Hacker News Reader

Comment by strictnein | Hacker News Reader

> The ACLU has become much more active in trying to protect the rights of travelers during the Trump era

> in 2016, “the number of people asked to hand over their cell phones and passwords by Customs and Border Protection agents increased almost threefold over the year before.”

I mean, it's great and all that the ACLU is working on this, but the repeated attempts to tie this all to Trump is becoming kind of maddening. Pretty soon all this stuff will start being referred to as "Trump-era security measures" in the press and most will forget who actually started most of it (the last two presidents).

View on HN

While Obama is no saint there has been a very strong ramp-up this year alone.

What used to be miserable is now terrifying for some.

A strong ramp-up takes time to plan and implement. Especially in a large organization such as the TSA or U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Unless the ramp-up isn't actually planned or policy oriented. It could very well be simply related to feelings among agents that they're allowed to do more.

I will grant that ramp down takes immense work, considering the head of CBP hired by Obama last year to reform the organization resigned after the Border Patrol Union went after him.

Give me a break. It doesn't require a Manhattan Project to ask more people to unlock their phones. The spin you're putting on this thing is stealing angular momentum from the whole goddamn galaxy.

This could be (and likely was) as simple as a phone call from the powers that be, demanding that "you do this NOW or else". You do know that such things do happen in hierarchies, don't you?

It's not like the TSA has publicly visible and strict guidelines they are held to. All it takes is the word to spread through the DMZ.

Not true. The muslim ban for example, was uncoordinated and unclear at first - with lots of TSA confusion.

An indicator that planning took backseat to "decisiveness".

Unfortunately the "upping" part of the ramp is only an illusion.

There is only one ramp, and this ramp has been going upwards since the Patriot Act of 2001. And it will keep going up, no matter who is in office.

I disagree with the "whoever is in office part". I believe there are several contenders for the 2020 election that would ramp down.

It was supposed toramp down under Obama. It didn't. The man was a fraud. Who in 2020 won't be the new boss, same as the old boss?

That's what people said when Obama was first running.

If we have to rely on the next guy, then don't you think this reveals a fundamental flaw in our system?

Imagine if you're designing a system, and you notice that a hacker has exploited some issue and is causing damage, do you really tell people complaining about the exploit as "Not all our customers are going to exploit this issue, the next guy who accesses our system would definitely not use this exploit.

You don't see an architectural problem here?

America is a democratic nation, this is a choice not an exploit. It's a feature not a bug.

America is not a democratic nation (that's like saying all bugs were written by the programmer so all bugs are features). Democracy was tried in Greece and even Romans didn't use it.

The sheer fact that we have a constitution to limit the powers of the democratically elected govt means that we applied a patch on democracy from beginning itself.

If relying on the goodness of the govt were a feature, then we wouldn't need a constitution (which technically isn't even a patch but rather a unit test supplied with the system, which in itself can be modified).

A republic is basically democracy with a few extra steps added: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy

Yeah you're not getting the point here. I am trying to show you problem with your thinking about the system, and you think as if I don't know enough to make an ignorant point when it doesn't even look like you read my comment fully.

Until we disregard the DNC/RNC and their theatre democracy (they admitted in court they have control of rigging the primaries), eliminate billion dollar campaigns, there will never be an honest candidate without strings attached.

So you're saying that if Hillary Clinton was elected she would have instituted a Muslim ban?

Would she have repealed the "Patriot" act? That was the point of GPs comment, that the Patriot act was the reason for a trend that has been consistently increasing since 2001 and the war on terror.

Ah yes, again with the "democrats are no different than republicans" trope. The exact kind of wrongheaded and ignorant belief from the left that delivered Trump into the executive branch in the first place.

Yes, Obama was not perfect on civil liberties, but there has absolutely been an uptick in these kind of instances since Trump took over. Obama had no Muslim ban. And in general, Trump has given more delegated authority to CBP/DHS and other departments.

Maybe try to put things into perspective? We will never get 100% "pure" politicians and if the left keep staying home or voting for people like Jill Stein, then Republicans will continue to dominate.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-border-patrol-wa...

http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2017/02/21/dhs-removes-obamas...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/25/us/ice-immigrant-deportat...

https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/17_0220...

My favorite are the people who shilled for Jill stein all campaign, saying democrats are no different than republicans - then blamed democrats for republicans stripping the ahca, saying they should have stopped them. Rania Khalek is a prime example of this type of non ironic hot take.

I don't actually mind targeted cellphone checking at borders, but mindlessly ramping it up is a very bad sign.

Not being a jerk, but why do you not mind? I don't break any laws and I mind enormously.

I assume there are probably a 1,000 people that cross the US border a year where there is a very compelling case to check a phone. The same argument does not work for 10,000,000 people. So, I assume when you ramp up the people your adding have a much lower threshold than the old group.

Further there is a long history of random inspections as people cross borders without a warrants meaning it's simply doing the same things with different means. Basically, border security is one of the core functions of government and the expectation of privacy is minimal.

Or put another way, if you are going to open 1,000 laptops a year then I assume that getting a warrant would not be difficult. If you want to open 100,000,000 laptops a year then your not acting on any kind of evidence just going fishing. But, that kind of fishing tends to be ineffective and expensive both directly and by discouraging people from visiting the US.

PS: The same argument exists in other areas. Having 100 H-Bombs on ICBMs is a very powerful threat. Having 10,000 H-Bombs on ICBMs is just more expense without really changing the threat. You increase the risk of bad things happening, spend ~100x the money and gain what exactly?

Yes! If they do not know what you are looking for, they shouldnt be looking.

Maybe you don't mind about this specific invasion of privacy, but you should be extremely mindful of setting a precedent for future laws. When does it end? What will they be forcing you to do in the next couple of years? What will our children have to endure?

At borders is a huge limitation. The government can pat you down at a border as a normal procedure, it's like entering a prison. Historically, flying was something of an exception because it started as something rich people did and governments tend to treat them very differently.

Consider what happened to people that showed up at Ellis island. Some people would be forced to strip, take a shower, and undergo medical examinations. Remember, this was published as perfectly reasonable things that confirm to social norms. Further 1-2% of people where deported often due to physical deformities. https://books.google.com/books?id=OyL6JatN5KwC&pg=PA129&lpg=...

PS: I don't mean we should go back to a system like this, just crossing borders is very meaningfully different than sitting at home or driving down the street.

Traveling internationally isn't uncommon and is becoming more commonplace with advances in air travel. I'd rather not be subjected to an invasion of privacy while on vacation.

I think that's a common sentiment. Sadly the argument is often in terms of would you subject others (terrorists, drug dealers, etc) to this treatment.

> At borders is a huge limitation.

In the United States, border zones are any areas up to 100 miles inland from a land border or coast. The majority of US population and cities are in border zones and the border rules apply to them:

https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone

Like most parts of the law the details are very complex. So, in fact there is a huge difference from being within 100 miles of a border and having just crossed one at an airport.

Or to quote your link: Border Patrol, nevertheless, cannot pull anyone over without "reasonable suspicion" of an immigration violation or crime (reasonable suspicion is more than just a "hunch").

Grounds to search someone for contraband isn't grounds to read their correspondence. US citizens didn't re-enter the country through Ellis Island.

Sure, but as I said details matter.

Suppose police kill 1 person per month across the US. That's would not be a huge red flag for me, but if police killed 10,000 people per month across the US that's grounds for a revolution. The ground between A and B can be vast, so saying X happens on it's own is less important than the context.

All I am saying is that a 3x annual increase in X can be a bad sign even if the old and new rates are justified because the trend on it's own is concerning.

That argument is very different from the one I responded to.

I think the worrisome thing here is that there isn't any restriction or regulation around what people should be looking for at the airport on someone's phone slash what are the markers for why they should be scrutinized. Even with regulation, this kind of power gets abused. Just look at cops in the US. Even though there are rules around when a cop is allowed to search someone's vehicle, cops often find ways around it to do so and get away with it, because it's often a cop's word against a regular citizen's word (and to get anything changed, it's often a long, drawn out and expensive legal battle.)

Maybe at this point we can't really blame presidents at all.

Perhaps presidents are mainly there to make speeches and slightly tweek a few policy decisions important to constituents, but government itself is pretty large and goes right on between administrations. (Which isn't always a bad thing either).

Perhaps. But stuff has gotten pretty nutty recently...

My working model is that the President is there to be America's punching bag. Lots of Americans have things wrong with their life or feel they aren't getting their due; rather than fix this (which is hard, and often requires leaps of faith & commitment where you can't be sure of the outcome), they look for someone to blame. Who better to blame than the guy who is nominally in charge of it all?

The actual "government", in the sense of who determines how life actually goes on in America, is distributed across a web of key employees in major corporations and governments of all levels. These are not necessarily the CEO (who is often the shareholder's & employee's punching bag); rather, it's the anonymous guy who has been there his whole life, has a huge network of connections within the company, has developed a large degree of expertise in the business, and holds the trust of both the nominal decision-makers and the line-workers who do the work.

Witness how we've had 18 government shutdowns since 1976 [1], and life generally goes on during them. (Interestingly, most of them were during the Carter/Reagan years, lest people think government has gotten more dysfunctional recently.) Also observe how the President usually gets blamed or credited for the condition of the economy, which he really has very little control over. People want a figurehead that they can point fingers at; it's usually not the guy who actually holds the reins.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_shutdown_in_the_Uni...

Though I agree with your points for the most part, let's not forget that the president does have real power to directly affect policy in this country, as well as shape key parts of government, as we are all being constantly reminded of lately.

But let's also step back and recognize that "the president" has always been at least the president himself and his adminstration. Of course the network expands from there and the key employees that you mention in important companies include individuals capable of weilding considerable 'asymmetric' power.

Lately, I can't help but think of Cigarette Smoking Man.

You might enjoy this piece which takes your point much further: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/08/sarah-p...

Just as with children, who started it isn't particularly relevant. What is most important is that the person running things now is responsible for it.

Last year, Obama was responsible for it. This year, right on through to the end of his presidency, Trump is responsible for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com