They weren’t already? The US spies on its allies. And those allies spy on the US. That anyone would only be figuring this out now is kinda sad. Any foreign travel (for whatever definition of “foreign” applies to you), should be made with the assumption that someone will be attacking your electronic devices. If you don’t need all of your personal/work data on the device you have with you, don’t keep it there. If you do need some of that data, have a way to get it over the internet, preferably using a VPN but at least using encryption. For the extra paranoid, you’ll need a way to verify the OS, applications and certificates of the device accessing the data. And that still leaves hardware based attacks as a risk.
The US spies on its allies
Every country (with the capability) is spying on every other country at this point
There are two ways to really interpret that:
- What was previously at the discretion of different orgs (with a strong suggestion to use burners) is now official policy.
- This now applies to personal devices
I used to do some work for the US government and even going to the frigging UK we would always have a “private meeting to go over logistics” a week or two before going over where we would be told that we need to request and use a burner phone and laptop. Never in writing because the UK was our closest ally but anyone who tried to bring their “real” work devices would rapidly be told that something went wrong with their paperwork and they can’t go on that trip anymore.
That’s an easy way to avoid going on trips then.
I don’t know who you are but most people’s threat model doesn’t need to include a foreign government spy agency physically attacking their phones. That assumption itself is insanely paranoid.
Edit: Hello?? It feels weird to ask this are yall high profile government workers or else what makes you think foreign governements will be so interested in what you have in your phone?
what makes you think foreign governements will be so interested in what you have in your phone
This is a question no one should answer in a public forum
Personally I’m all for burner phones, I just wish you could get burner sims as well like the good old days.
All good and well, but Israeli software used by various govts can read phones without needing for them to enter a given country, see “Pegasus” scandal in Poland from last year
Okay, and? Most Americans use or have some form of burner when interacting with the government.
Citation needed
Interesting approach from an institute that banned having anonymous SIM cards!
