US Border Patrol says they can create central repository of traveler emails
viewfromthewing.com
viewfromthewing.com
How many petabytes of mirroring before the whole operation becomes too expensive to justify?
I get the joke, but an Internet trained bit of code, like GPT-3, isn't what you want writing text files all over your drive.
You'd probably end up on 43 watch lists, and thrown in jail for having time travel child porn, featuring Katie Sagel and Trump in the 60s.
One of them knew their apartment was going to be raided by the FBI so they left a suitcase full of encrypted cassette tapes in there for the FBI to salivate over.
After finally decrypting the first one, I believe it was just static noise :)
Yes, I earned the downvotes, have at it.
Anyway this made me want to read Cryptonomicon for the 5th time and gift it to some younguns.
That sound fishy, was there any metadata to confirm it has been decrypted? That's the thing with encryption, it's just math, it won't "fail" anything if you got the wrong key, you'll just get random data back.
For example, PGP, PKZip, OpenSSL, and age all do this with encrypted files. I'm not sure I can think of a user-oriented encryption application that doesn't. Disk encryption also definitely does (although in TrueCrypt volumes the header is encrypted and not recognizable as such, so TrueCrypt is an exception, probably deliberately).
Crypto primitives in programming languages don't, and NaCl crypto secretboxes don't (they just start with the nonce!), so I guess if you were calling the NaCl secretbox encryptor by hand to encrypt your files, they wouldn't have any header.
Be sure to put he proper headers on the data so it self identifies as an encrypted file.
I really like the idea of a hacked hard drive or phone which generates a never-ending series of files containing terabytes of random data. I bet any given boarder crossing will only have the ability to scan two devices at a time, so bring a couple and you can probably shut down everything as they scramble to figure out what to do when their local storage fills up.
I realise that this is not the exact argument that i was originally making, but technical people are unlikely to rethink technical solutions without them understanding the technical barriers that limit a "solution's" effectiveness.
Most hard drives (and presumably SSDs) contain embedded microcontrollers to handle translation between the various protocol levels (USB, SATA, etc) and the raw data on the platters/FLASH cells, often running i/o drivers on top of some microcontroller-specific RTOS.
So ... surely the ideal technique would be to write a driver for the RTOS that generates a stream of data on the fly that looks like an ExFAT filesystem full of directories and email folder hierarchies containing Lorem Ipsum text? That way, it keeps feeding an unending supply of junk back to the imaging hardware (which probably isn't anything as high level/simple as "plug into a PC, mount it, and copy everything"). Yet if they open up the case and look inside, they'll see a genuine hard drive with genuine platters.
If I had to do this, I would indeed make a faked Nimbus 100TB SSD drive, but it would also be super slow and glitchy. Spit out the proper meta data, then slow random noise presented as glitchy virtual sectors. Done deal. They've surely imaged glitchy drives before. They aren't rare.
How many drives can they image at a time, and how long does it take? How many drives can they not image because yours is taking so long? That's what I would attack.
I'm wondering if it's not gonna be another 'good' reason to keep anyone they want to mess with for days. Oh sorry we can't read m2 disks we have to call the guy from the place that has the only converter. We'll keep you warm in the mean time. You didn't have a flight connection or a lawyer you wanted to call, right?
Based on prior stories I've read - trolling pissed off people with any form of Authority could end up very very badly for anyone doing this.
Aside from them just out and out confiscating any electronic device they like, they could detain you for a long period of time, they could put you on no-Fly lists (and then good luck ever flying into/within the US again), they could put you on extended screening lists (and so, every time you fly then on - again, kiss goodbye every electronic device you posess every time you travel, again). If you're a foreign national, or even if you look vaguely foreign, you might find yourself deported/denied entry/locked up for a while during the deportation process.
That's before they even get motivated enough to be malicious - I'm sure if they wanted, they could gin up enough of a case of "obstruction" or "wasting police time" if they can find any evidence (or even anything that looks like it could be hint of intention, like posting on HN), which even if it never goes to trial can still make your life a living hell, cost you your job, and a huge amount of money defending.
Or maybe they're just people who want to protect the country they live in? You can't just view everyone who disagrees with you politically as a drooling idiot.
That being said, you are of course correct.
1. Try to educate and reform the lawmakers. 2. Create a situation to bring out the absurd.
2 is often easier than 1 for the common man and has been used in many past revolutions.
Civil disobedience requires breaking the law. With that comes the possibility of being legally prosecuted. Civil disobedience requires accepting that. And in fact, a large part of the effectiveness of civil disobedience comes from the fact that people accept the risk of arrest.
(Note: this doesn't mean you should go on record with such a defense without an attorney present, just saying why it shouldn't legally be regarded as malicious without a lot of other evidence.)
For example, if I put a zip bomb on all my emails regardless of the border security but just as a general security measure, would that make me culpable if it wasn't targeted?
All hypothetical of course, because there's other hurdles to that as well like being flagged as spam in every day use.
Depends very much on what is being cut, in what context, and why. Cutting chicken fillets in a kitchen to cook dinner? No. Cutting a human on the street whilst screaming 'die you bitch' probably yes.
Its not about the tool, its about how you use it.
And if you have the zip bomb on the USB drive with the intention to damage a law enforcement system, things change.
Just like you are allowed to have a gun, but you can't walk into a random place carrying a gun.
I'm sure that the diligent border patrol protecting us would find it eventually.
In theory, you'd be fighting the system.
In practicality, you'd probably end up in some black site, disappeared.
I recommend against doing stuff like this.
'never'? Rising costs is a common factor in numerous cancelled projects, at least in the UK defence market that I'm familiar with.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/15/key-takeawa...
They wouldn’t lose voters with ‘extreme’ ideals because, if they decided to not vote, parties would counteract by moving towards the new center, which would be further removed from the ideals of those voters abstaining from voting.
Motivating people with ‘extreme’ opinions from one side of the spectrum to vote moves the center, so it can make both parties move in that direction.
Let’s (in a very simplistic model) say we have 100 voters on a 1 to 100 scale, so centered around 50.5.
If, normally, the extremes of 1 to 10 and 91 to 100 don’t vote, the center stays at 50.5. Convince the 1 to 10 people to vote, and the center moves to 45.5, so the two major parties move in that direction, too.
There’s an assumption here that most politicians are willing to, somewhat, go against their beliefs in order to get elected. I think that’s true, and unavoidable in a two-party system (which, in turn, is hard to avoid in a system with “winner takes all” elections), but if it weren’t, parties can easily replace candidates that object to a course change with others that either have different ideals or are willing to sacrifice some of that a bit in exchange for their career.
This is the opposite of what we’re seeing on the right. Centrist republicans have been pushed out of the party for not being conservative enough over the last 4 years, and primary candidates go out of their way to outdo each other in terms of conservative positioning.
Nobody seriously running on the right is trying to be a moderate Republican on the federal level because being a “RINO” is political suicide.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/15/key-takeawa....
This theory requires either ignoring that voters may have a threshold at which they become disaffected or ignoring that political opinion may not be unimodal; if you consider both of those factors, that strategy ceases to be dominant.
In the real world, voters can become disaffected and abstain, and political opinion is often not unimodal (in the US it's closer to bimodal.)
Who controlled the executive at the time of the Snowden revelations? Remind me.
Perhaps you mean one is more open about their common policy goals than the other? That may be true, but it's cold comfort.
You are making my point for me.
Can CBP make you unlock your own phone?
What is on the device in their hands, on US soil, is subject to their stupidities, whatever those stupidities may be on the day their grubby hands get hold of your phone.
What is located remotely, in a privacy conscious jurisdiction, say Switzerland, is outside of their remit. I know US courts like to think they have power over the world, but they don't. US courts and US law power stops at US borders.
The trick is to make sure nothing gets cached on your local device (including authentication credentials, obviously). A bit like the old Thin Client computing really.
If you want to go one step further, don't travel with working credentials. Rely on someone outside of US jurisdiction to provide you the last piece of the jigsaw in a secure manner once you are in a safe location.
Also, if you're a non-american traveler, all the constitutional rights you're afforded as an American don't apply. So they can pretty much ask whatever and refuse you access for any reason.
It's like the US is becoming more and more like China. But it's a worlwide trend, really, with old men screaming "We're gonna be in the dark !" ... It's thoroughly depressing.
Edit: As written down in the comments, the part about foreigners' rights is wrong. See comment for correction.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/22/14066082/us-customs-bord...
False
https://www.maniatislawoffice.com/blog/2018/08/do-non-citize...
They had to stop at the border, and take the next flight back home?
(But what would happen, if one didn't disclose one's social media accounts and other things, when leaving the US)
The real problem is that they now require social media handles on the visa application.
The usual reason given is searches for large sums of cash.
No, it's not true in theory, either.
No, it doesn't.
US “law power” extends as far as the enforcers of that power are able and motivated to extend their reach, which very often extends far outside of US borders.
OTOH, there's places and contexts where that reach tends to encompass more casually and with less case-specific motivation.
It used to be that Switzerland had iron-tight bank secrecy regulations that the US (and the rest of the world) really couldn't breach. Yet over the years the US has managed to force massive changes on Switzerland's financial institutions, and for decades now there's been much more transparency, and Switzerland's banks are not nearly as secret nor as effective at hiding assets as they used to be.
Apart from getting other countries to change their financial regulations to be more in line with what the US wants, the US has also been very successful in doing the same in regards to issues like drug enforcement, human trafficking, child molestation, and many other issues.
So, depending on your threat model and what data you're trying to keep private, I wouldn't count on any jurisdiction ultimately being and remaining safe for your data.
Something else to consider is that once your data is out of your hands, it's easy for whoever has it to make a copy to archive and work on at their leisure. Even if they don't share, sell, compromise, or trade away that data today, that doesn't mean they won't do so at some time in the future when laws, technical capabilities, or incentives change.
Switzerland agreed to FATCA, which only applies to people subject to US taxes and allows those people to refuse to have their information shared with the IRS, in which case the IRS has to specifically request it.
The "massive changes" you mention essentially consist of banks asking you if you're a US person and then, for the big banks, making you fill out a bunch of paperwork and for the small banks, refusing to open an account for you. If you're not subject to US taxes, there's no effect on you whatsoever.
I think the _much_ more interesting thing, which is unrelated to the US (as it's not a party to the agreement) is the AEOI [0].
Anyhow, Switzerland is still very much a sovereign nation and the fact that it has agreed to give limited financial information to the US, with consent of the account holder, does not change that.
A fun bit of proof: copyright infringement, one of the US's pet peeves, is still very much alive in Switzerland. It's your legal right to make as many copies of something as you want and give them to your friends and family [1].
And ultimately, the US' power over Switzerland is quite limited due to the referendum system. Any change they'd like the government to make has to have the consent of the people. The Swiss are quite protective of their privacy so I don't see the US having any success weakening that.
[0]: https://www.efd.admin.ch/efd/en/home/themen/wirtschaft--waeh...
[1]: https://www.admin.ch/opc/en/classified-compilation/19920251/...
Also, for stock accounts, you'd be required to fill out a form in German/Italian/French regarding Swiss taxation.
I agree that you can't count on jurisdiction alone for your data remaining safe. Neither will a technical solution like encryption. The latter might keep your data safe, but not you and your loved ones if there are not some legal limits what people wanting to access it can do.
Eh not really unless you're a US citizen, which is a US problem not a Swiss problem. When I arrived, several years ago, and was opening an account I was asked multiple times If I was (or ever was) a US citizen and had to sign (again multiple times) that I wasn't a US citizen. Many small and even cantonal banks will outright refuse to open accounts for US citizens.
Further, being involved in any violation of or conspiracy to violate American law is a crime, even if you never actually step foot in the US. Companies can be sued in US courts for actions they took overseas. None of this is particular to American law, the same is true in any advanced legal system. American law just has particular significance because of American economic preeminence. Some of the most vexing legal issues, both theoretical and practical, surround this cross-border application of law. And I guarantee you wouldn’t like the result if countries took a strictly physical, territorial approach to their legal authority.
It very case/situation specific. The host country might block extradition for various reasons, but often, the US has global reach.
This also means US companies can ignore GDPR.
The EU would say otherwise but fortunately they don’t get to police the world anymore than any other foreign country.
Policies are decided in the interest of plutocrats. Very occasionally when it would generate good PR or if disenfranchisement gets too bad, some retroactive number fudging will be used to whip up a press release or report on the number of calls or letters to a congressional office, as if to make it seem like a policy was affected by democratic consideration of constituents, but that is purely theatrics and publicity and has no bearing on or connection to the way congressional offices pursue legislation.
There are of course other tools, but they require a bit more dedication: regular donations to think tanks and lobbyists who agree with you and can spend time schmoozing/convincing congressmen, regular donations to legal foundations who challenge overreach in court, and of course voting when the time comes.
cyn·i·cal
/ˈsinək(ə)l/
1. believing that people are motivated by self-interest; distrustful of human sincerity or integrity.
"her cynical attitude"
2.concerned only with one's own interests and typically disregarding accepted or appropriate standards in order to achieve them.
"a cynical manipulation of public opinion"
No, the Border Patrol interpretation of the “reasonable distance from the external boundary rule” is that it extends to at least 100 miles from any land border or any part of the US coastline (whether or not it is or is in proximity to an international border.)
The Fourteenth Amendment doesn't just lose force for everyone living in one of the coastal cities.
No, it applies to where the Border Patrol asserts authority to conduct warrantless stops and searches of any person/vehicle/etc. for potential immigration or violations.
(There's also a similar 25-mile zone where they assert authority to do so on private property other than physically entering houses.)
They also claim similar authority to the 100-mile limit in cities with international airports, if they happen to be outside of the 100 mile zone.
> The Fourteenth Amendment doesn't just lose force for everyone living in one of the coastal cities.
The Fourteenth Amendment limits the power of state governments, it's the Fourth Amendment that is at issue here. But the legal theory is that warrantless searches in these circumstances, are reasonable and thus compliant with the Fourth Amendment.
You need to either wipe the phone or have stegnograpic volumes.
It's a sad state of affairs.
They can force you to unlock/provide password to your devices if they have probable cause that there is evidence of a crime on the disk. Typically this is because someone looked over a shoulder and saw child porn on the screen. I'm not aware of anyone being forced to provide passwords or keys in any other circumstance, but I'm not an expert.
Encrypt your data, keep your devices off. Do this even if you have "nothing to hide".
[1] https://apps.nsa.gov/iaarchive/library/ia-guidance/security-...
What I would recommend is to keep as much information off your phone as possible. Save emails on your personal computer, and delete them from your phone before traveling. Log out from online accounts like web-based email accounts before traveling. Don't have sensitive files on your phone; encrypt them and download them from a server somewhere that you control.
Finally, as "sumanthvepa" recommended, "keep all interactions with (Border Patrol Agents) on a cordial basis and cooperate immediately and completely when ordered."
Reasonable: use Apple's free device management app and lock out sync to any other / unknown hosts, along with a few other settings.
Note that 1Password for iOS has a travel mode for this situation as well.
More realistic is to just wipe your phone and reset it to factory settings using a throwaway google account. They probably won't ask for it but that way it looks unremarkable and you don't have to waste your time arguing with them.
I wouldn't even bring a computer across the border anymore, at least not for a vacation. I always use full disk encryption and I am not interested in giving the CBP (which I'm sure has great IT security) copies of all my confidential work documents to just leave sitting around for the next 20 to 75 years waiting to get exfiltrated by who knows what hacker group will get to it first.
Refusing to travel to the United States would prevent this from happening.
Now - if they can make you restore in their presence, that would be a big problem.
Contact your representatives in government and tell them to make legislation banning this practice. Donate to the ACLU.
There really isn't much difference conceptually between the two systems.
Not sure crossing the US border in either direction or being within 100 miles of it (the 'extended border area') is particularly 'limited'?
Just because some other places are worse
A) Doesn't mean some are better in this regard.
B) Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make it better here.
As you deviate from that list, the list of "rights" rapidly peters out.
Just because others are worse, doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make it better.
Could that apply here?
1 https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191124/09372943445/penns...
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-4/b...
https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone
I also suspect they did not anticipate it being both feasible and normal to have one’s entire private writings on one’s person at all times like modern phones permit.
What sucks is that I know this is probably being stored on AWS. Tech companies enable this kind of shit, and even push sale of larger and larger systems to governments. And they are massively rewarded for doing so.
This isn't the government... this is a sales guy at AWS pushing them to store things for 75 years... he knows he gets a helluva commission check on that deal.
Gross oversimplification, but not really. We, as technologists, have to take responsibility here.
If you think there is a risk, and you take a device, obviously FDE is a requirement, although, that could be seen as "suspicious".
The easiest thing to do is to fill up TB's of HDD's with useless information. Random pictures, documents, perhaps thousands of people's contact information downloaded from a public source. Store any "important" documents as random file names, perhaps inside archives or volumes that need decrypting. Or not at all, instead "in the cloud" but still encrypted so that you can travel without worrying about somebody accessing your information. Make deliberate "suspicious" file names, make them believe a file is encrypted (a 50GB file named "totally not a hidden volume.hiddenvolume") and maybe they will waste time trying to open the volume only to realize it contains thousands of pictures of naked molerats.
Clearly you need to be smart about crossing borders with electronic information these days, and not having any with you seems to be the best course of action.
I think people seriously misunderstand the range that the Border Patrol has--its far more than the US and Canadian borders. Portland Oregon, for example, is within their grasps due to the coast + 100 miles being considered part of the border.
So, you could be never leave the country and be caught up in their web quite easily. I wouldn't be surprised if 70% of the population of the US lived within their range.
Which is the coastline, for the most part; international law considers countries to control land, and lakes, bays (some) and harbors, but not the seas and oceans.
However, the encryption would not protect you against this problem. They may ask for the password to decrypt the volume and deny you entry to the country if you refuse to provide it.
That sounds monumentally complicated and not easy at all. I understand that a tiny percentage of highly engaged techies can manage what you are talking about, but 99% of people cannot.
I wonder if you have your house burned down and you want your digital pictures back, can you ask them to give you a copy of their backups? That's the only thing that storing this data for this period of time is useful for, but I guess they won't hand it over.
Not to mention that given their track record regarding things like facial recognition software, individual unmonitored CBP agents will probably be able to just you know, steal all the private information taken on people they're stalking.
The police have already been caught abusing these databases when they were minimal, increasing the amount of available stored is idiotic until we solve the problem of oversight and security.
The best strategy is to simply comply with all relevant US law and orders issued by officials at the border. And one should understand that at the border, a foreigner such as me will have very limited protections. In practice there are really no protections at all. People like me essentially rely on the goodwill of the US officials at the border.
For the most part they are polite and business-like. Its best to keep all interactions with them on a cordial basis and cooperate immediately and completely when ordered.
The best strategy is not to travel to the US at all, if you can avoid it.
It's not even about not handing over data that they could have if they really wanted it. It's about sending a message that this behavior isn't OK and that foreigners are human beings too.
The US doesn't care about your privacy, but it does care about its economy and so voting with your wallet is still the most power you have. Continuing to degrade yourself at the border at their whims condones their abuses, however implicitly.
If they don't extend that into data located on devices you're carrying across the border, it isn't because they don't reserve the right, but merely because they lack the means or interest.
You're correct, however this does not mean they all treat you like you should be the most thankful person of Earth for them letting you in and not harassing you endlessly.
The U.S. even requires you to hand over social media passwords in some cases and a lot of personal information before you even get on the plane.
The outright contempt for foreigners is not as common elsewhere.
P.S. And of course, you have borders like between EU countries where you barely even notice you crossed a country border, (as an EU citizen).
I haven’t seen anything where the U.S. requires gratitude. Is that a new policy, or just your opinion?
Once I even had the guard - who before me had been dealing with a plane full of Chinese tourists - give me a knowing smile and a "I can tell you know what you're doing" kinda comment as he more or less waived me through. I guess being a white male native-english speaker helps a lot in those scenarios.
P.S. Global entry helps a lot in these scenarios and is (still? was?) available to non-US citizens
Subpeonas etc. can be challenged by US companies/individuals in the court when they are within the country. Innocent until proven guilty is the way of life within a country. During border crossing, system has been changed to assume guilty until proven innocent (for better or worse).
You are correct that if you are in such a situation (border agent asking for data), it's better to comply amicably. I personally would consider cloud backing data and cleaning up local drive before entering US as my best strategy. Carrying unsurmountable amount of data (10 TB+) is also another strategy.
That's pretty scary.
If you’re a citizen, I don’t know if they can seize property, but if they can, you won’t be able to cross the border with it.
In and outside the US, non US citizens serve as a proving ground, for tech that US Gov will eventually deploy against it's own citizens.
US Gov does this because it can, because news orgs are more interested in sportball, because both parties have successfully set citizens at each other throats for decades and because the public keeps gorging on whatever fear-filled plate of nonsense is put in front of us.
Ten years from now, an entirely new regime of surveillance abuses will be added to those already deployed against us. More than any other reason, this will happen because we endlessly reelect the people who are ultimately responsible.
We could do better.
outside of illegal porn, what exactly constitutes digital contraband? is this defined anywhere? any well known example cases?
Surely if you're traveling with illegally obtained classified information, that's seen as contraband.
This would be like commenting on censorship/non-free speech laws that you’d solve it for yourself by using Tor or some other anonymizing method. That would not solve the problem of a society which will lack free speech, and if a society did not have free speech, you would have problems, even if you’d manage to somehow get free speech for yourself.
So anything in the cloud (e.g. webmail) is off limits unless you download to your phone.
Legally they are only allowed to inspect what you are bringing into the country, so stuff in the cloud is out-of-scope.
It’s an open question about whether they can compel you to decrypt anything or get you to unlock. They could always seize to inspect later though.
It could probably be implemented as a one-click service on some devices.
Would they really process the data just because? It seems like a severe amount of data to process and evaluate. How much compute power is set aside for this and how much online storage is used? Do they use a cloud service for this?
It'd be interesting to hear from somebody in the know about what is they real can do and what is heresy.
I'm not in the know, but I know that all the email content I've ever written is trivial to fit on a $50 hard drive, and with that I can search through 20 years in under 20 seconds.
It's not a question of "could they do it" but "would they do it", your answer to that question depends on social and political issues, not technology. It's why I prefer technical solutions like encryption to political problems like privacy.
You could have a key and a passcode that relies on 10 steps (such as using a web service) that is reliable for you to know but not easy to "explain" how to obtain (and, as a bonus, easy enough to build in a dead man's switch, if I don't visit script.php within 24 hours the key is gone and even I can't decrypt now).
The border patrol isn't really known for it's humanitarian works.
What happens if there’s porn?
(Sorry, it's off topic but I couldn't resist)
"Stenographically encode your important documents into your porn" is what I'm reading here.
Edit: Look at how non-US citizens exchange ideas for how to avoid handing over all their personal data at border-crossing. What a shame.
9/11 ushered in an era where the US government took pretty extraordinary steps to protect national security by undermining the rights of citizens (see operation “Stellar Wind”.) It was so aggressive that FBI director Comey did not want to reauthorize it due to constitutional concerns.
Fear indeed is a powerful and profitable emotion to traffic in, it drives so much of our current media and political landscape.
A prominent political pundit that shall remain nameless said relatively recently that what is true doesn’t matter as much as what feels true. And that mentality dominates our political discourse.
Actually after the Snowden revelations: aren't the three letter agencies able to access our data without us knowing it anyways? If we are on their radar, they can get whatever info they want from us anyway. That's my understanding. So why harrass the normal person crossing the border?
Since the border has become such a focal point of our political conscious, the culture of some of these agencies is really being brought to light. Just look at the private Facebook groups of current and former CBP agents comparing migrants to animals and whatnot.
When the culture of an agency gets toxic, you start to see enablement of this kind of behavior.
Like a lot of things that come down to "this doesn't affect them", this is yet another issue where I'm surprised that there are people who support this. The border patrol is under the control of the president, who can make changes. They could change this policy. Obama didn't change it, and Trump doesn't seem likely to care, because 'it won't apply to him'. But why not? The 100 mile border plus other exemptions is incre
You're definitely free to think that...
Five Eyes and the customer lists for companies like Cellebrite definitely tell a different story.
Americans seem to make more noise about it for sure, there are more people willing to loudly oppose these kinds of things
UK: https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/15/4524208/uk-border-police-...
Australia: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/25/sydney-airport...
Canada: http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/6/8162337/iphone-unlock-borde...
And there's others, Israel, German's BND literally handing over most of Europe's internet traffic to the NSA...
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The same reason you as a non-American had that flag on your wall, is why you hear so much about the US. I'm an immigrant to this country and have lived in plenty of other places
Over the years people's opinions of the US in other countries have gone from overly positive compared to reality, to overly negative compared to reality, mostly because of the amount of scrutiny the country gets (and how much the media here thrives on turmoil, no one is quicker to insult America than Americans)
I haven't had particularly bad experiences reentering the country, but they've been worse than the experiences I had entering other countries.
... you usually instead get called out for not comparing the US to some homogeneous Scandinavian country that would fit inside California.
Neither is a realistic comparison, in general governments will quickly default to not treating individuals well because of the dehumanizing tendencies of bureaucracy and power dynamics, and the effect is only amplified "few party system" most countries end up with.
The US struggles, but does make excellent progress, in escaping that trap.
I'm an immigrant to this country, my pride doesn't rest on "USA #1!!!!!!!"-style nationalism...
But the US treats it's citizens great on the global scale of the term, that's why they're so quick to make noise when certain groups are excluded from that fair treatment.
The fact Americans are so comfortable and so quick to self-denigrating is just a further reflection of that.
There's no reason for entry to be hostile. It's quite hostile, even coming from Canada. The US would be fine if we had the same entry standards as Canada and an open border...
We could also rather politely control immigration by having a solid system for verifying employment eligibility and fining the pants off of employers that violate it. There's literally no reason to run around policing the individuals working without authorization.
... like my comment says Americans do and doesn't oppose?
>There's no reason for entry to be hostile. It's quite hostile, even coming from Canada. The US would be fine if we had the same entry standards as Canada and an open border...
Does my comment say something against this?
-
Did you reply to the wrong comment? Or did you think that me saying "Be pragmatic in viewing a country on a global scale instead of just having this self-serving need to constantly insult yourselves" was saying "America did nothing wrong!"
Problems should be solved inwards, not by treating human rights like a pissing contest.
Instead of immediately going "We could do what country X does, look at their outcomes!!!!", realize country X is not your country, and realize, you don't need country X's actions to frame what's wrong with your own country's problems.
The problem with immigration isn't "We're not doing what Canada is doing", the problem with immigration is you're not treating human being like human beings.
It's much easier to justify solutions to the latter than the former because moment you turn this into "look at your sibling do this right!!" you shift the focus from the real problem, mistreating people, to a fake "problem", "other countries are doing better than us", to which it's easy to say "so many others are doing worse".
Other country's actions and outcomes should be a catalyst to examine application in your own country at most, not some kind of goalpost like Americans love to treat them.
This news is a horrible thing, and I'm outraged. It needs to be fixed. Right now. Having said that, it's good to have a little bit of historical context. Every governmental structure we've set up, from the military to a national police force, has pushed the limits to see how far they can go.
You think you'd set up these agencies with clear missions and they would stay inside the coloring book and mind their knitting, but that's not how it actually plays out. Instead, egotistical, ambitious people get in charge and want to do something even more impressive than the last guy. That means pushing things. IIRC, one of the first uses of a telephone tap was made by law enforcement. The intelligence community got so far out of whack that by the 70s it took a major reform to try to un-screw them. A lot of that work we dismantled after 9-11.
Here's another way of saying the same thing: it used to be that when extreme things happened the people we elect and the government we've created took drastic, emergency and probably extra-constitutional action to react. You can go back as far as Jefferson (or before) and the Louisiana Purchase and see people we put in charge kind of making it up as they went along.
This actually worked well because if there was a mistake? Well, we were doing it the wrong way to begin with. Elect new people, clean up the agency, say a bunch of apologies and write checks, and don't do that again --- at least in the same way.
Now, however, we want to create systems of things. Whereas it used to be that if they thought there was a bomb on a plane they might forceably unload it and strip-search everybody there, now we just hired tens of thousands of people and treat everybody that flies like a potential terrorist. Problem solved. No more worrying about those one-of incidents. No more people getting fired, agencies looking bad, or any of those huge cleanups.
After the 93 World Trade Center bombings, the United States Secret Service wanted to put anti-aircraft missiles on the White House. They were laughed out of the room. Who knows, they might have put some up anyway and nobody ever found out. After 9-11 that changed. Now it's a system. They wanted to shut down Pa Avenue, also laughed out of the room. They got it. They regularly ruin cell service, and are monitoring all calls in the area. Now they're bulk-buying privacy data and asking for even more permissions. These aren't "Hey, we're worried that something might happen, so let's try this for a while even if it's wrong" These are "We want permission to do this from this point on out and you leave us the hell alone" I don't mean to pick on them. Everybody's getting in on the action.
I could continue the rant, but as you see, this isn't a case of people changing or agencies changing in the last 20 years or so. This is a case of continuing to tinker with a system over 230+ years until you broke it. I wish it were just as easy as blaming the Border Patrol. It is not.
Richard J. Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", is a 1963 essay that "explores the influence of a particular 'style' of conspiracy theory and "movements of suspicious discontent" throughout American history." It's not specifically concerned with anti-foreign sentiment, but includes that.
https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_American...
But the xenophobic pattern is clear in the history of American Immigration law. Forced Mexican Repatriation (1932), The National Origins Formula (1924), California Alien Land Law of 1913, Anarchist Exclusion Act (1901), Chinese Exclusion Act (1882).
The Page Act (1875) barring "immigrants considered 'undesirable,' defining this as a person from East Asia who was coming to the United States to be a forced laborer, any East Asian woman who would engage in prostitution, and all people considered to be convicts in their own country."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_laws_concerning_imm...
Samuel Finley Breese Morse, creator of the eponymous Morse Code, wrote an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic screed, Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, initially anonymously though his name was later associated with the piece.
Surely American Protestants, freemen, have discernment enough to discover beneath them the cloven foot of this subtle foreign heresy. They will see that Popery is now, what it has ever been, a system of the darkest political intrigue and despotism, cloaking itself to avoid attack under the sacred name of religion. They will be deeply impressed with the truth, that Popery is a political as well as a religious system; that in this respect it differs totally from all other sects, from all other forms of religion in the country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Morse#Anti-Catholic
https://archive.org/details/foreignconspiracy00mors
That itself is only one of a long line of examples of anti-immigrant, nationalistic, or racist sentiments expressed by business and industry leaders, including notably Henry Ford and Thomas Watson (IBM), both anti-semites and Nazi collaborators.
https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...
https://allthatsinteresting.com/henry-ford-nazi
https://www.algemeiner.com/2012/04/12/ibms-role-in-the-holoc...
Mark Twain's On the Damned Human Race includes numerous essays highlighting abominable treatment of and policy toward foreigners (and others), notably during the Spanish American war, mostly dating from 1890-1910.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/mark-twain-on-the-damned-huma...
Ellsworth and Harris, The American Right Wing (1960) is a fascinating look at reactionary politics, much of it xenophobic and racist, largely of the 1940s and 1950s, with more than a few names familiar today.
https://archive.org/details/AmericanRightWingEllsworthHarris...
True history is far darker than the highlight reels.
If I have a laptop encrypted with luks or whatever, then what? What are the consequences of non-compliance?
Even if you could grant access, businesses may very rightly feel the content shouldn’t be accessed by US border agents and if it’s stored by border agents, it means now some US government server could fall under the juris diction of GDPR or something (eg my work phone or laptop had a photo with sensitive customer data or something).
On top of that, it’s increasingly mandatory to use your personal phone for business data, eg PagerDuty, Slack, company email, company social media tools. So while it may be your personal device, you may still run into crazy conflicting issues of whether you are allowed to unlock it.
How are you going to comply with “delete my account” requests when some business data is on US government servers for 75 years?
US agencies have deeply poor and incompetent information security, so how long before this is subject to a data breach, or a rogue employee exfiltrating and selling it? Will people be able to sue the US government for substantial per-person damages when that happens?
The conflicting and incompatible privacy issues of this are bananas. What an arrogant and deeply stupid thing to do by the border agency.