M'assistant

tips hat

Another reason to take a burner instead if you have to travel to China.

Just mail yourself your real phone

That's not much better tbh. Remote VPN into your computer/NAS at home, otherwise just live with a burner while you're there.

Customs of the country can inspect any international packages.

Or maybe don't go to authoritarian countries like China, Russia, and now the USA.

Do they even need this tool? I mean, last I checked, there is no protection against self incrimination in China, so they could just jail you for refusing to unlock. People in China just complies whenever police ask to unlock their phone.

True, but some people may not have a choice because of work or family.

The data is still valuable and most importantly it's a way to spy on any visitor.

Or anywhere, really.

As though the US didnt used to spy on its citizens lol

The spying aspect definitely did happen, but you used to be able to have a meme making fun of the US president and have no issues entering, but now they have new orders from their tyrant in chief to arrest people for making a harmless joke. (Search: "Bald JD Vance Meme Denied Entry")

Thats a very strange place to draw a line in the sand when they were literally exposed wire tapping essentially the entire population of the country and mass harvesting private data.

I said "Don't go to authoritarian countries" not "Don't go to any country that conducts mass surveillance". Since every country does mass surveillance these days, the only practical thing to do is avoid those that punish you for you speech, hence China, Russia, USA (a lot more places on the list, but these are the big 3 No-Go Zones)

wire tapping is one thing, seizing and/or searching phones is another. while both are bad obviously, you can usually protect yourself against wiretapping by using secure communication systems, which phone calls is not a part of

and how do you keep the vpn credentials secure?