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Comment by Buge | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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-...

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.

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...

Sources to back this up?

Just look at what happened to Alain Phillippon:

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

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