[rl3]

Any solution that has to maintain plausible deniability must be resistant to automated forensic exploitation suites commonly sold to law enforcement.

The pre-boot authentication phase is far harder to attack than an operating system that has already booted, so the only solution I can see is a typical hidden volume setup with two independent operating systems. The capability needs to be baked into both iOS and Android by default.

Cloud backup, wipe and restore is also nice, but not necessarily an option for some people depending on the circumstance. On this front, I wish Android would stop sucking. From what I understand of iOS, it's simple and easy to do this with iCloud, and you end up with basically perfect backup restorations.

Why it's even acceptable for western border agents to rifle through people's private digital lives is mind boggling. It has zero national security value (there's already a large intelligence apperatus that does this at internet-scale), so the only real reason has to be to catch non-technical people lying about their immigration status. Somehow that justifies violating everyone's rights in the process.

[monochromatic]

> It has zero national security value

I'm against it too, but of course it has more than zero national security value.

[rl3]

How so?

Unless a terrorist or spy is exceptionally stupid, they're not going to be carrying anything of value on their phone through a border checkpoint.

[sokoloff]

I wouldn't underestimate the propensity of humans of all sorts to act against their own interests in service of laziness.

State-sponsored agents are less likely to be lazy and more likely to follow SOPs, but the average person (law abiding or not) is likely to be lazy/sloppy a lot.

[jacobush]

There are stupid terrorists. However, one could argue the value to national security is negative, because of drag on the economy, resentment, and because these resources could be better spent elsewhere. Like training our own real life spies.