[marssaxman]

There are no political solutions to things like this either - not that any of us talking about it here have any meaningful hope of accomplishing, anyway. We might as well try whatever technical fixes we can come up with, since it's better than the nothing we'll get if we wait for the politicians to deal with it.

[k-mcgrady]

Political/legal solutions are the only ones that will work long term. Tech solutions can be legislated around.

[marssaxman]

Political/legal solutions also take a generation or more to accomplish. What are we supposed to do in the meantime, just put up with governmental abuse?

[k-mcgrady]

Politics can potentially change within one election cycle, legal faster if get our opposition politicians onside.

[adamsea]

Let's not be defeatist. Just because something is difficult and may take a long time does not make it impossible.

[jchrisa]

Don't travel with electronics?

[TeMPOraL]

Here's a business/service idea off the top of my head.

As a traveller, just before going through security you wipe your device and "sell" it to a vendor in exchange for a voucher that will allow you to exchange it back when you land and go through the security at your destination. You take the new device, provision it with your cloud data, and go on your visit; when you go back, you go through this process again, in the other direction.

Lots of problems to be solved with that idea, not the least of which is the business model, but it would allow you to travel without any electronics on your person.

[fapjacks]

I toyed with building an application like this, except that you just carry your device with you. The application basically tarballs your entire environment up, offsites it, and then wipes and factory-resets your device (incidentally I got lost in the rabbit hole of trying to wipe an SSD heh). It's completely clean, you can surrender your device for inspection, give passwords, etc. And then after you're through, you download the application which acts like a dropper, and it explodes your environment and data onto the device again. Docker was really useful here.

[TheOtherHobbes]

But this makes it very obvious you've reset your phone. Which is a red flag - although not technically illegal, so far.

You really want something that looks like an in-use device and gives no hint that you have sensitive files stored anywhere else.

[fapjacks]

It would have been configurable. The important thing is that your blob of data (e.g. VeraCrypt volume) is offsited and wiped. You could leave your laptop otherwise completely lived-in, just not containing your data anymore. Otherwise, I've worked for companies that gave out loaner phones for overseas travel. A factory-reset phone is much less suspicious than a threadbare "factory-reset" laptop.

[TheOtherHobbes]

On a laptop, it shouldn't be too hard to have a dual-boot system where OS 1 has nothing of interest, and OS 2 is temporarily hidden from the boot loader.

Alternatively keep the main OS on a USB or hard drive, and get that in/out of the country by other means.

There are other options. Generally, carrying obviously visible sensitive files with you in person is not a necessity.