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Comment by agotterer | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

> 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

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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