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Comment by andreasklinger | Hacker News Reader

I was always very confused/amused by the questions at the border:

"Are you a terrorist or affiliate with a terrorist organization?" "Are you a secret spy"

Why would anyone say yes? What's the purpose of this. Do they just need it to avoid arguments like "we dont even ask?"

A friend of mine explained it to me:

- let's say that they have the suspicion or evidence that you are affiliated w/ a terrorist organization. by US law they would need to prove this in front of a court before they could act on it. OR they could simply show that you lied at entry and use that to expel you from the country. Simple. Done.

I am unsure what the deeper goal behind the social media accounts is but i assume it also connects to a similar strong arm argument like that.

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It's not as simple as that: they would still need to make the case but you lying at the border just gives US authorities bigger evidence. Couple of years ago a French tourist answered "yes" to make fun of US borders and ended up in jail for a couple of days - not years as obviously he was more a dumb tourist than a real terrorist

> Couple of years ago a French tourist answered "yes" to make fun of US borders and ended up in jail for a couple of days - not years as obviously he was more a dumb tourist than a real terrorist

This must have made the USA so much safer.

I get the sarcasm, but given there are hundreds of millions of US border crossings annually, a policy of taking everything seriously regardless of size probably does make the US safer.

I'm sure that there are lines somewhere between 'taking things seriously', 'overreacting' and 'making examples of people'. Ask a stupid question, expect a stupid answer. It's a stupid question because nobody in their right mind would answer 'yes' to the question which just leaves people with a language barrier (which have a high incidence rate at borders), people that are nervous and/or tired (ditto, probably including some of the guards) and people that are trying to relieve the situation by attempting to be funny (stupid, but understandable since humor has been since time immemorial a natural release for tension).

You're completely right. There are serious downsides.

However, I think this question (and a lot of the crappy things about the US) exist to deal with and automate problems at scale. Scaling is hard. Scaling solutions are overkill if you don't have a scaling problem.

In this case, the problem is strong due process protections and allocating court resources. You might not hold a person without involving the courts if you suspect them of terrorist ties, but you can if they lie on a form or tell you they're a terrorist.

I don't know the specifics, but one could imagine a concession of due process if, say, the person held for their answer on the entry card is guaranteed to appear before a judge within three days.

Automate the process and you get silly situations like the one above. Don't automate the process and somebody eventually screws up and denies due process or lets a suspected terrorist through without scrutiny.

And again, yeah, the entry questions could be handled better, but it's a serious juggling act scaling it up and fitting it into our legal framework.

Not to mention that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

"Are you a terrorist?" -> "No, but I'm a soldier for The Cause..."

I don't think it's necessarily a stupid question, because of the psychology involved with lying.

This question would likely weed out any wanna-be small time people intent on causing harm to the US. Something similar to how many criminals in the US are arrested due to routine traffic stops.

If asking this "stupid" question prevents 1 single undesirable person from entering the US, then it's served it's purpose.

At what cost?

The extra 30 seconds per person to answer this question, I imagine.

He's not necessarily dumb because he made the mistake of thinking your border drones had a sense of humour. And given that English is probably not a native language for him, it's entirely possible that the sarcasm did not get through.

Quaking in fear in front of authority figures might be the norm in the USA, but it is not the norm everywhere.

In that case, at least he received a gentle warning in the form of a few days in the cooler, as opposed to wandering into the US where his attitude could have easily (depending on his skin color and other factors) have gotten him a sucking chest wound for his trouble.

Best to learn not to argue with people with guns at the border.

(Somewhat tongue-in-cheek here but I actually do think this is the purpose of aggressive border authorities. As someone who traveled around old, pre-EU, pre-Schengen Europe, you used to see it quite a bit there as well. Hard to say if it was intentional or just the product of different training, though.)

I don't really have anything constructive to add to this, but the idea that the government is setting up bullys on the border to educate foreigners on how to deal with its citizens in a way that doesn't end in death, is beyond fucked up.

Border guards aren't supposed to have a sense of humor.

Imagine how many non-resident/non-citizens enter the US daily. Now imagine if everyone of them were allowed to jokingly answer these questions. It would make doing their job that much harder.

It's much easier to treat all declarations as serious, rather than try to weed out the jokes. And because of the nature involved investigating, anyone who willing makes false statements are punished.

The border agents are looking for you to slip up or provide a tell. Asking questions like that may sound silly, but that's the point. They want to try to catch people off guard with unexpected questions and see how they react. These agents are trained to read your reaction and body language. Your body language and voice levels can help reveal some truth or at least the fact that you're uncomfortable answering the question. And why would you be uncomfortable answering a question about whether your a terrorist or not?

I wonder how they are trained to differentiate between someone who is hiding something and someone who is uncomfortable because they have been in a 10 hours flight, barely slept, have not been speaking english for months and are anxious to be suspected for nothing.

Ostensibly facial ticks or whatever.

Actually country of origin and maybe skin color / attire.

That's the function of pseudo-science bullshit -- you can ignore civil liberties and pretend you're not.

they want you to think they are experts with domain specific secrets passed on through craft-lore passed down from the wizened sages of border security.

But the reality is that this is no different than arson-lore (where firefighters testify based on superstitions regarding burn patterns) or leech-lore (where doctors recommend based on superstitions regarding your humoral balance) or polygraph-lore (where law enforcement interprets the squiggles of your heart to decide when you are lying).

All non-scientifically validated "lore" is just a superstition, and should be treated as such. The reality is that DHS is unable to stop terrorist attacks. Full stop. They can't possibly, in a free society.

That's ok, because that's one cost that a free society pays, but the benefits are worth it, so we carry on.

The problem is that DHS believes their own superstitions, has defined their actions to be "good" because "we're the good guys", and thinks that the public thinks they are responsible for preventing all terrorism.

This only stops when either the public demands change, or at totalitarianism. And you can't really tell, in full, when the first option disappears. You realize after you grasp for it and come up with wisps of smoke.

Well I was asked a similar question but not in the US, and I can tell you that it can catch you off guard given the right circumstances, even if you aren't guilty. Are these guys trained enough to tell the difference?

The way I see it, it's not going to make the guilty people stumble, but it will lead to false positives. In the long run, I think asking such a question does more harm than good.

Because when The Law asks questions, it is rarely innocent.

> 'Sir, when was the last time you broke the law?'

> 'Can you describe in some detail where did you spend your last paycheck?'

> 'Sir, step away from the queue. I want to ask you about this picture you took where you happen to be in front of a bank'

> 'Sir, are you innocent?'

The list of things one has to agree to in order to live in peace is getting longer and longer.

> And why would you be uncomfortable answering a question about whether your a terrorist or not?

Because it can be interpreted as accusing you of being a terrorist, which is very offensive.

Not anymore.

For better or worse the definition is being expanded such that we're all going to be classified as terrorists soon enough. Terrorists have fewer rights than the average citizen, so its inevitable.

Am I a terrorist? Well, yes, yes I am. My wife donated some money to our local mainline Catholic church and they've participated in some anti-abortion activities and some define that as financial support of terrorism. I was in the US military and I never did anything personally, but the army certainly has participated in acts that are terrorist from the point of view of other countries. Some of the worst terrorist acts happened before I was even alive, but I bet PLA members and Hezbollah members don't get a free pass for the same reason. Why the org I voluntarily joined, genocided the Native Americans just a century or so ago, and per the SS standard that makes me not just a terrorist but an unrepentant war criminal. I voted for Trump and campaigning for him is considered a hate crime on college campuses. I'm into electronics and computers and theoretically I could make a radio jammer or write a computer virus, although I'm not into that personally it doesn't sound too hard and a I certainly have the skills and gear necessary.

So in summary we've donated money from the shared checking account to financially support terrorist acts, I willfully joined an active terrorist organization in my youth (although I do have an honorable discharge, so there's that in my favor), I willfully and knowingly have terrorist / hate crime sympathies, and I have proven terrorism related interests and skills and abilities. So yeah, I am a terrorist. Many of you are too. I have to lie on my immigration forms and claim I'm not a terrorist, very annoying having to do that.

The term "terrorist" doesn't have a single fixed meaning. It's context-dependent. Pretending it's not context-dependent willfully misinterprets the speaker.

A lot of words function like this. E.g., "believer".

When a christian asks me if I'm a believer I might say yes.

But then I'd probably say no if a wiccan asked me the same question.

Obviously, that doesn't mean that everyone (or no one) is a believer once you fix some additional context.

So in summary, according to the sense in which the USFG is using the term, you're simply not a terrorist.

Everything else about your post is just a slippery slope argument, which may or may not be valid, but certainly isn't well-substantiated.

While slippery slope might technically be a logical fallacy, it seems to be the MO of every government everywhere.

Being a context dependent term is what makes questions like these from the government a big problem. Its like Nineteen Eighty-Four where "we have always been at war with EastAsia", only now the changing term is what constitutes a terrorist, or some other group the government has decided to not like

Meh.

Terms of art will always borrow and re-define colloquial language. Do programmers aspire to 1984 because they re-appropriate the word functional?

Defining an explicit list of "terrorist organization"s may or may not seek to redefine the term terrorist, but it is not tantamount to willful restatement of established historical fact (a la "always been at war").

No one would seriously would assert that the term-of-art definition of terrorist == the dictionary denotation of terrorist. That is the meaningful line in the sand between mere rhetorical ploy and outright democratic totalitarianism.

I was referring to the fact that the word terrorist seems to have expanded to mean "whoever I have decided to fight currently" whenever the government uses it

> Your body language and voice levels can help reveal some truth or at least the fact that you're uncomfortable answering the question.

Maybe I'm actually just uncomfortable being grilled by my own paranoid countrymen without my guaranteed Constitutional protections as though I'm some sort of enemy of the state when really I just got back from Cozumel.

If you are a US citizen returning from abroad you are likely not going to be "grilled" at the border. You'll be asked a few routine questions about where you visited, the purpose of your travel, etc.

You'll get to fill out a boring customs declaration forum. No carrying food into the country or smuggling in plants/animals/pets, no carrying over $5K of cash or equivalent, etc. If you have nothing to declare sometimes you didn't need to fill out the form. I never understood that in the past, perhaps it had something to do with no checked luggage (or no luggage at all) equals no declaration form.

In the old days they were lazy and handed out Visa Waiver forms to everyone on the plane. Perhaps they've stopped doing that. The Visa Waiver form is the famous "are you a terrorist?" Q+A forum. You don't have to fill that out if you're a citizen because entering the USA as a citizen never requires a visa. Theoretically if you have a visa (are a citizen of a non-visa waiver country) someone already signed for you and investigated such that you're not a terrorist and filling out a visa waiver would be pretty pointless if you require and have a visa.

Immigration officials seem to delight in pulling peoples chains, and you have nothing more interesting to do while waiting in line, so local variation and variation over time is highly likely.

> You'll be asked a few routine questions about where you visited, the purpose of your travel, etc.

The agents are usually polite and friendly. But they aren't always, and that can be intimidating and infuriating if you're a US citizen who's simply returning home from a trip.

They also treat US citizens like dirt.

uhh way incorrect. and I am a contractor for Customs! When I came back from the World Cup in Brasil I definitely got grilled, mainly because on my US Passport it displays the unfortunate (only when travelling) fact that I was born in Iran. Ok that and maybe because I grew a full beard that didnt match my passport photo, but still ;)

Just be respectfull as much as you can even though you just flew multiple hours and it's 1am and all you want is a clean shower and a fine meal just because Argentina lost another final... ahh sorry bad memories

> And why would you be uncomfortable answering a question about whether your a terrorist or not?

You must have never been wrongly accused of anything.

Would there ever be a legitimate reason for answering yes to those questions?

The closest thing that I can think of is if you were a member of a political party that had associations with a terrorist group (or that had been labelled as terrorists). So for example Sinn Fein in Ireland where they had links to the IRA.

Some people, very few but not zero, really are that dumb.

But I believe the main reason is so that when they catch somebody and prosecute them for terrorism, they can add "making false statements" to the charges and get even more prison time.

This is one of the reasons why I'm really liking snapchat. Every message goes poof after reading and the network is very private.

Unless of course snapchat is storing every message. In which case they'd have gigs of my silly selfies.

Considering recent events, they are probably looking for evidence that you are reposting ISIS propaganda or whatever the boogeyman of the day is.

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