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The point of the pay is to illustrate how far removed the person the author is being a douche to is from the people who make the policies. People in low level jobs like that are generally just trying to get through the day.

If it is not a legal requirement that they detain entrants who do not answer questions entrants are not required to answer, then someone who does so anyway does not get to use the "just doing my job" defense.

Asserting that "The CBP goons want U.S. citizens to answer their questions as a ritualistic bow to their power" is douchebaggery in it's highest form

Except this is precisely what distinguishes them from CBP non-goons.

This is yet another reason why the pay is important. Low level jobs are process-oriented. They are designed to be carried out by average people. They are trained on what to do in various situations, of which this is probably one. I don't know about legal requirements, but I'd bet anything their training doesn't tell them to just say "have a nice day" when someone refuses to answer simple questions.

The customs agents this guy dealt with were just doing what they were trained to do. That's all they can be expected to do, all they should do. It's unreasonable to treat them as goons for simply doing their job. They're real people, most of them probably decent ones (because really, most people are decent people) who have families to feed, mortgages to pay, cars to buy, etc. Assuming that they are not makes the author a douchebag (and one who reads way too much Orwell).

There is not a distinction between goons and non-goons that can be made. He'd probably get similar results at any airport he went to because they all go through the same training program.

I don't think you can read too much Orwell, nor, in nonfiction, too much Solzhenitsyn or Milton Mayer.

Any Orwell other than Animal Farm is too much Orwell.

Orwell's fundamental problem was that he didn't understand how organizations function, and how the whole differs from the sum of its parts. He saw only the trees and not the forest. He understood what motivated individuals well, and just extrapolated that out, which led to erroneous thinking.

Aldous Huxley was quite the opposite, which is why his vision of government and society has in many ways materialized but his vision of the individual has not. There was a great post here a couple weeks back about the two that illustrated it.

I don't know about legal requirements, but I'd bet anything their training doesn't tell them to just say "have a nice day" when someone refuses to answer simple questions.

Then it should. He is under no legal obligation to answer their questions. If I were to try something similar, I'd be much more polite about it, but, rude or not, he was perfectly within his rights to refuse to answer.

Now, if other factors were enough to actually raise reasonable suspicion that he had done something wrong (such as smuggling some contraband into the country), then the proper response is to move him on to further screening.

It's unreasonable to treat them as goons for simply doing their job.

Ah, yes, the tried-and-true "just doing their job" argument. I don't buy it. People are responsible for their conduct while performing their job. Their employer may set policy, but in the end the person implementing that policy that must accept shared responsibility for that policy.

They're real people, most of them probably decent ones (because really, most people are decent people)

Wait, wait, wait. Now, I'm going on just the words of the author here, but:

"The officer changed tack to bad cop. 'Let this guy sit until he cools down,' the officer loudly said to a colleague. 'It could be two, three, four hours. He’s gonna sit there until he cools down.'"

How does that describe the actions of a decent person? I don't care if the author was rude to the customs official. Declaring in a power-trip manner that you're going to make someone wait for 2-4 hours just because you can... how is that decent?

I do think the guy was a bit of a douche in how he handled the situation: "none of your business" is probably one of the rudest ways he could refuse to answer. Something more like, "I'm sorry, but I'm not legally required to answer your questions and would prefer not to," seems like it would have garnered a better response, both from the customs officials, and from the hordes of commenters calling him a douche. If he had done that, and still was subjected to the same mistreatment, I'd feel a lot more sympathetic. But still, he did nothing legally wrong, and exercised his rights as a US citizen, and was detained and hassled for it. That's wrong.

So, just curious; where's the dividing line between "poor government schlub just doing his job" and "Nazi prison guard who knew he was doing evil", assuming you'd agree the Nazi guard is culpable on some level?

Fact is, government employees can choose to work elsewhere. But as a citizen I'm stuck with my government. That's why you won't see much sympathy for law enforcement in these situations.

You're not stuck with your government, you could move elsewhere, probably about as easily as a border patrol employee could find another job.

I don't know where the line is, but it's pretty clear that the customs agent is on the other side if it from the Nazi guard. It's certainly somewhere in between those two.

> I certainly don't know or care if those questions are mandated by Congress. (I don't find it hard to believe that they were though, or at least mandated by a group set up by Congress for that purpose.) It doesn't really matter.

> What I'm sure of is that they weren't mandated by the any of the people who questioned our author, especially if there are check boxes for them in some software. They probably weren't mandated by anyone who had ever met any of the author's victims, or even heard of them. And the people who mandated them will most likely never even hear of this guy or the handful of nutjobs like him.

They probably weren't mandated by anyone at all, or at least, no one with the rightful author authority to mandate answering such questions. Thus, it's valuable to the rest of us that some exceptional people will assert their right not to answer.