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Comment by astrobe_ | Hacker News Reader

Yes. People here imagining workarounds based on automatic wipe, encryption, etc. should rather acknowledge that their country is slowly drifting to a fascist state.

Your tech tricks are childish. Act like adults. Take responsibility, make decisions, take action, gather support.

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I'm not in the US, but say I was. I'm fully on board that the country is slowly (or not so slowly) drifting into becoming a fascist state. Say I needed to leave the country for some important reason and come back. Say I didn't want my phone searched. What should I do? What amount of taking responsibility, making decisions, taking action and gathering support is gonna help in that situation?

Technological workarounds which leave federal agents unable to search my phone isn't gonna fix the slide into fascism. But it might make my trip back home more comfortable. Activism against fascism isn't gonna make my trip back home more comfortable. But it might play a role in fighting the slide into fascism.

Hell, activist work to fight the slide into fascism might be the reason why I would rather not have my phone search by federal agents at the airport.

Individual problem require individual solutions, systemic problems require systemic solutions, and both kinds of solutions are valuable because both kinds of problems are real. Most people make the mistake of proposing individual solutions to systemic problems. You make the mistake of dismissing individual solutions to individual problems.

(I have also intentionally ignored here whether these solutions will actually work. I'm guessing some could, most would not. "I ran out of battery on my phone and didn't bring a laptop, sorry" would probably work. Some complicated cryptographic setup which "technically doesn't erase the data but leaves it inaccessible" probably wouldn't work; the federal agent wouldn't recognize the difference.)

Fair enough. It's fine as long as people don't forget that fixing individual problems won't fix systematic problems; it would be like curing the symptoms, not the root cause.

> Say I needed to leave the country for some important reason and come back. Say I didn't want my phone searched. What should I do?

Don't take your phone and/or other devices you don't want to have searched. It's the advice routinely given to those planning a trip from the rest of the world to the US.

That's another technical workaround. A good one, when possible, but it doesn't exactly fix fascism.

If you want to beat fascism, use the fascists to beat it; not angry crying college kids who are openly loyal to Stalin.

That stunt ten years ago failed for a reason.

I have no idea why you are talking about Stalinist college kids all of a sudden.

All countries (all hierarchies) drift toward fascism. It's a historically and demonstrably effective way to consolidate power. The time to act is always, regardless if you're scared today or not.

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