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Comment by NoImmatureAdHom | Hacker News Reader

I get the sense the implication is that the U.S. doesn't have strong protections. That's wrong. Many governments in allegedly civilized Western countries have security services with much more power than in the U.S., permission to seize and search your phone being pone of them (the U.K. and Australia are especially bad). The U.S. actually has unusually strong protections against the police in this regard and in others.

You also might consider that usually these protections don't apply to you if you're a foreigner who's trying to get in to a country not your own. They have no obligation to let you in and they can ask anything they want in exchange for access.

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The US also has unusually large differences between the rights of citizens and non-citizens. In the European way of thinking, most rights are human rights. Citizens only enjoy a limited set of additional rights.

In particular, citizens have the right to enter the country, while non-citizens can be turned away. However, border officials do not have substantially wider powers at the border than the police have inside the country. You don't lose your constitutional rights just because you happen to be a non-citizen trying to enter the country illegally with the intention to commit crime.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/europe-immigration-refugees-...

“In 2017 both Germany and Denmark expanded laws that enabled immigration officials to extract data from asylum seekers’ phones. Similar legislation has been proposed in Belgium and Austria, while the UK and Norway have been searching asylum seekers’ devices for years.”

Note that the powers were given to immigration officials, not border officials. Those people are bureaucrats working for the local equivalent of USCIS.

Border officials != immigration officials, asylum seeker != all people crossing a border.

I was responding to “the EU is not like the US where foreigners have the same rights as citizens”.

Whether it’s immigration or border officials is irrelevant to that comment.

No, it is very relevant and if you don't understand why I wonder why you would bother to comment in the first place.

Huh? My comment directly disproves this claim I replied to.

“However, border officials (in the EU) do not have substantially wider powers at the border than the police have inside the country. You don't lose your constitutional rights just because you happen to be a non-citizen trying to enter the country illegally with the intention to commit crime.”

Clearly asylum seekers in the EU do not have the same rights as EU citizens.

Hence, my response was directly relevant.

No, you are conflating the immigration process (which is an attempt by an individual to obtain the same rights that citizens have whilst in the country) with the crossing of a border (which is a much simpler process and is usually handled right at the border). The two are completely disjoint. The article deals with border crossings, not with the immigration process as such, though usually if you want to immigrate you first have to cross a border. This is why the United States is so picky about people that start their immigration process once they are already inside the United States. They would much prefer you to start that process from without so that you can be stopped and refused entry at the border. Doing that later - for instance, through deportation - is much harder.

Asylum seekers anywhere do not have the same rights as the citizens of that particular country or immigration area: if they did we wouldn't call them asylum seekers. Asylum seekers are simply a special class of immigrants for whom special processes and documentation requirements may apply and who may have extra rights based on their asylum seeking status. There are whole bodies of law around this theme.

Finally: the EU doesn't have a constitution. So you can't directly compare the EU situation to the United States one anyway, and from both a border crossing and immigration perspective the two are vastly different.

The thing you are referring to is that specifically undocumented asylum seekers (of which there are many) can have their phones searched to ensure that their story matches. You can agree or not with that policy (personally I'm conflicted about it, I can see both sides here) but that isn't anything at all like the border guards being allowed to search any phone they think is interesting.

I'm so confused.

My response was not specific to border crossing or the immigration process, it was the broader claim:

"The US also has unusually large differences between the rights of citizens and non-citizens. In the European way of thinking, most rights are human rights. Citizens only enjoy a limited set of additional rights."

So I posted a link to an article showing that, no, the EU is not that different than the US in having a different set of rights for citizens and non-citizen.

Your comment about "Asylum seekers anywhere do not have the same rights as the citizens of that particular country or immigration area", which basically agrees with the point I was trying to make.

The EU doesn't derive most rights from human rights. Every country has its own constitution and the differences between EU countries is vast, as is the relationship of each country in the union (and plenty outside of it) with the EU.

All these generalizations serve no purpose and are strictly speaking off-topic. If you're going to make such comparisons you're going to have to work a lot on clarifying the context within which your comment is made because it is very easy to misconstrue what you write on account of the gap between the situation as it really is and how you present it.

Dragging in asylum seekers serves no purpose, that's not what this is about at all, so you categorically can't illustrate any differences between the US and the EU regarding the rights of people crossing borders by shifting the topic like that.

Even if such a comparison in the abstract might be interesting. We could also start a conversation on emacs vs vi in this thread, it would be about as off-topic.

All these generalizations serve no purpose and are strictly speaking off-topic.

I agree, but I'm responding to a comment that made a generalization, not bringing a generalization into the discussion.

Dragging in asylum seekers serves no purpose

I'm responding to a generalization, so providing a specific example where the generalization is untrue, serves the purpose of proving that the generalization is untrue.

If you have concerns that specific topics shouldn't evolve into broader topics (that seems to happen in the comment of every HN post?), that's fine, but I think your comment would have been better directed at the person I originally replied to that introduced the generalization.

No, you introduced the topic. The parent to your comment did not mention asylum seekers at all. Unless you have some other comment in mind, in that case would you mind pointing it out?

The comment I originally replied to said "The US also has unusually large differences between the rights of citizens and non-citizens. In the European way of thinking, most rights are human rights. Citizens only enjoy a limited set of additional rights."

Which is clearly broadening the conversation beyond just border inspections.

The US has very few rights that apply only to US citizens. All visitors have 1st amendment rights to free speech, rights to legal council, to a jury, to avoid self-incrimination, etc.

The US Constitution does not authorize delegation or re-delgation of right-granting or selective-right-limiting to law enforcement (or to physicians). The US Constitution serves to specify dates and times, values, and specifically what the government may not do.

Write a function to determine whether a given person has a given right.

What attributes of the person are constitutionally relevant to determining whether a person has a given equal right? Which conditionals are acceptable in a function that equally protects equal rights?

Then, Write a function to determine whether all persons have Equal Protection of Equal Rights.

Other than "law is not code", I have no idea how to respond to you. I have no idea what you are saying.

The government has Unconstitutionally and thus illegally limited the rights of persons where the government has discriminated on the basis of disability and of citizenship.

John Locke and John Stuart Mills wrote about Liberty. If it be unequal, it isn't liberty at all.

Why this phrase?

> Equal Justice Under Law

The situation is as you describe if you believe the US Constitution. Unfortunately the Constitution is an obsolete piece of paper that no longer serves as the constitution of the US. The real constitution has long been the set of creative interpretations issued by the Supreme Court. According to those interpretations, non-citizens often have substantially fewer rights than citizens. That was particularly obvious in the aftermath of 9/11.

Yup. More explicitly: The reactionary majority on the Roberts Court consider themselves above the Constitution. By both word and deed. aka "judicial primacy".

I'm sure you have some examples as opposed to vague general statements, right? If anything, the fact that noncitizens in the US get constitutional protections was emphasized after 9/11.

> The U.S. actually has unusually strong protections against the police in this regard and in others.

Uh, what protections exactly? The article explains in detail how nobody has any protection against phone searches at the border, including lawyers with privileged information.

Agreed. The right to complain I suppose. Like blowing raspberries up wind.

Yeah I did a bad job of explaining myself. I was thinking of border searches as a subset of the protections of privacy (in the U.S., operationalized as protections against unreasonable search and seizure). Overall people tell the police to fuck off all the time when they come asking, and you have strong protections when you're doing that. The police rely heavily on people not knowing their rights.

> I get the sense the implication is that the U.S. doesn't have strong protections. That's wrong. Many governments in allegedly civilized Western countries have security services with much more power than in the U.S., permission to seize and search your phone being pone of them (the U.K. and Australia are especially bad). The U.S. actually has unusually strong protections against the police in this regard and in others.

But I'm confused. How does this apply to people who would use burner phones in the US? Presumably US citizens who live in the US won't use a burner phone in the US and keep their real phone in a stash in Mexico/Canada.

> You also might consider that usually these protections don't apply to you if you're a foreigner who's trying to get in to a country not your own. They have no obligation to let you in and they can ask anything they want in exchange for access.

Oh right, so this doesn't apply to people who the advice was addressed to. You were just having a nationalistic knee-jerk reaction. Good to know.

Yeah I didn't do a great job of expressing myself. Here's another try: the list [U.S., China] implies the U.S. does a really profoundly terrible job of protecting your rights to privacy (in the U.S., a prohibition of unreasonable search and seizure) because China is dystopian-abysmal on this scale. When, in fact, the U.S. does a pretty good job especially in comparison to other developed Western nations: you can absolutely refuse a search when the police show up, and indeed you should unless YOU called them. Their tactics include trying to make it seem like you don't have a choice, but you do. Many other developed nations are much worse in this regard (the U.K. and Australia are particularly bad). But I was thinking of France, personally. It's hard to imagine French people refusing to help the police because, as far as I know, you really can't and you have to answer their questions.

This ruling in the 5th Circuit (so it only applies to the 5th Circuit?) is bad and reduces the U.S.'s standing with regard to how strongly it protects you against unreasonable search and seizure, but the U.S. still does a pretty good job overall. The 100-mile thing is, in practice, not a thing for U.S. citizens in the U.S. It's still very bad. But the border police aren't the people seizing and searching your phone if you're already in the U.S., it's the local police or the FBI and they have to get a warrant.

It's a similar situation with strong protections of other rights, like the right to free speech. Denmark is considering making public Koran burning illegal, for instance, or the right to peaceably assemble / protest, which the U.K. just got rid of. Part of it is the very concept of "rights" as instantiated in the U.S. Constitution.

>Oh right, so this doesn't apply to people who the advice was addressed to. You were just having a nationalistic knee-jerk reaction. Good to know.

The notable part of the article to ME was that the border police can search returning Americans' phones without a warrant. I think the default situation in developed countries is that if you're a foreigner trying to get in the police can search you without a warrant, and maybe that includes phones? It's a shitty situation, but that's how it is.

As it turns out, I have a passport from somewhere other than the U.S. :-)

Thanks for the clarification.

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