DHS uses travel as pretext for search of researcher and journalist | Hacker News Reader

DHS uses travel as pretext for search of researcher and journalist

papersplease.org

87 pointsgreyface-16 comments

Wait wait, is someone suggesting that the government gave itself an end run around the constitution, and then they used that to circumvent the constitution?

All in favor of constitutions but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

> If Mr. Curry had known to assert his status and rights under the Privacy Protection Act, he would probably be entitled to damages from the agents who searched and seized his data.

Lawyers and only lawyers-- is there some kind of workable legislation that could require agents to inform citizens of their rights under the PPA before demanding access to the phone, something like Miranda rights but for interrogations?

It really sucks that this journalist can't get damages essentially because they forgot to do a null check right before the search.

The Miranda ruling is weirdly narrow to me. Ideally you would be informed of your legal rights in any scenario, just to the particular case of arrest.

And also courts routinely narrow it even further - things like a person saying "I think I want a lawyer" have been found to not be asking for a lawyer, etc

You have a lot of rights. Many of them are conditional or depend on the facts of your situation. The fact that such a warning could potentially take hours to recite and be outside of the capability of law enforcement to understand make your proposal challenging.

Miranda works because you can write those limited rights on a card in words small enough for a cop to say.

This leaves out an important piece of information - Curry used his home IP in an attempt to gain control of an attackers wallet but the wallet had already been emptied by another party.

Curry didn't actually do anything wrong - he was acting as a security researcher. However it was sufficient for him to be legally Subpeona'd before a New York Grand Jury and TSA used that Subpeona as part of the detainment criteria.

I don't love the grounds of the electronic device search here but this was not random or arbitrary.

> I don't love the grounds of the electronic device search here but this was not random or arbitrary.

The way modern day totalitarianism (at all levels of it) works is operating through existing legal and bureaucratic systems to make your authoritarianism seem "legal and within reason."

It's so much easier to enrage people if you do something _completely randomly_, but if you put "oh this is legal" behind it, people calm down quite a bit.

Not to drag you in this, but your comment is an example of that. And ignoring the ego for a second here, I've definitely seen myself care "less" when something is legal if I wasn't paying attention to it.

Remember that this isn't really new. Sham courts, sham procedures, sham justice has been the cornerstone of every fascist, dictator, authoritarian in the past.

The rest of the comment isn't really relevant here, but I'm going to type it out just because someone might find it interesting.

We can see this type of "sham procedure" in social media moderation, in workplace behavior moderation, etc. Any person in power can, very easily, use rules, codes of conduct, policies, etc to control and set the tone of any interaction. Funnily enough, that power is usually reported as designed to protect the people with less power, but it's nearly always used to exert authority on people with less power.

> existing legal and bureaucratic systems to make your authoritarianism seem "legal and within reason."

Right.

Who thinks it is reasonable and appropriate to voluntarily consent to TSA full body scans? And now TSA facial recognition. It creeps up on us until a few people politely saying "no thank you" appear to be extreme.

We operate under a shared framework that is ideally codified in law.

The alternatives to codification are bad.

If your issue is with the codification and what is codified, you fix that through the process of updating that codification.

Disobeying or being angry at the process because it doesn't match your preconceived notions isn't a reasonable response.

In all societies, there are legal ways to subpeona someone at a border. That is not irregular or incorrect. "You are legally required to show up and talk to a grand jury" is not authoritarian rule.

You can't just call every legal code you don't like "sham justice".

> TSA used that Subpeona as part of the detainment criteria

TSA has no authority to detain anyone. You can literally walk away.

The article is unclear but it’s safe to assume he was detained by immigration.

I read a different article that reported he was returning to the U.S. from Japan. So definitely it was immigration authorities.

That is incorrect. TSA absolutely has full legal authority in the federal area of an airport including detainment and arrest. They are federal agents and past the security gates is federal area.

Immigration also has detainment authority. According to BleepingComputer it was actually CBP (Border Patrol, not ICE).

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