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Comment by josephscott | Hacker News Reader

I ran into this exact issue trying to board a flight from the USA to Tokyo, a number of years ago. About 2 steps from getting on the plane a plain clothes cop pulled me aside and searched my luggage. The only thing he asked about, repeatedly, was if I was carrying cash. Fortunately for me, I was not. After he made sure to go through everything I had he let me get on the plane.

When the only thing he was concerned about is if I had any cash on me, it sure felt like an attempted robbery. He never asked about drugs or anything else illegal I might have had.

This needs to come to an unqualified stop.

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Though you probably will never know why, there must be some reason why you were identified as someone who is likely carrying large amounts of cash. Wonder what criteria they're using and how many civil rights violations they've bundled into it.

In some cases it could be as flimsy as they were pacing nervously while black: https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/deas-cold-cons...

Because they claim that these are "consensual", they claim that they don't need any particular criteria for an encounter, but of course the "consent" was not ever really freely given here, they would either trick or bully people into giving consent.

Feels like a general police stop abuse in a new context: You're free to go as long as you don't actually try to go, because exercising your rights makes you "suspicious."

"You can decline to consent, but you'll miss your flight because we'll detain you for an hour". It's so clear that no one can meaningfully "consent" in a situation where one person has the power to deeply fuck you over like that.

It’s not consent if you’re not allowed to say no.

> it could be as flimsy as they were pacing nervously while black

Judging by the picture on the poster's website, I doubt being black had much to do with it: https://josephscott.org/

That was an example to illustrate how little basis they needed for these searches in previous cases, not intended to be a guess for what the reason the person at the start of this thread was stopped.

The point is, this whole "cold consensual search" policy was based on nothing other than the officer's personal opinion for who should be approached and searched; because it was theoretically "consensual", they didn't need any kind of basis for making the determination.

One of the most worrying patterns for me, in both government and any sufficiently large corporation, is the idea of secret rules and dishonor without explanation or appeal.

Yes, and people right here on HN will often defend such rules because "if the rules are known, people might comply with them". The secrecy and ambiguity often are the point as it allows the powerful to attack the weak under the guise of legality.

It's a one of least-resistance solutions to integrity/interpretation problem. Good integrity is expected but most people don't think like programmer-lawyer-surgeons, so it's an impossible goal. Overly strict rules are in fact detrimental in many ways too. Obscuring the rules obscure all those problems.

I was once asked whether I was carrying large sums of cash at Oslo airport. I think the only reason they asked me was because there was literally nobody else in sight. I was in my early twenties and broke af. I was wearing jeans with huge holes in them and shoes that were more duct tape than shoe. I showed them all the cash I had on me: 3 coins. 2 of them had holes in them.

> there must be some reason

b/c it looked to the agent like he had cash in his backpack

I don't think that's always true. I was stuck in a TSA line once that hadn't moved for about 30 mins and I was stopped right next to a security officer. He told me he had to pick someone as the line wasn't moving.

When he took me in his room he said "You can have an x-ray, or the other search" by which he was insinuating needing gloves. I took the x-ray and he said "Well, if it's any consolation for the radiation I'm putting you on the other side of that security line, which would have been about another two hours from the looks of it." o_O

That's a bit strange because the machine scanning you at the airport can see cash... At least US cash.. it has a hard time with crypto though.

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