How long can you be detained? And under what conditions? More than a few hours will get the vast majority of people cooperating. I suspect they could detain you for 24 hours, or even several days, but I don't know what the legal limit is for detaining a citizen at the border of their own country.
And for quite a lot of other people, even not being personally detained, but having to acquire new devices is inconvenient enough to compel cooperation. Who wants to buy new devices? Who has a need for two sets? It'd only be a cost of business for someone who does a decent amount of traveling and has confidential information to protect.
But then, that's a trap too because why should people need a reason? Why are only people with business/legal confidential information a protected class?
> How long can you be detained? And under what conditions
The answer is not very long. I'd call "a couple days" to be not a big deal, and not at all equivalent to being tortured to death, like the person I was responding to was implying would happen.
So yes, encryption does work, and all that will happen to you is that you could be moderately inconvenienced.
But even that I would expect to be rare. Most border security would just look at your computer, or whatever, not find anything on it (because the thing you show them just looks like an empty computer), and move on their way.
The narrative that I was responding to was this idea that technology solutions can always be bypassed, by torture or something, therefore technology solutions are worthless. And that's just not true.
An extremely effective technology solutions to an incompetent border guard that is interrogating you is for all your devices to just appear like there isn't anything on them, like a new factory default computer that you just bought.
A guard will just look at that, not see anything, and then move on to the rest of his crappy job.
> . Say 5 hour detention then they ask again. Then detention again. Repeat.
Ok, and does this happen in real life?
The answer is no. It does not. In almost any western country in the world, the low paid border security guards are not detaining people in mass for days on end.
This stuff just isn't really happening to any large degree.
The example you gave was of someone who was suspected of murder.
The amount of people who are in the population of "people suspected of murder, and are jailed for not giving up their password", is a very small population size.
So as long as the government makes a pinky promise to never use their power elsewhere it's okay? Think at least a little about the future. They might be doing it now for a good cause, but how long is that going to last? There's nothing stopping them from jailing anybody who refuses to give up their password, because what's jailable is the act of not giving up your password.
> So as long as the government makes a pinky promise to never use their power elsewhere it's okay?
I never made any claims about what is or it is not OK.
The only claim that I am making is that this whole "XKCD wrench meme" is dumb, and that encryption actually works really well for the vast majority of people in the vast majority of usecases.
That's all. Encryption works, and you are not going to be tortured, or locked up forever, because you refused the order of a low paid border guard.
Such situations are extremely rare, and it is annoying that people keep bringing them up when they basically don't happen to anyone.
And for quite a lot of other people, even not being personally detained, but having to acquire new devices is inconvenient enough to compel cooperation. Who wants to buy new devices? Who has a need for two sets? It'd only be a cost of business for someone who does a decent amount of traveling and has confidential information to protect.
But then, that's a trap too because why should people need a reason? Why are only people with business/legal confidential information a protected class?