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Comment by abandonliberty | Hacker News Reader

You're mostly right.

At some point these experiences may affect tourism, business, and desirable immigration.

But it's probably too distant of an effect to have that much political capital.

It's only distant in that it's near impossible to measure, so it's distant to the perception; otherwise, it's right here, right now.

If not long in the past; I for one decided around 2003 that visiting the US is too spooky a prospect for me. By boat maybe, so that if I get turned back I at least have a bit of a fun time traveling. But then again why not simply go to like a thousand other places where I pretty much know it'll be great and that I'll be treated with respect, with the added bonus of pumping money into an economy that does worthwhile things with it?

Agreed - I should have said 'distant externality'.

I have a trip to the USA coming up soon, I'm now worried that they'll seek passwords to my work devices.

Not as distant as you think. Travel organisations avoid even layovers in the US (in Europe at least) just like they would war zones and North Korea. And some (but definately not all) companies have a wiped devices policy for US bussiness trips.

When it comes to stuff like this the US is graded on a curve. The same incidents under Obama feel like friendly diplomacy might make it better. Now, maybe Europe and places like Canada should just return the favor. A bit like how travel visa's are often a reverse FU. Ever notice how many destinations dont charge tourists visum costs except when you are from the US or another country that would charge them as well?

> Now, maybe Europe and places like Canada should just return the favor. A bit like how travel visa's are often a reverse FU. Ever notice how many destinations dont charge tourists visum costs except when you are from the US or another country that would charge them as well?

I understand your point, but it's rather impractical and more importantly not very politically amenable for countries that benefit from US tourists/visitors and are less paranoid about security to reciprocate for the sake of reciprocating. This is how we end up in a downward diplomatic spiral. I'd much rather prefer (as someone who visits countries that reciprocate and those that don't) to have places like the Schengen Area hold what they see as a moral high ground.

How we'd get change then? I'd normally agree with you, but in this case that's the only thing which would work. At least it should be put on the table when negotiating visa programs with the US.

Yeah, who cares about business, tourism and desirable immigration? None of those things are worth much to the US economy I guess.

(Our family was seriously considering a touring camper holiday to the US in a year or two. Now: no way in hell.)

All those things are. The question is, how much do these things affect the above? This has been going on since W Bush on; the Obama and to the present, and as of yet, the impact would seem surmountable, i.e. negated by the majority of people who travel anyway and conduct business anyway.

Your life was not online as much that is changing. Facebook didn't even exist under Bush

True, but I suspect we will see other countries do the same, not as retaliation, but more because they'll want catch up to the US in terms of border security ...and it will become a normal thing except in third world counties too inept or poor or corrupt to care to implement this where the dissidents will be free from hassle, for a while.

The world is going through it isolationist phase so yes it is likely other countries will do the same. Though in the future I am seeing a possibility where governments ask for your social media handles and all that data is trawled using an ai which assess your risk profile according to the needs of the government asking the questions. Instead of all your private data getting into the hands of the government or outside third party it accessed and processed by an AI. Personally I would not mind such an AI scanning my profile data as long as the parameters of the questions are already set and the data is not seen by any humans.

This will have a broad chilling effect. You can't deviate from the norm anymore. I would be worried very much if my fate lies in the hands of an AI where there is neither transparency nor recourse.

There is already no recourse in the immigration system.

You dont have a recourse with immigration officers who can be a racist homophone or have any other hangups to reject your entry to a country. But if its AI it is more likely to look at what is relevant such as are you going to overstay or have nefarious reasons to enter. Nothing to do with your race sexual orientation or religion.

I had a Facebook account before Bush won his second election, in 2004.

Unless it causes a very noticeable drop in tourism - not on anecdotal level, but on the level of millions - about 70M tourists visit US yearly, so to make noticeable change, it probably should be like 10M at least - there will be no change. Note that there are literally millions of citizens who don't get a dime from tourists, don't care too much about tourists, but worry a lot about (real or imagined) threat of terrorism. They'd kick out any politician they perceive soft on border security faster than you can say "TSA".

The difference is that just about everyone in the US actually is positively affected by tourists (tax dollars) but not affected by terrorism (very low incidence of terrorism in the US). I'm not sure where the millions of Americans who don't get a dime from tourists exist.

The US is a sufficiently large enough domestic population that it self-generates and self-fulfills most of its tourism market. I was surprised myself when I looked up how lopsided it is. Similar can probably be said of China, EU, and perhaps Africa in a couple decades.

Overseas arrivals to the US is tracked in [1].

Domestic tourism represented 96.7% of the annual market in 2013. [2]

In the context of this thread's discussion of overseas visitors avoiding the US and its knock-on effects upon the US tourism industry, if overseas visitors 100% disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn't be a rounding error, but according to these statistics it's definitely not the political-economic club it's made out to be in these discussions. For better or worse, it is up to US citizens to vote in any changes in border control service delivery standards.

For what it's worth, many of the procedures I've heard people complain about have some basis in reasoning lurking in the background. International transits (where you land in a US airport but go onwards to a different country, never once stepping foot onto non-airport soil) requiring a security re-screening is explained in some places [3]. The cost to Americans getting People's Republic of China (PRC) visas traces back to diplomatic tit-for-tat, as PRC citizens visiting the US pay similar fees. Many security industry observers admire Israel's airport security, yet discussions like this thread neglect to mention Israeli border control also demands social network and email credentials, and the US is singled out for adopting an Israeli practice, when just scant few years ago the US agencies were excoriated for being too unenlightened to adopt Israeli practices [4].

Where I see room for improvement is service delivery, and education of citizens might help, while increased focus upon anchoring the mobility of capital to mobility of labor will definitely help. I've had my share of visa issues traveling into Canada as a US citizen, but the staff were unfailingly polite while still being hard-nosed, while I hear of other US citizens getting hassled at the Canadian border. I've had minor snafus in border crossings into Mexico and the PRC as well, and I was treated politely there, too. My attitude in all of these interactions was, "Ah, sorry I made your day harder just now, what can I learn about what I missed with regards to the policy so I don't make the same mistake again, what is the rough, overall process and timeline to fix it this time around, and what is the detailed next action item (who/where/what/how)?" This has never failed to elicit the officer politely, sometimes gladly, assisting me, so maybe this helps others. YMMV, of course.

[1] http://travel.trade.gov/research/monthly/arrivals/index.asp

[2] http://www.eturbonews.com/53328/research-domestic-tourism-si...

[3] https://www.quora.com/Airports-Why-do-you-have-to-go-through...

[4] https://www.quora.com/Is-it-justifiable-for-the-Ben-Gurion-a...

How is it distant? I have friends and colleagues who are already thinking about skipping going to he US on business trips for this reason.

On a slightly different note. Can this be used to send people home even if they are not bringing a device? I mean, wouldn't it be suspicious to not bring a computer or phone? And if border police are as arbitrary as people say, why not send people away for not having devices that could be unlocked. It would be suspicious couldn't it?

AI/ML conferences are talking about either avoiding the US, potentially with some livestream for people stuck in the US.

This year's schedule is probably set already, but 2018 may be different.

Completely off topic, but which conferences are that? Any recommendations? I'm looking to go into that field.

There's a lot of conferences that overlap.

The biggest ML conferences are ICML and NIPS. ICLR is a new one focused on deep learning that is also very good, but smaller. AAAI seems to be the big general AI conference, but I haven't really seen much talk about it. KDD seems semi-popular, but not a top-tier conference.

There are also application-specific conferences like ACL & EMNLP for language & CVPR for computer vision.

I'm not an academic, but I went to ICML last year since it was in NYC, and it was definitely worth it.

This wikipedia page has a list of some others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_science_confe...

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