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Comment by azeotropic | Hacker News Reader

It sounds most like a criminal investigation into a particular violent incident at the border and the investigators are trying to follow the money.

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This is incorrect. A criminal investigation would be legal.

A quote directly from the article sums up the counterpoint nicely:

“We are a criminal investigation agency, we’re not an intelligence agency,” the Homeland Security source told NBC 7 Investigates. “We can’t create dossiers on people and they’re creating dossiers. This is an abuse of the Border Search Authority.”

A quote from the official statement from the Customs and Border Patrol. It was also in the article.

"CBP told our colleagues at NBC News that the names in the database are all people who were present during violence that broke out at the border in November. The agency also said journalists are being tracked so that the agency can learn more about what started that violence."

That quote doesn't mean that the journalists have been convicted of crimes. It means they have dossiers/database tracking on them just for being there, reporting the violence, etc. Doing their jobs as reporters. If the agency wanted to find out what started the incidents in question, the agents should swiftly identify that journalists couldn't be the cause and dismiss them instead of keeping a database of them.

since when do we as a country track people over violence instead of say just oh doing an investigation of just asking wha5t happened? are we suddenly Communist China or Nazi Germany?

>are we suddenly Communist China or Nazi Germany?

Suddenly? No. This is the inevitable result of the normalization of authoritarianism, militarism and mass surveillance that began after 9/11.

I mean, we have a President who outright calls the press enemies of the people, and half the country agrees with him, and most of the rest just dismiss it as Trump being an angry crazy man. That's how far the Overton window has been pushed towards protofascism in the US.

How do you do investigations if you aren't allowed to question suspects and witnesses and keep records of them? I'm really perplexed by this stance.

This doesn't make much sense. They would just interview the journalists after the event, and maybe do some follow-up interviews with a few. They wouldn't tag their passports for increased screenings, interrogate them at every border crossing, etc. They're treating the journalists like they helped organize the violence.

To me it just seems like a way to harass and disrupt journalists trying to closely cover the story.

Don't forget the part about going through their devices.

The part where journalists insinuated their devices might have been searched but admitted it didn't look like anyone had touched them?

So the basis for tracking journalists and treating them with suspicion is that they were present during a newsworthy event (i.e. doing their jobs)?

If guilt by association could be attributed to on-duty journalists, practically all journalists would be in jail.

Messing with the press will always be construed as intimidation. Means to an end. And rightfully so. So as the government; just don't do it. Don't even think about it. The press doing their job is the turning point in the feedback loop that makes democracy work.

The first amendment protects the press, as well as the people's right "...to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

The whole "keep tabs on journalists to learn more about the violence that journalists didn't contribute too" is a strawman argument, and a fairly obvious boot-licking one at that.

If you are investigating or otherwise overseeing the border, would it not be useful to have a list of journalists who are actively gathering on-the-ground intel (for their jobs)? This is a weak attempt to make it look like the Obama era abuses a la Sheryl Attkinson.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/01/29/sharyl_at...

Databases of journalists have slightly different optics when the president has called for opening libel laws, encouraged violence against the press at his rallies, and has labeled journalists the "enemy of the people".

Reality is more far important than optics. Contextualizing it doesn't change the facts.

The reality is that a journalist for a publication critical of the president was murdered by a brutal dictator, and the president shrugged his shoulders. The facts are that Donald Trump has attacked individual journalists for writing pieces that are critical of him.

Further facts include that the president has lied about the migrant caravan in question as a way to win political support by claiming it contains middle eastern terrorist elements, and diseases like smallpox and leprosy which will be spread to Americans.

Now we learn that journalists covering the caravan are facing undue scrutiny by border agents and are being tracked and you want to simply dismiss the context?

Come now, the reality of the Khashoggi situation is that he was not a journalist at all but an an agent of Qatar and a client of the former head of Saudi intelligence, who sometimes phoned in opinion columns to the Washington Post dictated by his foreign paymasters.

So that you do not misunderstand, I'm not saying that any of this excuses Khashoggi's murder. I'm saying that it's disingenuous to suggest that those who ordered his killing were motivated be some sort of generalized antipathy to journalism.

> I'm saying that it's disingenuous to suggest that those who ordered his killing were motivated be some sort of generalized antipathy to journalism.

I'm not saying those who ordered his killing did so because he was a journalist, I'm saying Donald Trump shrugged his shoulders in part because Khashoggi wrote for the Washington Post. Donald Trump is known for holding grudges and for treating those he views as loyal differently. For instance, he suggests the federal government should de-fund disaster relief for California (didn't vote for him) wildfires while saying the government will give "A+" relief for an Alabama (did vote for him) tornado. He is a strictly transactional man. He's called out the Washington Post specifically and has looked into hurting Amazon as a way of punishing Bezos for owning the Post.

>I'm saying Donald Trump shrugged his shoulders in part because Khashoggi wrote for the Washington Post.

Or maybe he shrugged his shoulders because a foreign intelligence agent got killed by a foreign intelligence agency in a foreign country? Surely Trump, with U.S. and allied intelligence at his disposal, must have been made aware of Khashoggi's true nature.

Indeed, the German press was reporting that Khashoggi was an intelligence agent right away. It took the Post several weeks to finally admit as much, and still they've continued to spend millions of dollars (for example, on Super Bowl ads) to pretend Kashoggi was a real journalist.

Whatever you think of Trump, the Post deserves a great deal of contempt.

> Or maybe he shrugged his shoulders because a foreign intelligence agent got killed by a foreign intelligence agency in a foreign country?

For the longest time Trump refused to even consider that Saudi Arabia was responsible for the killing, so that's a stretch.

> Surely Trump, with U.S. and allied intelligence at his disposal, must have been made aware of Khashoggi's true nature.

Trump famously discounts the conclusions of our intelligence agencies and can't pay attention to the presidential daily briefing unless his name is included in big bold letters. I think it's a stretch to say that if our intelligence agencies know one thing then it's a given Trump knows it (and believes it) as well.

>For the longest time Trump refused to even consider that Saudi Arabia was responsible for the killing, so that's a stretch.

If your definition of 'refused to even consider' is raised the issue directly with the leader of Saudi Arabia, well then, sure.

> encouraged violence against the press at his rallies

Could you give a specific example of this?

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-incitement-vi...

^ videos of Trump encouraging violence

That had nothing to do with journalists and was specifically about protesters who attempted to disrupt a rally.

But they're not just tracking them so they can reach out and seek further details as part of an investigation. They're gathering information in excess of what they would need for that purpose and using the information they have to flag them for additional screenings, detain them, and in at least one mentioned case turn them away at the border.

That was the Mexican government that turned a person away at the border, not CBP. If CBP could make the Mexican government turn away arbitrary persons at the Mexican border, don't you think they might have started with caravans from Honduras?

An unnamed source?

Pray tell, what is the line between creating a dossier and conducting an investigation? When does a collection of evidence of a given suspects involvement (or non-involvement) become a dossier?

Although I don't believe it's relevant to this case, the unnamed source is wrong. The DHS absolutely is an intelligence agency. It even has an office (DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis) dedicated to synthesizing and disseminating the intelligence it collects. Intelligence collected by CBP is part of that mandate.

I don't think so. Pulling a journalist in once to ask for information would fit with that.

But flagging them so that all future border crossings result in automatic detainment for questioning can't be seen that way. I can only read that as surveillance and harassment.

Look at it from the perspective of an investigator who believes that there are Americans providing financial assistance to a caravan that turned violent, as well as the ordinary customs enforcement duty to ensure that large amounts of cash do not cross the border. If you don't know which Americans were involved, but suspect several who were present at a particular event, it may make perfect sense to question them every time you see them at the border, and search them (at the very least) for money. The fact that a lot of the intrusive questions that the reporter complained about were financial in nature (e.g. "Do you own or rent your home?" or "Who pays for your travel?") seem entirely consistent with this mission.

I agree that it is surveillance, but you seem to forget that that's one of the things law enforcement does in an investigation.

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