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Comment by fulafel | Hacker News Reader

Argh, you couldn't invent this kafkaesque stuff:

"When he went through secondary inspection at Vancouver airport, US Customs officers didn’t even need to ask for his passwords — they were saved in their own system."

"They said, ‘Next time you come through, don’t have a cleared phone,’ and that was it. I wasn’t let through. "

I know that US/Canada privacy laws might not give people protection in this situations, but what about universal human rights? UN Declaration of Human Rights and other binding international agreements recognize the right to privacy.

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And, of course, the United States is based on the concept of natural rights. Hence the Bill of Rights saying, "Congress shall may no law".

Americans 4th Amendment right wasn't created by the 4th Amendment, but merely acknowledged by it. All human beings have an inherent right to privacy -- to suggest otherwise as a US citizen is self-contradictory.

The problem is no human beings except US citizens have the inherent right to enter US. So you can easily refuse to surrender your privacy - and they can as easily to deny you entry to the US. Unless, of course, you are a citizen - then they'd make it suck as much as they legally and semi-legally can but eventually they'd have to let you in.

The fact that they saved his passwords is pretty ugly. They're free to demand them 100% of the time, so it raises questions of whether they're saving them for some other purpose.

And more simply, it means you have to trust border patrol's password management as well as your own. (Or change them all immediately.)

Also makes the border control's system a pretty attractive target for hackers.

Exactly. I think a database of identities tied to accounts with passwords would be at least as tempting as the OPM records (though to different people), which is reason enough that it shouldn't exist.

Since when does the US give a damn thing about the UN declaration?

They signed it.

Signatory, Ratified, Implemented. These and other words making up the jargon of diplomacy mean very different things.

For example:

UNCLOS - "Although the United States helped shape the Convention and its subsequent revisions, and though it signed the 1994 Agreement on Implementation, it has not signed the Convention as it objected to Part XI of the Convention." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_the_United_...

UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: "The United States government played an active role in the drafting of the Convention and signed it on 16 February 1995, but has not ratified it" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_th...

Basel Convention: "Haiti and the United States have signed the Convention but not ratified it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_Convention

Thank you for pointing these things out.

Additionally, the US wages illegal wars all the time - against the UN charta where only aggression for self defence or with a UN mandate is allowed.

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