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Comment by Baeocystin | Hacker News Reader

Come now. What would you say to an academic who didn't want to go to the whole of Europe, just because he saw some scary news about something that happened in Prague once?

The US is a huge, multifaceted place, and like anywhere so large, you will find things both awful and wonderful. But life is a lot less chaotic than the news agencies claim. And the histrionic folks, while loud, are a lot fewer in number than the amount of airtime their doings get would have you believe.

tl;dr- Come on over, the water's fine. You'll probably make some friends. Everybody wins.

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I second the line of thinking, but please rein in the TSA a bit. That's literally the only thing I'm scared about going to US. All the other things seem like a purely local phenomena that shouldn't be generalized to the whole 300M country. But I am scared I'll get into trouble on the border because of my HN and Facebook posts (e.g. against US drone strikes).

Very unlikely that they would care. Frankly, they don't have the resources to care about people (including myself) who protest and don't like drone strikes. The TSA is annoying but the worst part is just long lines.

As we know from history, and as was confirmed during the debacle over "naked scanners", TSA and such institutions will never, ever yield an inch. At best we can hope for a side step.

Yeah, there's no way I'm going to defend the TSA's methodologies. They a pain to deal with.

The good thing I'll say is that somewhere around 57 million people visited the US last year. 99.9%+ had no trouble other than long lines and the general frustration that comes with long distance travel. So your fears, while completely understandable, are also very, very unlikely to cause any actual trouble.

Ok, thanks for the numbers. That feels much better than what I was lead to believe happens at the borders all the time.

0.01% of 57 million people still means 5,700 people were harassed, largely unnecessarily.

That doesn't really do it for me. Isn't the level of government mistrust and "dissent in speach" you regularly encounter on HN, extremely high on HN compared to the average US visitor?

Like, at levels only seen in 1 out of every 100,000 visitors, making it quite likely you'll be one of the 0.1-% percent if you hold these extreme viewpoints?

The sort of stuff you see here wouldn't even wiggle the needle.

Those 0.1% mean absolutely nothing. There was a comment months ago right here in HN about a guy who owned a secure email provider who had his throwaway Android device confiscated, and who was interrogated for 8 hours on the topic of "give us access to your private email admin panel". He refused and was smart enough to not bring any way of unlocking his admin access with him (whitelisted IPs and/or physical keys which he left at home). He described the interrogators as very angry and that they "advised" him to immediately go back.

We get it, people who comment on sweet puppy Instagram posts aren't under threat. Sure. But the IT folk, especially people having access to sensitive information or white/black hats can definitely expect a plethora of insolent questions at the airport, asked in small creepy rooms somewhere at the back, from people who refuse to even identify themselves. Is that even legal?

Shall we also mention the looming danger of own laptops being banned on flights? Either use a Chromebook-like device (which, I have no doubt, will steal your private data, why else would they setup such a honeypot anyway) or GTFO, that's USA's policy.

I've made up my mind. I am not going to the USA for now. There's undoubtedly a huge pool of interesting people who can make some of my business dreams come true there but I am not sure being recorded in an unofficial "special target" list for life and having my devices every time I go confiscated is worth it. I'd say no.

(I exaggerate a bit of course, but to the average guy like myself losing even a $250 throwaway device is something that I will feel.)

> who owned a secure email provider

So he probably was on some kind of a radar. Are you? Then you concern is completely warranted. Are not? Then it's not.

It's a slippery slope kind of situation. Once they start doing it and see they can get away with it, then they start widening the circle.

I'm not advocating or defending them. Of course they should be called out on any case of abuse, and aggressively. With that, you also need to rationally evaluate if your personal probability is high enough to worry about it (especially to the point of not visiting a country just because of that), and for most people it just isn't.

The TSA and immigration officers at points of entry are nearly as bad as people make them out to be. It's a little like judging Chicago as a war zone based on stats from a very narrow geographic area with high violent crime rates: it isn't representative -- it's just that nobody ever gets "outraged" over the times they are treated well by customs/immigration/TSA. It's the same thing as tourists avoiding France because of terror incidents when in fact tens of millions safely visit France every year.

Criticism of TSA are certainly fair, but as someone that flies to the US from Europe monthly, the fears are definitely overblown.

Seriously, don't sweat it. The fears are overblown and not based on any actual data other than anecdotes from highly vocal bloggers/etc.

About 1 million visitors a day enter the US through airports in the US and about 360 are denied entry -- most of those because they had prior visa violations that deemed them inadmissible and others because they didn't have a valid visa. So 0.03% denied entry. In the U.K., that percentage is about 0.02%, just for comparison.

>The TSA and immigration officers at points of entry are nearly as bad as people make them out to be.

I think you're missing a 'not' in there somewhere. :)

> That's literally the only thing I'm scared about going to US

Don't be. TSA is stupid theater, they suck, but probability of anything happening to you is very low. Probability of anything beyond mild irritation happening to you - unless you one of high profile people that Powers That Be have a beef with - is vanishingly low.

Yes, it still happens - millions pass through TSA every day, and you'd have a number of cases where usual silliness rises to the level of dangerous idiocy, and these cases would be widely publicized and criticized, as they should be. But pure numbers game suggests your chances of becoming one of those is very small. If you take some basic precautions - like not standing out too much, being polite and not arguing with them, however stupid the proceedings look, etc. - even smaller.

In fact, on my latest travels, I personally have had much more irritating experience with London security that with TSA. On top of everything TSA does (which they did too), London people were severely understaffed for some reason, but if you think that made them move at anything faster than a glacial pace, you'd be so wrong. They were so Zen I'd be envious if I wasn't so concerned about missing my flight because they need to swab my books and slooowly bring it to some mysterious machine and slooowly come back and so on... But still it wasn't much more than mild annoyance summarily.

> But I am scared I'll get into trouble on the border because of my HN and Facebook posts (e.g. against US drone strikes).

Nobody cares. Really. They don't have resources to read every HN thread.

That is probably the reality over there. But the perception from Here is definitely different.

That's what every American says.

I didn't live here until I was a teen, and I spent my childhood in Southeast Asia.

I've also lived for years at a time in a half-dozen other countries around the world.

So far, there's no other country I would rather live in than the USA. YMMV, and I respect that.

But please also consider that I am speaking from relevant experience.

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