With the current US administration pondering the possibility of forcing foreign travelers to give up their social media passwords at the border, a lot of recent and justifiable concern has been raised about data privacy. The first mistake you could make is presuming that such a policy won’t affect US citizens. For decades, JTTFs (Joint Terrorism Task Forces) have engaged in intelligence sharing around the world, allowing foreign governments to spy on you on behalf of your home country, passing that information along through various databases. What few protections citizens have in their home countries end at the border, and when an ally spies on you, that data is usually fair game to share back to your home country. Think of it as a backdoor built into your constitutional rights. To underscore the significance of this, consider that the president signed an executive order just today stepping up efforts at fighting international crime, which will likely result in the strengthening of resources to a JTTFs to expand this practice of “spying on my brother’s brother for him”. With this, the president also counted the most common crimes – drugs, gangs, racketeering, etc – as matters of “national security”.
Once policies that require surrendering passwords (I’ll call them password policies from now on) are adopted, the obvious intelligence benefit will no doubt inspire other countries to establish reciprocity in order to leverage receiving better intelligence about their own citizens traveling abroad. It’s likely the US will inspire many countries, including oppressive nations, to institute the same password policies at the border. This will ultimately be used to skirt search and seizure laws by opening up your data to forensic collection. In other words, you don’t need Microsoft to service a warrant, nor will the soil your data sits on matter, because it will be a border agent connecting directly your account with special software throug the front door.
I am not a lawyer, and I can’t provide you with legal advice about your rights, or what you can do at a border crossing to protect yourself legally, but I can explain the technical implications of this, as well as provide some steps you can take to protect your data regardless of what country you’re entering. Disclaimer: You accept full responsibility and liability for taking any of this information and using it.