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A guide to protecting your privacy at U.S. borders [1]

['Boing Boing']

Date: 2025-07-18

ACLU attorney Nathan Freed Wessler doesn't take chances when he goes through a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) checkpoint: "I try to be very careful about what I bring," the deputy director with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project told us. "I don't bring my work laptop. I'm a lawyer with very sensitive client communications, including stuff involving lawsuits against the very agency that would be searching me."

That may sound paranoid, but for Wessler — the guy who convinced the Supreme Court that cops need a warrant to grab your location data — it's common sense. "I leave the phone at home and travel with a so-called burner. The same precautions corporations require for trips to Beijing now make sense coming back into LAX."

We interviewed Wessler to learn what can happen when a U.S. citizen lands back in Trump's America. His answers were chilling: CBP can copy every photo you've snapped, every Signal chat you've had, and every Google Doc you've edited — no judge, no warrant, no probable cause. They can keep you sweating in a secondary holding pen at the airport for five, six, seven hours — longer if you piss them off. And while they can't legally bar you from re-entering your own country, they can confiscate your phone for months while they try to crack the lock code.

Over the course of our conversation, Wessler provided a playbook for citizens coming home: what questions you must answer, which ones you can kill with silence, how to neuter Face ID before the agent reaches for your head, and why a burner Chromebook wiped in the departure lounge isn't crazy.

This interview has been split into three parts. Part one, presented below, covers rights of U.S. citizens coming back into the country with advice on what to do if you are interrogated. Part two, which will run next week, covers how to protect yourself from invasive searches of your phones and laptops. Part three will cover Wessler's thoughts on the future of the rights of American citizens under Trump's regime.

As a US citizen, say you're entering customs, you just landed at the airport, and you're coming back home. What information are you legally required to give to a customs agent?

Wessler: So at the primary inspection station, you obviously have to give them your passport and answer basic questions about where you're coming from and your travel — questions to help them satisfy themselves that you are in fact a citizen. And then questions relevant to customs inspections. What do you have in your luggage? Is there an import duty on something? Did you declare fruits and vegetables? All those kinds of things.

Beyond that, U.S. citizens don't need to answer questions. You don't have to answer questions about your associations, your political beliefs, who you visited when you were abroad, your religious practice, none of that stuff that customs agents and border agents do ask people. You really don't have to answer any of that.

So if they say, for example, "What do you think of the president's policies?" and you say, "I don't want to answer that question," could they say, "Well, we're going to detain you for further questioning now?"

Read the rest of the interview with Nate Wessler of the ACLU on our ad-free Boing Boing Premium site!

Previously: "I fear we're heading towards civil war": A chat with one of the Yale professors who left for Canada

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