Your daily dose of “Are you STILL not taking this seriously?”
From “ARS Technica UK”
A US-born NASA scientist says he was detained by US border police, until he agreed to unlock his phone and let the agent copy or examine the phone's contents. The phone was NASA property, but the US Customs and Border Protection—another wing of the federal US government—seemingly didn't care.
The scientist — Sidd Bikkannavar, who works on tech at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab — thinks it was his foreign sounding last name that spooked them. Except they never searched his bags, they didn’t seem to care about them. They also already knew everything about him.
It all seemed a bit odd, according to Bikkannavar, because he's enrolled in the Global Entry scheme, and thus they already knew everything about him.
The only thing they wanted ? … access to his NASA issued phone.
While they have the authority to search devices you aren’t obligated to unlock your device.
“I told him I’m not really allowed to give the passcode; I have to protect access. But he insisted they had the authority to search it.”
Of course if you say “no” they have the right to “detain you” until your picture appears on a milk carton. Not wishing to go through that, the US born, American, tax paying citizen handed over his device and it’s PIN and they took it away for 30 minutes.
Bikkannavar said he doesn't know what happened during those 30 minutes, though he told The Verge that "the cybersecurity team at JPL was not happy about the breach."
I’m sure that Russian cybersecurity would be ecstatic.