In 2014, the Supreme Court made it clear: phone searches require warrants. While it did note the case involved a search “incident to an arrest,” the precedent was undeniable. If a phone…
If you want to not have to worry about this sort of thing:
encrypt your phone
take a complete backup of your phone
store it somewhere you can access it remotely
wipe your phone
profit.
You can travel then, unimpeded, when they want to crawl up your ass hand it over, a full wiped unencrypted brand new phone. Because the previous disk was encrypted, you don’t have to worry about forensic analysis. Then, when you get where you’re going, download and restore the backup. You can do this with a laptop too.
Make sure you’ll be able to decrypt the backup, some recoveries don’t do this, some do. Know your hardware and your software.
Bear in mind, other countries might not have any rules preventing them from looking around inside your butthole while you’re there. So to avoid having a car battery attached to your nuts in Cambodia, just don’t carry a phone with things on it that you don’t want them to know about. But if you’re in a country where you can’t be forced to divulge an encryption passphrase, this method gets you across a border with no worries.
If you want to not have to worry about this sort of thing:
You can travel then, unimpeded, when they want to crawl up your ass hand it over, a full wiped unencrypted brand new phone. Because the previous disk was encrypted, you don’t have to worry about forensic analysis. Then, when you get where you’re going, download and restore the backup. You can do this with a laptop too.
Make sure you’ll be able to decrypt the backup, some recoveries don’t do this, some do. Know your hardware and your software.
Bear in mind, other countries might not have any rules preventing them from looking around inside your butthole while you’re there. So to avoid having a car battery attached to your nuts in Cambodia, just don’t carry a phone with things on it that you don’t want them to know about. But if you’re in a country where you can’t be forced to divulge an encryption passphrase, this method gets you across a border with no worries.