My solution was to stop carrying these devices when I travel. I ship them ahead to my destination through a parcel service, and carry a burner phone (for emergencies) during my actual trip.
"For purposes of ensuring compliance with the Customs laws of the United States and other laws enforced by the Customs Service, including the provisions of law described in paragraph (2), a Customs officer may, subject to the provisions of this section, stop and search at the border, without a search warrant, mail of domestic origin transmitted for export by the United States Postal Service and foreign mail transiting the United States that is being imported or exported by the United States Postal Service."
And I think most other countries have similar rules.
And depending on what kind of parcel service you use, you'd not even have protections against warrant-less searches in US domestic context. I'm not remembering the details, but IIRC only First-Class type mail / parcels are protected. Most packages aren't.
Second, should my devices get damaged then the parcel carrier is on the hook to make me good.
We’re not the only ones who know about Thunderstrike.
Us individual techies always look for ways we can, as people, dodge these intrusions of the system into our lives.
Unfortunately for us individual techies, the real power is in political organizing and shifting the law and culture around such intrusions. We shouldn't need to be inconvenienced like this.
Similar plans wrt if I ever go to something like blackhat or defcon.
A lot of countries don't allow used electronics to be imported, which is more than you think.
Not to mention the duty you have to pay for the countries that do.
I do very little international travel, though, so I may have just been lucky. Most of my travel is domestic, and none of those issues apply when you aren't leaving the country.
What does that even mean?
You don't use the internet?
Surely you have an internet connection, and you could make your device accessible through the internet somehow for accessing your data. It doesn't require "the cloud" in the sense that you keep your data resident in "the cloud" on third-party servers...
Punch a hole in your home internet firewall, or terminate a reverse ssh tunnel on some super cheap VPS provider to access your data from home.
I certainly run fileservers of my own that I can access through the internet, but that's not what people mean by "the cloud", and very probably isn't what the comment I was replying to was talking about, as he specifically mentioned syncing the data to the device.
But I may have misunderstood.
Nonetheless, I don't do that anyway because I don't take a device that can make use of that data. I only take a very basic feature phone.
This doesn't require a cloud service.
Why? What is your threat model?
All phones have software that can be hacked, not just smartphones. But Apple and Google have vast teams aimed at protecting this code... random Chinese OEMs probably don't.
And once you are in country, a smartphone can use Signal (over a foreign SIM or wifi) to have encrypted comms, while all your texts and calls will be intercepted in the clear.