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Comment by caminante | Hacker News Reader

Here's the Customs and Border Patrol policy in question [0] (see page 31).

The EFF has a nice write-up on this topic [1]. It sounds like there's a "border search exemption" that bypasses the Fourth Amendment. The rationale was to ensure duties were paid and screen for "bad guys," drugs, weapons, diseased fruit, etc.

[0] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/privacy...

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/12/law-enforcement-uses-b...

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Here's the ACLU's page on this, with a map of the 100 mile "constitution-free zone": https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights-governments-100-mile-b...

Note that this zone includes New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Seattle, etc, etc, and hence a really sizable portion of the US population.

Also note that that image is incomplete: international airports count as border crossings for CBP's purposes, so any city with one and the surrounding area in a 100 mile radius should be added.

Edit: About like this. Quick & dirty edit of the ACLU's .jpg, so the quality is poor: http://imgur.com/a/DqDeQ

Nice. And in case it wasn't already crystal clear at this point: that means the majority of Americans live in places where the government straight out claims that the Bill of Rights just doesn't fully apply.

US Census population density map by county (pdf): http://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/maps-data/maps/thematic/us_p...

On the bright side, it seems like more light is being shown on these long-standing terrible policies now that Trump is president...

> The rational was to ensure duties were paid and screen for "bad guys," drugs, weapons, diseased fruit, etc.

There's always a perfectly-sounding rationale for such giving them such powers, but in the end these are always abused.

This comment [0] claims that under the Jay Treaty [1] you're essentially given a free pass at "the border". But according to Wikipedia and this article [2], at best this only applies to the Canadian border. If this claims are true, I'm surprised that the EFF & ACLU aren't educating everyone about this exemption.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11742399

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Treaty#American_Indian_rig...

[2] https://law.seattleu.edu/Documents/ailj/Fall%20Issue/Smith%2...

If your a Canadian citizen with %50+ native blood you can apply for a green card / citizenship at the border because of the jay treaty. That's a very small amount of people although. Canada is a lot more stringent about jay treaty rights in this case although than the US. It's actually harder!

I really doubt though all of these guy's details are correct, since it would mean all native born Canadians could just apply for US citizenship on the border, and I would think there would be some CBC article about it by now.

Also if you do stuff like 'put your house under a trust' or any other corporation, then you lose things like the 250k cap gains exemption on a house you directly own and live in when you sell it.

So definitely a YMMV. This feels like all of the 'you don't actually have to pay income tax' crap if you do this magical bureaucracy incantation you see on the internet.

> If your a Canadian citizen with %50+ native blood....

> since it would mean all native born Canadians could just apply for US citizenship on the border

These are not equivalent, and so it's clear why not all native born Canadians can apply for US citizenship at the border. In particular Native-Canadian is not the same as native-born Canadian. It's like the difference between Native Americans and native-born Americans (note the difference in capitalization, if that helps).

Apple needs to implement a way where you can set up 2 separate PINs. One for your regular stuff and another that logs you into a sort of dummy state, where things look real but really are not. Heck, I'd switch to Android if something like that existed.

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