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The hundred-mile border thing is a myth; it refers to a SCOTUS holding that limits searches with a nexus to a border crossing to within that distance, but does not allow CBP to search people who haven't transacted directly with the border in some way.

ACLU, which I otherwise support wholeheartedly, does us all a mild disservice by perpetuating the myth, which is very widely believed.

Really? What about the checkpoints that are set up within this zone stopping and questioning people without reasonable suspicion or knowledge that person crossed the border at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ea_VMY0UnA

The border search exemption applies only to people who have transacted directly with a border. Being 20 miles from a border gives CBP no special powers over ordinary citizens.

CBP routinely stops & questions all north-bound traffic on US 54 >20 miles north-east of El Paso. Am unsure of the distance, but they did request opening my rear hatch(SUV) to facilitate the dog sniffing my parts boxes and tools.

Am pretty sure the checkpoints on I-10 in western AZ are >100 miles N of the border, the Tohono O'odham* rez lies between I-10 & the border.

* The elders have also stated no wall will be built on their lands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tohono_O%27odham#Border_issues

You might have hit one of these:

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

Are there any cases of people suing the CBP for unlawful restraint? I remember seeing a video a while back where the guy wouldn't get out of the car, and they just broke the windows and took him out anyway.

No, it applies to people who the CBP agent reasonably suspect transacted directly with a border. Whether they actually transacted with a border or not is immaterial.

I live in San Diego and I can tell you that CBP most certainly does conduct searches on anyone passing through their secondary boarder checks. When I drive to LA I would say 1 in 5 times the secondary checkpoint is open in Oceanside and you have to slow down and at the very least get waived through. CBP has every right to stop and question you if they feel the need though.

You are wrong about them being limited to right at the border. There are many border patrol stops way north of the border, south of Tucson, all areas around Tucson. These are at the least dozens of miles from the border.

Even prior to 9/11[1], you didn't have any rights at the border. As stated in other comments, most of the bill of rights doesn't apply at national borders, even for US citizens.

But I totally agree with you. We had eight years of domestic spying, increased TSA nonsense (I no longer fly within the US. I wish more Americas would refuse to fly), predator drones, secret kill lists and the first president in history to spend every day of this tenure at war. I wish everyone who is out protesting now was protesting just as loud during the Obama years instead of falling into the false left/right divide: http://fightthefuture.org/articles/the-fallout-of-american-a...

[1] What's the difference between 9/11 and a cow. You can't milk a cow for 16 years.

There have been dozens if not hundreds of articles questioning the legality of searches at airports since 9/11.

They're not a new phenomenon that suddenly started under the Trump administration.

Correct. They have gotten worse though. And even if you believe nothing changed, it's terrible and we need to stop it.

Most Americans are not the sort with the knee-jerk "Think of the children!" reaction. The problem is that most sane Americans do not vote. Our political landscape is such a mess that Americans don't want to think about politics, and so their opinion is drowned out by fear-driven activism.

If I understand terrorism, I will not react to it irrationally. The rational reaction is, in fact, no reaction at all. The problem is that those who do react to terrorism react in fear. They push this agenda of security over liberty.

In order to overcome this idiotic agenda, those of us who are sane enough not to react, must actually take action. We must actually vote. We must actually talk politics, instead of going on with the things we find more immediately important, we must actually take political action. It has just been too damn hard to get that to happen, so here we are.

The history of aggressive border searches goes back a little further than 9/11.

Like to ~1800.

Wait until that guy finds out they used to get to turn you around and ship you back if they didn't like the way you looked

> The following happened to me, for instance, in an airport in 2006:

A guy carrying a weapon into an airport. An old woman with a back brace who has done nothing wrong. Yeah, it's almost exactly the same thing!

Why be obtuse? My point was obviously about suspension of 4A and Miranda rights.

If I'm not mistaken, the Supreme Court made a ruling that searching a person's belongings without probable cause is ok if that person is traveling. It was in 1973, way before 9/11.

There seems to be a lot of outrage about searching electronic devices lately, especially among the tech crowd, but legally there's no reason why a phone or laptop should be immune to search while suitcases and briefcases aren't.

I think it's finally becoming more common because the government is slow to adapt and they're only just now developing the tools to conduct these searches.

but legally there's no reason why a phone or laptop should be immune to search

If the pretext is border security, there is a small difference, the documents stored on an electronic device won't explode or start firing bullets or be used in a stabbing (the contents of a case might).

We should absolutely fix the lack of foundational privacy laws in the US though.

But the contents of a phone might be a recipe for homemade explosives or drugs, or a blueprint for a 3D printed gun, or the schedule for an attack.

You think it is a good use of resources to scan devices crossing the border for such easy to obtain information?

Really?

Of course the attack schedule is not easily obtained, but just asking such a dumb terrorist if they are a terrorist should be similarly effective.

> for such easy to obtain information?

Is it easy to obtain in the US without being tracked?

Yes. Leave all electronics at home. Go to another location, avoid cameras, etc. Use a fresh device left there by someone else. Get the information, destroy device. Never go to the same place again.

That doesn't sound easy to me, but then, perhaps I simply don't have the right experience.

If you believe this, why not dragnet everybody's devices all the time? Surely you'd generate more recipes for explosives and drugs, and be able to prevent all sorts of crimes.

For the same reason we don't frisk everyone all the time.

Privacy does matter, but long ago society decided to suspend those rights at the border.

If you want to revisit that, fine, but don't claim current policy is a change. Searching people at the border has been standard practice for a long time.

Can you be more specific about what "reason" you're referring to? It's not at all clear to me what it is from the logic you're employing upthread.

The second sentence mentioned the reason. Privacy does matter. It's in the Bill of Rights. And it should matter.

But like every right, it has exceptions. One exception we mostly agreed on, until recently, was being searched when crossing the border.

> ...legally there's no reason why a phone or laptop should be immune to search while suitcases and briefcases aren't.

Of course there is. My suitcase has my clothes, toiletries, and maybe a book to read when I get to my destination.

My electronic device has a list of everyone I correspond with, what we type to each other, all the websites I visit both at home and on the go (Firefox Sync), everywhere I've traveled with that device since I got it, every destination I've searched for since I got it, my home WiFi SSID and password, the SSID/password of any place I've been allowed to connect including work, access to every file in every cloud storage service I use, username/password to all the VPS and dedicated servers I manage for myself and for all my clients, remote access to my home network and my work network, and so on.

The scope of my suitcase is limited to what I'm wearing and what I'm reading on my trip. The scope of my mobile device is a huge chunk of my entire life. Do you get the difference now?

In 1973, your suitcase might have contained a list of all your contacts, love letters from your mistress, maps, business papers, a diary.

Were any of those ever forbidden from searches?

Are you seriously arguing that we should not expect any privacy at all just because where people store their information has evolved over the past half century?

In 1973 and in 2017 your suitcase could contain a gun. searching and backing up the contents of your cellphone has nothing to do with preventing a weapon coming on board. There is a legitimate reason to search luggage, there is absolutely no reason to know the intimate contents of someone's device at the border. At most, x-ray the device to ensure it's not a bomb, otherwise stay the fuck out of my personal business.

I'm arguing that we shouldn't expect more privacy simply because we've started storing our secrets electronically instead of on paper.

Even in 1973 people had private info they didn't want the government to see, yet the Court decided other concerns overrode the Fourth Amendment.

But by your own words, access to private info was granted back then only because of where we had to store it while traveling. We now store our information on encrypted supercomputers that fit in our pockets instead of in our luggage, open for all to see.

If you truly feel we don't deserve and shouldn't expect privacy, I hereby demand that you immediately post your entire medical history, SSN, full contact list, passwords for all of your social media accounts, full text of every email and sms conversation you've ever had, your full browser history (porn and all), and links to every file in your cloud storage services, all to this public thread for everyone to see. Go ahead, I'm waiting. You have nothing to hide, right?

You see, it's not about expecting more privacy, it's about expecting them to fully respect the privacy we already enjoy when sitting at home.

> it's about expecting them to fully respect the privacy we already enjoy when sitting at home.

That's the point. We don't, and that's not new. The courts decided long ago that we don't enjoy the same privacy when crossing borders that we enjoy when sitting at home.

Whether the information is written on paper or stored on encrypted supercomputers is, legally, irrelevant.

So you're saying the law should never, ever change despite that technology changes and improves? That what was good enough for the 1970s is good enough for today? Because that's a pound of bullshit that I find hard to swallow.

I still can't understand why you desire zero privacy at the border. Why would any citizen applaud the government for invading their privacy just to entertain security theater? The contents of my phone have zero bearing on whether I'm bringing a gun on a plane. You don't foil a terror plot at the TSA checkpoint by browsing someone's phone contents.

No, I'm not saying the law shouldn't change.

Advocate changing the law if you want but acknowledge that you're asking for a change in the law. Then consider the reasons the law exists in the first place and why they're no longer applicable, if you think that's the case.

And please don't misstate my position. I don't desire having zero privacy. I just recognize why searches are necessary.

> My electronic device has a list of everyone I correspond with, what we type to each other, all the websites I visit

Maybe that's a problem we should solve.

Maybe, but until it is solved, we can and should encrypt all our devices against any intruder, whether it's our own government or criminals.

> there's no reason why a phone or laptop should be immune to search while suitcases and briefcases aren't.

I can fit several lethal weapons inside a [suit,brief]case. The data on my phone is not a lethal weapon.

The entire purpose of searching luggage is to prevent someone from bringing a lethal weapon into a group of people who are physically incapable of leaving.

My cell phone's data contains literally zero threats to those around me.