[philpem]

Put the files you need on an encrypted online share, then download them when you need them?

Then of course zero-write the hard drive and reload the software when you're done.

[tsss]

That looks suspicious. You need to have at least some personal data on you for them to drool over.

[bluejekyll]

Just be honest: “whenever I travel, for security reasons, I always wipe my laptop and phone of any personal data as I’m extremely concerned about it being stolen while traveling.”

[deelly]

Agent: please write login/pw/url to you data on this piece of paper. Now.

[bluejekyll]

To be clear. I don’t support this policy. What I’m suggesting is that by misleading/lying to an agent you might make it worse.

This sucks and is stupid, all forms of dragnet type operations are.

In this particular context, you could specifically discard 2fa tokens, etc., such that a password isn’t enough to login to these accounts. Now this might mean that your entry will be denied, but you will be incapable of giving them access to what they’re asking for.

[philpem]

Household budget, a couple of old bank statements, some Github clones...?

[blunte]

Aha, but make sure none of the contributors to the repos you cloned are on a bad list, or you have now accidentally associated yourself with them.

It's a bit of a stretch maybe, but not beyond possibility.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Could you say something like:

"Lost everything in a hard drive crash literally two days ago, pretty busy getting ready to travel and just had time to reinstall before I jumped on the plane."

[colejohnson66]

No. Because lying is a serious federal felony.

[Roark66]

So what, you just say, this is a new phone and I lost my previous one. Conversation over.

[LurkersWillLurk]

That is called "making false statements", a serious federal felony. 18 U.S.C. § 1001.