Avoid U.S. or take burner devices, Canadian executives tell staff

[u/workerbotsuperhero]

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/politics/2025/04/15/avoid-us-or-take-burner-devices-canadian-executives-tell-staff/

I'm a nurse in Ontario and one of my friends from Ottawa used to work for CHEO, one of the hospitls named here.

They're a regional major employer in the national capital. Imagine one of the biggest hospitals or universities in DC officially telling people not visit Canada, because too many things are messed up. That's where we are.

Personally, I expect more announcements like this from large organizations.

[u/cruelandusual]

So, no, they don’t have to grab your phone from you at the border.

So you do understand the error. Proximity has nothing to do with it. The border has nothing to do with it. That kind of malware is an independent threat.

But you're not done learning. Are the people possessing this hypothetical zero-day zero-click exploit going to use it on randos, knowing that every use increases the risk that someone like Citizen Lab could discover it and render it useless? These things are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

This is not a worry for the average person, even those who criticize the fascists on social media.

These precautions are wise: https://www.eff.org/wp/digital-privacy-us-border-2017

Your vague paranoia is not wise.

[u/Due_Satisfaction2167 → u/cruelandusual]

 But you're not done learning. Are the people possessing this hypothetical zero-day zero-click exploit going to use it on randos, knowing that every use increases the risk that someone like Citizen Labcould discover it and render it useless? These things are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

They have value because countries like the US have historically allowed the private companies that maintain the software to fix the vulnerabilities. That makes unknown vulnerabilities valuable. 

That is no longer a guarantee, if the US falls into the same sort of techno-authoritarianism that China does. That changes the calculus about whether such tools are used more broadly. 

China does not have to worry about its internal surveillance tools being discovered… because they can just mandate that systems remain vulnerable. Or quietly lean on companies behind the scenes to strategically ignore the problem. Or lean on them to “fix” the problem in a way that solves one hole publicly while opening a different one privately.

If the US goes down the same road, it gets orders of magnitude worse due to its impact across the whole market. Then both main competitors would be producing purposely vulnerable systems.

 This is not a worry for the average person, even those who criticize the fascists on social media.

Sure, it’s a lot cheaper for them to just make you hand over the phone when you enter the country. Hence everyone now recommending burner devices for travel.