https://www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/article/can-us-border-guards-deny-entry-based-on-cellphone-contents/
This measure was taken by the U.S. authorities because the researcher’s phone contained exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed his political opinion on the policies of the Trump administration on research,” French Higher Education Minister Philippe Baptiste told AFP shortly after the incident involving the French scientist.
GrapheneOS and Aiports (And other forced unlock scenarios)
I still think the best solution is to use a burner phone, with not much info but enough stuff to make it appear convincing. . Leave your real phone turned off in a safe location back home. You can have a lot of back up data on a tiny sd card that will likely go undetected in your pocket, or once you are in said country with your burner phone, you can download the necessary data from encrypted cloud. Be fully cooperative with border guards.
The tough part is that wiping and restoring the device is rather impractical. Sure, if you have basically no apps, that's fine.
But some of us visit, live and work in several countries, and need access to certain services. For example, I have bank apps that can't be re-activated on the phone unless I'm standing in front of the ATM to scan a rotating QR code. If I leave the country and wipe my phone, I'm without banking access until the next time I'm there. That either sucks or is totally not possible (bills to pay, etc.). Some places have government services apps that are geo-restricted (ok, those are easy to fool, but still takes time and maybe 2 phones so you can set up a hotspot with vpn+proxy). Even things like metro cards that contain your app private key would be a hassle to restore. And then 50 apps that you just have to set up again for the umpteenth time because the developers are too young to provide an Export Settings feature.
The real issue preventing all of this is a true disk image backup, because if you had that, everything, including private keys and file date/time stamps would be preserved. Without it, relying on Seed or others makes it a no-go.
Another option is to use virtual machines, snapshot it before the border, encrypt and offload to USB, and then reverse the process. But GOS would need to support VMs other than just Linux command line stuff. Would be great if instead of user accounts we had full GOS VMs.
The one suggestion from elsewhere that I could get behind is the concept of entering a duress code that silently deletes a specified user account and logs in as Owner. You could keep your phone intact, and only if it looks like you're going to be pulled aside, enter that code, and eventually hand them the phone. The owner profile, of course, only contains the stuff you're wiling to have snorted into the government database, provided they can crack the encryption.
I'm torn between just hoping they can't read a GOS phone, and deleting a handful of apps that might appear "interesting" to ignorant people in some other countries -- including the US now.