If the border guards see that your laptop has epoxy in the ports, and that by definition you are using this technique for privacy-averse countries, sounds like you won't be making the flight any time soon.

What border guards have you seen that would inspect a laptop that closely in the first place? I fly relatively frequently and all they care about is that it's kept in a separate bin to the rest of your luggage, no one looks at it upclose(also you can damage ports in a way that isn't visible on the outside).

99% of my flights have been exactly like this with no device inspection, and I've been in multiple autocratic countries. What I meant is that if they are at the stage where they are looking to plug into your laptop, having the ports blocked like this will immediately cause problems for you in countries where blocking your ports would be useful. It's a catch-22

Ah, I see - sorry I misunderstood. I thought the comment meant that you'd be stopped from boarding the plane in the first place if your laptop has glued up ports.

So what happened during the 1% where it did happen?

Nothing exciting or worth sharing to be honest. Anxious hours spent in the airport followed by entry denial. There were no real consequences other than stress in the moment and the inconvenience of having to re-book a ton of things.

So they just don't scan your laptop or phone if you gum up all the ports? They wouldn't pop out your hard drive?

An alternative solution might be to backup to microsds.

Pulling out the hard drive might be effective if it's 2002 or something. If you have a modern laptop like a MBP, then the drive isn't really removable. If you were to remove it, the use of encryption linked to the T2 chip makes the thing useless.

Good point. I don't travel a lot and I use old hardware.