Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

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From the article (emphasis mine):

> This may upset Customs and Border Patrol agents, who are probably smart enough to realize that 85% of Americans now have smart phones, and probably 100% of the Americans who travel internationally have smart phones. They may choose to detain you anyway, and force you to give them passwords to various accounts manually. But there’s no easy way for them to know which services you use and which services you don’t use, or whether you have multiple accounts.

You can be damn sure the government has a list of possible email addresses associated to individuals. That'd be be the first thing any modern SIGINT program would compose so as to link accounts. Assuming they have that (which again I'm assuming they do) it's trivially easy for them to go from "John Q. Citizen / SSN: 123-45-6789 / Podunk, USA" to a set of emails to cross reference against service providers.

Add five minutes in a dark room with piece of hose and... well you know the rest.

>You can be damn sure the government has a list of possible email addresses associated to individuals.

things the government knows, and things that a CBP agent knows, are not the same thing. They NSA doesn't just provide their database to all the hundreds of thousands of front-line law enforcement agents. If you're being specifically targeted for some reason, enforcement agencies might be provided with a history of your social media activity, but it's unlikely that they can just pull it up when they type in your drivers license number.

Actually, you're wrong. Just recently Obama opened up data sharing between the NSA, FBI, CIA and hundreds of other agencies.

Source: https://www.engadget.com/2017/01/12/obama-expands-the-nsas-a...

When you say parent is wrong, you're saying that the 100k border patrol grunts can access NSA data easily, which is not the case. So you are the wrong one.

This doesn't give other agencies the ability to just grab any NSA data. It just means the NSA doesn't have to filter data before passing it on.

Could you imagine if it were that easy to get info on any citizen? What's to stop a spy/traitor from becoming a border patrol guard, downloading all the info and selling it?

That doesn't at all address whether that specific bit of information is exposed. I bet it's not, it's ripe for abuse and could be a PR problem.

Obama made it easier for them to legally share data, that doesn't mean they opened the firehose the next day.

You can always claim that you don't know the password because you use an offline password manager that you don't have with you. Also, use 2 factor authentication of course.

One can refuse whatever way they want, but he/she can be detained and the device forfeited. And for non-citizens, they can be denied entry to US.

It is so easy for the 'bad guys' to carry a burner phone with fake google, Facebook, twitter, etc, accounts and log into them when requested. That way they don't have to refuse anything and there is nothing suspicious. This policy harms law abiding citizens and travelers but is completely ineffective when it comes to stopping criminals.

The majority of "criminals" CBP deals with each day are people coming in on the wrong visa. Saying tourist but having no plans to leave, or planning to work, for example. This system will be very effective there: Turn on phone, see text "baby can't wait for you, we're finally gonna be living together", question why their boyfriend is writing them that and why they didn't mention it, deny entry.

I don't think anyone really believes it'll catch a ton of "good to have you here, the bomb is ready"- or "whew so nervous carrying these 50 pounds of contraband!"-bad guys.

Also I'd slightly question the ease of creating burner accounts. Facebook will show your sign up date, and something too recent will be suspicious. Other things like "why don't you have pictures of your FB friends on your phone" and on and on could be clues to a fake account. Not saying it's really hard, but it's not something you'll whip together a week before your trip.

We have ~40 million foreign arrivals each year:

http://travel.trade.gov/view/m-2016-I-001/table1.asp

And apparently ~500,000 Visa overstays.

How many of the 40 million should we put off traveling here to catch a fraction of the 500,000? What ratio of turned away violators to hassled travelers is "very effective"?

Just like most other "national security" procedures.

> You can be damn sure the government has a list of possible email addresses

Hell, I've already gotten more email from the current administration than I ever got from Obama, Clinton & Sanders combined, and I'm a confirmed lefty.

... really? Can you expand on that? In my country, the government is not in the habit of sending out emails, largely so that they can tell people to disregard any email that claims to be from the government, as it's usually a scammer.

The United States government owns the .gov gtld so it's pretty easy to identify their emails.

Right, but what do they send you?

Here are the subject lines, with brief description.

Supreme Court News [Getting ready to nominate]

Supreme Court Update [Gorsuch chosen]

A Vote for America's Future [from VP Pence about his DeVos vote]

Major Economic Update [jobs bragging]

President Trump's Weekly Address [solicitin FB & Twitter follows, petition signing, watch his speech]

Not sure how I feel about that. It sounds fucked up, like propaganda, but it can be interpreted positively as well. They're keeping in touch with the electorate and keeping them informed. Dunno.

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