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Comment by kogepathic | Hacker News Reader

> Everyone proposing clever technical solutions. Burner phones and encrypted cloud data etc... you are solving the wrong problem.

Yes, and this is why I will happily pay airlines more to transfer in another country that is not America (e.g. Canada, Mexico). It sucks because it makes travel more expensive, but US airports are not traveler friendly (they could start by having international transfer zones so you don't have to do security again) and the TSA is a bloody nightmare.

I also avoid travel to the US. There are plenty of interesting travel destinations which are not America you can visit.

For Americans impacted by this, absolutely please write your representatives and ask they tone down this madness. For the rest of the world, if you can avoid traveling to the US, do so. Vote with your wallet and pick somewhere else.

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Canada also requires your password at the border. Recently one guy even faced 1 year in prison for refusing. At least in the US you don't face prison time. New Zealand asks as well.

Sources to back this up?

Just look at what happened to Alain Phillippon:

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/guilty-plea-ends-ca...

> Canada also requires your password at the border. Recently one guy even faced 1 year in prison for refusing.

That can't be true; at least, there must be a hell of a lot more to it.

Why would Canada want to pay provide prison space for a foreign national who's committed such mundane a crime as non-cooperation, and without ill-affect on any Canadian citizens?

If you're a foreigner, Canada will just detain you and deport you.

But a Canadian citizen they will arrest and charge with obstruction of their job.

Is job obstruction illegal in Canada?

It's specifically illegal to obstruct the work of customs officers, and it's what they were charging someone with who refused to give up his phone password. That guy ended up pleading out the day before his trial.

He was a Canadian.

>mundane a crime as non-cooperation, and without ill-affect on any Canadian citizens?

They already have laws that criminalise even possession of certain pornographics drawings or stories. Make no mistakes, Canada is not a free country and has no problem with imprisonment for victimless crime.

1 year was the maximum he could have been sentenced to. You're right, that the judge would probably picked a lesser sentence. In this case, he took a guilty plea deal for a $500 fine. In this case he wasn't a foreign national, but a Canadian citizen. I'm not sure if Canada will charge people who aren't citizens.

http://www.canada-usblog.com/2016/08/16/the-waiting-game-we-...

Not true about Canada. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13665021

And the Kiwi's might ask, but only to find out if you are violating quarantine regulations.

It's undecided about Canada. There is a law that could say it's punishable by a year in prison, but the law is from thirty years ago and hasn't been tried in this situation. The CBSA says that you can be arrested for failing to divulge a password though, and for now it is their opinion that matters.

If you read the link you will see that the CBSA policy is not to attempt to arrest people for this, due to the uncertainty.

https://bccla.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/CBSA-FOI-Docs.p...

Except they actually arrested a guy and were take him to trial before he plead out at the last minute. It's undecided in Canada but the current reality is that if you refuse, expect to be charged.

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/guilty-plea-ends-ca...

And if you read the link, that is from an almost two year old bulletin and begins with "until further instruction." I don't know what the exact FOI requests were, so all you can be certain of is "their policy under the Harper government was..."

It is a meaningless tautology to say the policy is only the policy until it is changed. If you can find further information, such as more recent FOI requests, that would be useful.

There is no reason to believe that CBSA under Trudeau would have dumber policies than under Harper, I fact the opposite.

That comment does not disprove mine. The guy did face up to 1 year in prison. He took a guilty plea instead of trying his luck in trial.

As for New Zealand:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...

Her name is Miss Torrent! ROTFL

It probably wouldn't have survived a charter challenge... But he accepted a $500 fine that saved years of legal battles, and the CBSA doesn't get a precedent set against them.

From what I've read, I'd suggest that the law is unclear at this point. It will probably be decided by the Supreme Court within a decade. But I find the ambiguity frustrating...

This is not exactly true.

* Canadian' border can ask you for your local passwords.

* You can refuse - at which point, if you are Canadian/PR, you are allowed to enter the country but your device is confiscated and sent to Ottawa for further examination.

* They can NOT ask for online passwords (like your dropbox account for example). THAT SAID, if you give them your local password, and you are logged in to Dropbox, it's fair game.

Furthermore, this has not been through the Supreme Court to set precedence.

Then why was Alain Philippon arrested and charged with a crime?

http://www.canada-usblog.com/2016/08/16/the-waiting-game-we-...

because he refused to hand over the local passwords for his devices.

I am not saying what the CBSA did was legal (as the case was dropped), but not handing over local passwords is considered "obstruction of the officer's job" by the CBSA (for which he was charged).

So I'm assuming that if they did want to charge you, they could.

But you said "You can refuse". His case proves that's not true.

And his case wasn't dropped. He plead guilty.

Back in the late 1990s, they did used to have transfer zones. I am not sure why they stopped. US airlines lose some non-trivial amount of money especially from Latin American travelers headed to Europe.

Without exit immigration, none of our airports are configured in a way that makes this workable today. There's nothing stopping someone in transit from just walking out the door.

Some airports are designed in a way to quickly facilitate this if the government ever changed its mind (IAH and LAX TBIT, I believe), but today none of our airports are set up for international sterile zones.

From the perspective of an American departing internationally, this is a bonus since you don't have to wait in line for exit formalities.

You are missing out on Hawaii and Alaska.

Can always visit NWT, or BC.

There is one flight from Latin America to east Asia. Aeromexico flies from Mexico City to Tokyo and Shanghai alternately with their 787s. (ANA is adding a NRT-MEX flight this winter also.)

But there are many, many connecting flights through DFW, Houston, LAX, and SFO. The direct flight costs upwards of $500 more, often a 60% or higher premium. That's the value of avoiding transit through the USA and the visa and CIS procedures involved. (Actually, the first $100 could be the usual price for a direct flight over a connection, but the same $500+ price increment seems to apply to connecting flights.)

Aeromexico is not known for its excellent seats, service, or food (though they're fine as airlines go). It's all about avoiding US officials.

> one flight from Latin America to east Asia

Are the countries on the continent of South America not generally considered a part of Latin America? Because there are other options from Santiago, Sao Paolo, Rio, etc. to Tokyo. Some of the options are on Air Canada, with a stop in Toronto which avoids U.S. airports but presumably not U.S. airspace so there may still be some additional scrutiny at departure.

You don't actually have to go all the way to a South American city, Panama City has Air Canada flights to Tokyo. It looks like the other carriers (Emirates, KLM, Turkish Airlines) have stops in a South American city first. The Air Canada flights aren't much more expensive but the European & Asian-based carriers are much more expensive than the flights with stops in the U.S.

Are the countries on the continent of South America not generally considered a part of Latin America?

Technically, every country in South America is considered a part of Latin America except British Guyana, Suriname, and France. Not including islands like the Malvinas or the ABC islands, of course.

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I should have specified one single flight. Of course you can fly to Dubai from São Paulo and then to Seoul or to Sydney from Santiago and then on to Peking.

But direct flights are very limited.

> France

French Guiana?

French Guiana is the departement (and region) of France that is on the South American continent. It is as much a part of France as e.g. Alaska is of the USA.

France can be divided into Metropolitan France (the main hexagon of France, along with Corsica), Départements d'outre-mer (including Martinique, Guyana, and others), and Collectivités d'outre-mer (such as Saint Martin). In terms of US geography, the rough equivalents are the continental US, Alaska and Hawaii, and unincorporated territories of the US (like Puerto Rico). If you don't understand the latter term, think of it as a fancy term for colony.

Well, sort of. Looking briefly at many maps of France (in French), the inclusion of the DOMs are relatively rare, in contrast to the inclusion of Alaska and Hawaii on most US maps. Corsica is about as prevalent as Alaska and Hawaii (probably more so), while Guyana and the other DOMs are about as prevalent as Puerto Rico.

I guess I find the phrasing really odd. It seems to imply that there is an independent country named France in Latin America. It would be similarly odd to hear someone refer to the country of the United States in the Caribbean.

I also don't know that excluding French Guiana from "Latin America" is actually correct anyway. French is a romance language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_America

The most prestigious university in Latin America is McGill University in Montreal.

Is this your way of saying that the term "Latin America" does not include French-speaking nations? Because the French apparently created the term and it included French Guiana.

In case anyone is confused, the Malvinas are correctly referred to as the Falkland Islands.

As others mentioned, this is plain wrong. I live in Uruguay and the best routes to Asia are from Santiago de Chile with LATAM, no need to go to the U.S.

If you mean direct flights to Tokyo, yes there are no Santiago to Tokyo flights.

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