Don’t visit unless it is a life or death situation. I wouldn’t want to go into country that wants to finger print me, hand over social media, and copy my devices.
I’ve never travel outside of Mexico before, but let’s say, I do want to travel to a country that do not ask you for a visa, BUT, to get to that country my plane do need to make a stopover in the US. Do I do need visa just for that stopover in the US?
Not if you transfer directly to another plane, you only need a Visa if you go through passport control.
Step 1: don’t
It appears that these countries now have some form of warning associated with travelling to the USA:
- Australia
- Canada
- Denmark
- Finland
- Germany
- Netherlands
- New Zealand
- United Kingdom
Sure are a lot of 5eyes countries in that list. I’m pretty sure we don’t have closer allies than that. Well aside from Russia now
I wish it were so easy. I’ll be going there later this year because family. Ugh
ship it to your hotel and travel with a burner til you reach your destination.
Wired is lost. If you dont offer up credible social media accounts or if you have a wiped phone, they probably wont let you in. These people still believe that the rules apply but they simply dont. There are no guarantees.
Last time I travelled to the US, I brought my old phone. It had plenty of text messages, a few photos of family and nature, and nothing else. They didn’t check it, but I guessed it would pass the “not a burner” vibe. Now I’m wondering, though, how people would react to me having no social media presence (other than Reddit at that time, which I accessed via browser). Not that I’m planning to travel to the US ever again, but I wonder whether there’s a market for perfectly inoffensive fake social media accounts.
You can tell that to
Ryan Lackey has traveled to countries like Russia or China[;] he has taken certain precautions: Instead of his usual gear, the Seattle-based security researcher and chief security officer of a cryptocurrency insurance firm brings a locked-down Chromebook and an iPhone that’s set up to sync with a separate, nonsensitive Apple account. He wipes both before every trip and loads only the minimum data he’ll need. Lackey has gone so far as to keep separate travel sets for each country, so that he can forensically analyze the devices when he gets home to check for signs of each country’s tampering.
Now, Lackey says, the countries that warrant that paranoid approach to travel might include not just Russia and China but also the United States
Thats what he wrote right after your quote, implying that he hasnt tested it. Also this level of paranoia was always justified for US travel and he surely knows that. The thing is that the US is now probably worse than Russia or China when it comes to the chance for random people to be arrested. For political activists its probably equally likely but the survival chance in the US is still higher.
I doubt that the US restricts entry based on speech more than China.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/trump-musk-french-scientist-detained
A French scientist was denied entry to the US this month after immigration officers at an airport searched his phone and found messages in which he had expressed criticism of the Trump administration, said a French minister.
It barely gets worse than this. This wasnt even for public statements, it was private messages. The only difference between this and China might be the scale at which it happens, but that is kind of hard to track.
A fucking Chromebook lmao
I mean it is quite locked down and something cheap enough for the nonce.
Pretty funny in the US context tho, I’d imagine it wouldn’t be too hard for them to get google to “help”
Until he gets detained by trumps border people.
I’ll actively try to avoid that. There’s been a time in which I thought it could have been interesting to visit that country, but the time has passed.
It’s so sad. We have a beautiful country and most people are very nice.
Got to be really deranged to vote for a candidate that ran on a platform of revenge and hate, and there’s at the minimum 70 million of those types of Americans which outnumbers many individual countries. Americans suck and don’t seem nice. Too many bad apples.
I guess so, but recent news aren’t exactly inspiring. I’m really sorry for you (and I say that from an EU country with shitty politicians as well).
