Has Government searched your phone?

There has been a lot of discussion on various TWiT shows about what authorities can not do with your phone.
Personally I have only had one occasion where this happened. I was traveling in Ontario, Canada. I stopped at the vehicle inspection station. After answering their usual questions they asked for my phone. I was a little dumbfounded because this had never happened before. The agent took it into another room, still in my view. He browsed through the phone for several minutes and then returned it to me. This was about year 2005.
Has similar demands to search ever happened to you. Was the Phone locked did you declare get a warrant etc?

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I would agree with Leo - as he has stated this before. If they took the phone out of my view, I would throw it away and buy another…

But no, never happened to me yet

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Canada does this all the time…“A”

Never heard of that happening. under what grounds?

They seem to make up the rules as they go along!!!

When you come across the border. Been going on a long time. I had read many stories of this back when George W Bush was president. So, been going on a while…

As a resident of Ontario, I’m going to ask for a clarification of this? There are no vehicle inspection stations inside the province. There is an international border, of course, and anyone crossing it in either direction is subject to search (and seizure) by the border agents of BOTH countries. Normally, when crossing INTO Canada you are interviewed by Canadian Border Services and when you enter (or return to) the US you deal with US Customs and Border agents. So did this happen when entering Canada or when leaving?

That’s interesting. I drove up to Montreal last summer and was half expecting to have my phone checked, but neither Canada going in nor US coming home asked. The checkpoint seemed super lax - I’ve spent more time stuck in California’s agriculture checkpoints than the intl border up there :man_shrugging:

There is a border station on Wolfe Island near Kingston Ontario–you take a tiny ferry between the two countries. On the US side, there is a concrete brick hut with two agents. On the other side of the water, the Canadian side has (or had the last time I crossed, say 5 years ago) an agent arrive in her car. She stood like 20 feet away, looked at us, and waved us through without even speaking to us. Perhaps she had noted our travel through the area about 4 hours earlier, but I thought that was pretty informal, to be honest. As @Leo has said before, there may frequently be advantages to being an older white guy.

The station I mentioned is on the 401 near London. It was new at that time and only commercial vehicles were required to stop.

Oh, you didn’t mention you were driving a commercial vehicle… sure they do have highway checks for transports to make sure drivers are following the rules (required rest/breaks, proper maintenance, truck weight is balanced and not over the limits.) I didn’t think they had border agents in those locations, but never been in one. It seems more likely it was a Ontario highway employee looking to see if you had been using your phone while driving or something.

I’ve done the reverse and searched a government phone. …because my father was a federal employee and needed iPhone help. :sweat_smile:

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