> most secure way ... encrypt the laptop and phone and ship to your destination via standard shipping services
Absolutely not. Any time your hardware is physically out of your control is a time when someone could install a hardware keylogger or replace your ethernet card with one that exfiltrates data or whatever.
The most secure option is to travel with an encrypted hdd/phone on you with no way to decrypt them, and separately acquire the private key (e.g. via shipping a secure hardware token which is made to be tamper resistant to a trusted friend at your destination).
If the devices leave your control for more than a few minutes, consider the hardware compromised and never unlock them again.
Laptops simply are not made to be highly resistant to an attacker with physical access, whereas hardware keys are, so it's not a good idea to ship them.
If you do ship them, you'll have to do a physical examination for suspicious hardware at your destination, (as you presumably did when you first received them if you're that paranoid), and it's damn hard to find a good lab for that in some countries.
Your advice is good as a way that's secure for most people's threat models, but it is a far cry from being the most secure solution, and I'd argue it's much less secure than simply carrying them with you.
Carry a computer with encrypted data but don't use it; remove the hard drive to copy the data to another computer in order to decrypt the data with the separate key. Discard the old hard drive and old computer afterward.
Do not use a single key; require several keys that are with different people, combined only in the way that you know how. Ensure the people are present to notice if the police try to come in.
By paraphrasing my comment as you did, you avoided the point I was making. What I proposed is the easiest and most secure way for a normal traveler not already under suspicion to avoid losing/exposing potential client and employer data to a foreign government during a border confiscation. By no means is it 100% foolproof and I never claimed it was. As I said elsewhere in the thread, if you're already the subject of an investigation your mailed package will be intercepted, but that's an entirely different conversation.
In short, the scope of my comment was avoiding a border seizure during travel, not 100% securing your devices from being compromised, which is an impossible goal short of just not using any devices, period.
Absolutely not. Any time your hardware is physically out of your control is a time when someone could install a hardware keylogger or replace your ethernet card with one that exfiltrates data or whatever.
The most secure option is to travel with an encrypted hdd/phone on you with no way to decrypt them, and separately acquire the private key (e.g. via shipping a secure hardware token which is made to be tamper resistant to a trusted friend at your destination).
If the devices leave your control for more than a few minutes, consider the hardware compromised and never unlock them again.
Laptops simply are not made to be highly resistant to an attacker with physical access, whereas hardware keys are, so it's not a good idea to ship them.
If you do ship them, you'll have to do a physical examination for suspicious hardware at your destination, (as you presumably did when you first received them if you're that paranoid), and it's damn hard to find a good lab for that in some countries.
Your advice is good as a way that's secure for most people's threat models, but it is a far cry from being the most secure solution, and I'd argue it's much less secure than simply carrying them with you.