anything physically over for inspection at immigration except my passport.  Customs have asked me to open and show content of luggage multiple times, but even they did not take anything, touched very little and certainly did not connect anything electronic to any device.  I would also like to add that nothing like this has happened to me when entering the UK, China, Israel or any other country where one might expect similar scenarios.

I understand as well US and other immigration and law enforcement officials have the authority (sometimes with, sometimes without court order or warrant), but it is certainly not common practice.

I will assume that these tools are mostly used in cases where phones are found during searches, or seized from suspects and those people refuse to unlock their devices. 

As for this being irrelevant in 2023, I disagree. Of course most of us are using iCloud and/or other cloud services these days and of course if this exists, then that's the go-to method as it is way easier. Cloud providers will hand over everything they have in their possession when ordered, because it's the law in the country where they operate. Laws in the US have been passed by elected representatives. On this matter, there seems to be a tendency that "right-wing" parties have stronger positions in favor of such activity, and if a majority vote by legislative majority, this is what happens (Voters of a certain previous US president who are not in favor of all this when applied to them personally should simply connect the dots and understand that they got what they paid for!). Anyway, at least the more educated among the "bad guys" know that too, and of course for that reason they use cloud services as little as possible. The infamous discussion with Apple having to add back doors was triggered by a specific case of a suspect who had not used any cloud services, but the data was physically on his device, and only there.

The fact that if you have physical access to something electronic, with sufficient effort, you will be able to get to the data that's stored on it, has pretty much always been there. Chips have been "opened" physically and other extreme methods have been used. To build something that is 100% safe against this is very hard and very expensive, certainly too expensive for a smartphone.

The discussion in the article is about what it is - a company making tools to make such processes easier for law enforcement, most likely in legally allowed scenarios in multiple countries, and another company - Apple - trying to make this as hard as possible for that company due to its "value add" in customer data privacy, and considering the "It's not possible to make a backdoor that only the good guys can use." stance they've had. All fair play and fine. For me personally: Case closed, and I'm ok with using my iPhone (and iCloud) for now, because I think the balance of all that is still "ok".