Ask a lawyer how is it possible to for the statistics to be so low.
But the numbers are not LOW if you think about it. 3 percent is a lot. Every time you cross borders, your chance increases to fall for a secondary inspection. In the numbers NotFuzzyWarm presented, around 13 MILLION people went through second screening only in the last year. That is over 1 million per month or over 35 thousand travelers per day. The number is in fact huge, even if it is almost nothing compared to TOTAL number of travelers.
I know people who traveled to the United States and went through secondary screening. They had their devices checked too. In fact, I believe the majority of the people I heard of traveling to the United States had border patrol go through their phones. I also often heard the worst thing you can do is bring USB sticks and hard drives.
It sounds insane that these are among the worst things you can travel with, but it is what it is. The best thing to do is simply travel with a dumb phone or a clean smart phone with only essential applications installed on it. If they ever check you, you at least have nothing to worry about.
What boggles the mind here is that when it comes to security, we should generally - in my view - take an overly cautious approach, rather than an approach based on statistical averages. We SHOULD look at anomalies or exceptions. Thus, I find it bizarre that the claim that only
some people's devices are being checked - to say nothing about the many other issues that can arise - means it's not a problem people should worry about.
I guess the libertarian slant has not reared its head on this issue. Wow.