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When I was a kid in the 80s, I had a US flag on my wall. What happened to the US in the past fourty years? It became a country that I don't really want to visit anymore. Every civilized nation behaves differently, at least towards citizens of allied nations. We are no enemies. Ain't no reason to treat us non-US citizens like people without any rights. - I am deeply saddened to see the US come this way, and I have no hopes that this will change in the forseeable future.

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.

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My simple answer: we became afraid. 9/11 showed us we were not invincible. Technology to enable mass surveillance had quick answers for our collective fears. Stoking our fears is a profitable industry. Here we are today.

I can totally understand the need to protect your citizens, but I rather think that this kind of behaviour damages the reputation of the US deeply. In the long run, you might have gotten your hands on someone's data that would like to harm the US (but are these guys so stupid to put their malicious plans on a handheld device they use at border crossing?)

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?

CBP does not have good data sharing with the NSA, hence building their own silo of stolen data.

Short answer is because they can.

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.

Don’t know why you’re getting so many downvotes. This is pretty general but there’s a lot of truth to it.

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.

But Americans were controlled using fear even before 9/11.

It's another thing where people have such a different world view about this that I can't understand why they don't have concerns. I can only guess people comfortable with this don't live in a place where the border patrol doesn't bug them, or they don't cross the border much. Your whole life is basically accessible on your phone, giving a copy of it to the us govt isn't going to make america a better country. I haven't ever understood what happens if you don't unlock your devices and just give them to them. Will they return them? I'm certain they'll harass you next time you come to the border.

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

> Every civilized nation behaves differently, at least towards citizens of allied nations.

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...

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)

If it makes you feel any better, we don't treat citizens very well on the whole either.

I haven't had particularly bad experiences reentering the country, but they've been worse than the experiences I had entering other countries.

You know, when you try and compare the US to any country doing worse than the US at treating it's citizens...

... 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.

I will always judge my society for the bad things it institutionalizes.

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.

> I will always judge my society for the bad things it institutionalizes.

... 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.

Healthy systems exist in multiple-layered robust feedback systems. Short answer: we're the same people just as afraid as we've always been, but we've dismantled or disabled several different feedback systems. We kept mucking with a complex system until we broke it.

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.

The trend unfortunately dates back through history. The 1960s through 1990s were a high period of openness to foreigners and globalisation, across the political spectrum, though not universally embraced. In particular the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, lifting nation-of-origin quotas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Ac...) and the 1961 formation of the Peace Corps (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_Corps) saw a tremendous increase in non-European immigration and foreign students to the US, and of peaceful deployment of Americans to non-European nations. (Despite overlapping in part with the Vietnam War). Globalisation, beginning in large part with oil and the Middle East but extending to consumer, manufacturing, and service relationships, also played a major role. The "bad foreigners" existed, but were Communists, a relationship that shifted and softened beginning in the 1980s, with Islamic and generally Latin-American narcotics adversaries ascendant.

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.

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