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Comment by _8j7i | Hacker News Reader

"...he clammed up, taking the Fifth, and citing constitutional rights against unwarranted searches.
...border agents told him he had no constitutional nor any legal protections, and threatened him with criminal charges should he not concede to the search.

...he was eventually allowed to leave with his belongings, the devices still locked, and no charges were pressed."

My goodness! I guess those protections did exit after all! :)

Guidelines:

-Goons can lie to you all they want. Never budge.

-Politely refuse, and remain cordial. Stay strong mentally.

-Make sure your devices are turned off prior to even leaving for the airport.

This is the sick reality we live in.

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Border agents may lie about your rights? Is there no Miranda equivalent for this type of detainment?

There is not.

Customs and Border Patrol operate under a special set of circumstances within ports of entry. You do not have the right to have an attorney present during the interrogation, you can have your personal belongings confiscated, you can be held without charge for up to four hours for any "reasonable" suspicion.

These same rules apply within one hundred miles of the United States border. So if you live near the any ocean, Great Lakes, the Mexican border or Canadian border, you live under a different set of rights than the rest of America.

You forgot "any international airport" on your list of ports of entry used to determine the 100-mile constitution-free zone.

> [100-mile] border zone is home to 65.3 percent of the entire U.S. population, and around 75 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population

this ACLU article shows exactly this https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone

Or an international airport. Sorry Denver!

> So if you live near the any ocean, Great Lakes, the Mexican border or Canadian border, you live under a different set of rights than the rest of America.

Interesting. You'd think that "real America" was just a turn of phrase - turns out that it isn't, that there is a Real America and that it does care far more about protecting individual rights.

> there is a Real America and that it does care far more about protecting individual rights

No, there isn't. Civil rights get trampled regularly outside the 100 mile Constitution-free zone too, just under different pretexts.

The border agents are in fact correct. The Supreme court has ruled that US citizens have no constitutional protections against search and seizure or basically anything else on the border of the US: https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone

Also police are allowed to lie about anything they want during interrogations.

I feel like there's a difference between "lying about the facts of an investigation, including what they know or don't know, during questioning" and "misrepresenting the rights of the accused."

The latter feels like a serious problem that should get rectified.

He was detained, not arrested. Miranda was unnecessary in this case.

> Make sure your devices are turned off prior to even leaving for the airport.

Security may ask you to turn them back on, not to search them, but to verify that they are actual working devices, and not a bomb.

Very good point. The key here is to make sure your devices are all fully encrypted. Feel free to turn them on to prove they are real.

But never decrypt. If this results in you missing your flight, so be it.

> But never decrypt. If this results in you missing your flight, so be it.

Why? Is that more important to stay locked than miss granma's funeral, or more positively, 75th birthday?

That’s what makes this all the more malicious. No one wants to miss a flight, and sometimes the consequences are irreparable. Time is the one resource you can’t recover.

Ultimately it is up to each individual to make this call. As for myself, this is a principle I hold above all else.

That's certainly a problem. My grandfather was a man who was tasked with killing spies, knew three languages, and out of all of this, I cannot even get him to talk about privacy or security. It appears even he was taught just to shut down on it and say nothing; even on your practices. All the while he taught child soldiers to become child assassin's for the US military.

If you're a security person, I suspect his recommendation would be - even though he doesn't understand IT and tech - to say you don't even understand how SSH works or can't tell the difference between encryption and hashing.

Turning them on doesn't reduce the security. The issue is unlocking them.

As far as the security of the data on the device is concerned, a powered-off device is equivalent to a powered-on device that hasn't been unlocked since it was powered on.

Pro tip: on newer iPhones with either Face ID or Touch ID, holding the sleep/wake button and the volume down button for some time puts the device in a mode where Touch/Face ID are disabled, the phone is locked, and the device passcode is required to unlock.

Touch/Face ID are also disabled when you boot the phone, so turning it off is sufficient.

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