See also: A Guide to Getting Past Customs With Your Digital Privacy Intact2-16-17 National:
DHS says agents are in the right to ask for passwords, decryption help.
In recent days, there have been numerous media reports of a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory employee and American citizen who was forced to unlock his phone while returning to the United States at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport.
In that case, Sidd Bikkannavar wasn’t sure what his rights were—he seemingly was unaware that there is a very broad exception to the Fourth Amendment at the border that allows officials to conduct warrantless searches.
Now, let’s imagine that you arrive at the United States border, and a customs official asks you to unlock your digital device and inspect it. You, being a privacy-conscious person, decide to refuse to hand over your password, unlike Bikkannavar. What are the ramifications of telling a Customs and Border Protection agent to go pound sand? What would happen to your device? And, how long could CBP hold you for refusing to comply?
Ars spoke with several legal experts, and contacted CBP itself (which did not provide anything beyond previously-published policies). The short answer is: your device probably will be seized (or "detained" in CBP parlance), and you might be kept in physical detention—although no one seems to be sure exactly for how long.
An unnamed CBP spokesman told The New York Times on Tuesday that such electronic searches are extremely rare: he said that 4,444 cellphones and 320 other electronic devices were inspected in 2015, or 0.0012 percent of the 383 million arrivals (presuming that all those people had one device). ..Continued.. by Cyrus Farivar
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