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Comment by TrackerFF | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, people are unfortunately not informed on just how much power border agents wield. Not only in the US, but in many (most I'd believe) other countries, too. I've worked on cases (intel side) where the law-enforcement side would just wait for the surveillance objects to cross the border, as that's where they could do most data collection with the least hassle.

If for whatever reason you think you're being investigated or surveilled (who knows for what these days, could be enough to just associate with the various protest groups / orgs), you can just assume that the border will be where they'll try to clone / download your data (phones, laptops, whatever)

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I'm lucky to live in a country (Poland) where border agents can either let you in, arrest you if there is an arrest warrant, or detain but only with a lawful basis for detention (as in, you are posing a threat to others) and detention may be used only when other measures have proved pointless or ineffective.

This makes returning to the country nice and pleasant. The border agents never ask you creepy questions like: Where are you going? Where will you be staying? What do you intend to do? (it's what US border agents ask their citizens). They just say hi and let you in.

Poland border agents do ask why you're visiting. Don't know where you're getting that info.

The obvious difference between your experiences and the person you're replying to is that he's residing there and you're visiting. You're right that your rights are far more limited when you're a visitor to a country crossing a border, but he and this thread are talking about what rights residents to a country have regarding the border.

Asking why someone is visiting is also pertinent to the border agent's direct job, because different types of visits require different documents, such as a work visa.

At least not if from the EU.

My point was that Polish citizens do not get asked. This is different for Americans. US citizens entering their own country have to answer these bizarre and sometimes creepy questions.

Yeah, in that case I agree. I didn't realize you only meant Polish citizens.

I’m British, I entered Britain yesterday morning and didn’t say anything to anyone from leaving the plane to asking for a coffee at Ealing Broadway - it’s all automated. The job of the border is to check you are the person your passport claims to be, which seems reasonable.

I did have to put my hotel on the landing form when I entered singapore last week but nothing more - again didn’t talk to anyone until checking in at the hotel. In China they did talk to me, asked me if I was there for business or tourism the week before, nothing more.

I know the US border is perhaps the least friendly border I’ve ever crossed — and that includes going in and out of Gaza, but I assumed that US citizens didn’t get that treatment.

Same here, no interaction with border control people apart from them directing you to the passport reader if you look confused, although I did once have a nice chat with an older border control lady who was wondering whether it was worth getting back into IT work because they were desperate for people who still knew COBOL. Time taken to exit the aircraft and clear immigration and get to the luggage carousel is about 5 minutes, most of which is spent walking.

+1 for the US border comment, and I've been into East Germany, Russia, and similar countries. And that's not an exaggeration, the US border experience is by far the worst of any country I've ever been to.

I don't understand why they would even bother asking a US citizen who is returning home these questions: Where are you going? Where will you be staying? What do you intend to do?

Wouldn't everyone just answer, "home", "home", and "go home"? What would even be the point?

They ask because people are dumb and say stupid incriminating shit

When I come home I don't even talk to anyone...

I just walk through the global entry gate without interacting with anyone...

Even though the law says they have to let you in eventually, it doesn't say they can't harass you just in case you fall for it. They can also offer you a reward like less harassment if you just comply.

The law also says that a cop can't arrest you for no reason but every lawyer will tell you that only means you get a check after the court battle, not that you won't get arrested.

"They have to let you in" means that they don't let you in and you might be able to get a payout in court.

Nobody at the border has the job of "Force the border agent to let in anyone who is an actual American because they have that right", and nobody holds a gun to the border agent's head if he does not let you in.

A society is fundamentally broken if people need to get held a gun to their head, to make them do, what the society has commonly decided they should do. That simply doesn't scale. You might be able to do that for a few fallen individuals, but not for load bearing ones.

Every society - like any other sufficiently complex system - is operating in a constant state of brokenness. Societies are dynamic, with components (organizational, human, technical) failing and being replaced continuously.

All are broken, some are more broken than others.

Broken in the sense of not sustainable, faulty in principle, might lead to further demise, or failure. Not as in there are issues, not everything is optimal.

On a long enough timeline nothing is sustainable; it just depends on when it breaks down. I think society can go on like this for a long long time

I've had border agents repeatedly ask me my citizenship and where I was born at

> I've had border agents repeatedly ask me my citizenship and where I was born at

Why? Your passport is literally proof of both those things.

There may be a difference between the passport you are presenting, and your passport. Until the border agent determines that those are equivalent, you are not necessarily who you say you are.

>>I don't understand why they would even bother asking a US citizen who is returning home these questions...

Racial profiling for one. Also "citizen" and "natural born citizen" getting treated differently for another.

> What would even be the point?

The point is harassment, and trying to trick you into some perceived lie so they can detain you. The US is friendly like that.

Last month I returned to the US. My experience with passport control was I stood in front of a camera and a photo was taken, and the light turned green, and I went through. No questions, no interaction with passport staff.

The fastest I've ever gotten through passport control.

I had this experience at YYZ once in like 2024 at preclearance (Canadian on a TN), it was very nice, didn't even have to hand over my passport. It went away at some point though and I haven't experienced it since...

Also I guess while we're sharing experiences returning home, at least for US -> YYZ I just fill out info at the self-guided kiosks. Officers just say hi, glance at the receipt and mark it, and I'm done. Never been asked anything so far.

> My point was that Polish citizens do not get asked. This is different for Americans. US citizens entering their own country have to answer these bizarre and sometimes creepy questions.

It's not like I kept a list or anything, but as an American, I don't think I've ever been asked questions like "Where are you going? Where will you be staying? What do you intend to do?" by border control when returning to the US.

I distinctly recall having been asked questions about where I'm coming from, like "Do you have any X"? (where X is legal and common in a country I visited, but illegal in the US).

They're on the lookout for criminal activity. I transited lower Ontario with empty containers for a completed move between states. That can look like smuggling to the guards and you get more probing questions.

I am a US citizen who has left the States a small handful of times. I received probing questions twice while crossing the USA-CAN border (which I have crossed ~6 times), once where the agent got angry with me because apparently I wasn't answering/following her directions well enough, and the other time the agent seemed to just be following a protocol. The only other time I was questioned was on my way to Iran, but everyone was getting questioned. That flight was delayed by over 3 hours too.

I do not look like an immigrant or other marginalized group that stereotypically gets extra attention at borders. I know the difference, because my (American) brother-in-law gets 'randomly selected' everywhere for the misfortune of having Arabic ancestry.

I'm a CAD citizen and usually have an easy time driving into the states, but have been searched or pulled aside twice. Flying in is always easier. Crossing back into Canada, Iirc I've been searched 4 times. It's usually a routine thing because I'm often crossing back in at strange times alone.

Depends... I've come back to the US without being asked a single question.

But if you are from outside the EU, it’s tad different.

Strongly depends where you're from. I know of people who were turned around.

Did they have a valid passport?

Yes

Was it going to expire soon? Did they lack a visa?

no, the problem was that they additionally had a russian passport.

If you are part of the EU and move to countries that are also part or at least have strong ties your experience on the border can still differ a whole lot.

I've been traveling during high alert corona times where you had to carry extra corona related paperwork or at least that was the official message, but at the border no one even asked for your passport. There were a lot more people at the border but a lot less interest in getting close.

Then at more normal times border agents wanted to know nearly everything about what was in the car. Sometimes you have to drive through a scanner and sometimes they just wish you a happy day or not even talk to you.

It's mostly chance, but no one ever wanted my phone, so far.

This is completely counter to my recent-ish experience. Over the last two years I've entered Poland... 14 times? and over time, the experience has gotten more intrusive.

Could it be because of the war going on next door?

Yes? The claim: the Polish border is easy. My counterclaim: no it is not.

That was not the original claim. The original claim was "border agents never ask creepy questions to returning Polish citizens".

> Where are you going? Where will you be staying? What do you intend to do? (it's what US border agents ask their citizens)

Recently you don't even have to get your passport out of the bag, nevermind talking to anybody - you just stroll through the gate. They know who you are via facial recognition (which is creepy in its own right). But how would you know that, tovarisch mayor, your metoditchka was written a long time ago.

Yeah I realized after I got home that I flew from London to DC recently, and I didn't show my passport once. I liked the stamps...

Polish border agents told me (Ukrainian, first time to Poland) to speak to them in polish language when they were checking my documents some years ago, so YMMV.

Polish police and border agents are absolutely disgusting. They come straight from the soviet union. Avoid at all cost. I certainly wont be going back to poland any time soon. At least not by air.

Its funny for a country obsessed with efficiency, the US border agents ask questions that are completely pointless and never verified and simply a waste of time.

The questions are more a means of judging whether you're nervous or behaving suspiciously. The actual answers are irrelevant unless they're especially bizarre.

Might as well go back to judging a person on the shape of their skull or tea leaves.

Not really as those aren't situational. If you start asking someone ordinary questions and they appear especially nervous then it's probably that they have something to hide and combined with other things (e.g. big heavy coat in hot weather) might tip off the security people.

Many people are nervous because they have poor local language skills.

Nerves are not a measure of someone's guilt of anything. Life is a bit more complicated than that. Im sure we are aware of many world leaders who lie quite confidently and your trap would never catch them.

I agree - it's not a perfect test, but it is easy to implement and costs nothing extra. I suppose it's more likely to catch those people who have been coerced into carrying something illicit rather than experienced smugglers who do it all the time.

It's not used to establish guilt, but to establish whether the person is worth further examination, so false positives (e.g. due to language difficulties) would just lead to either further interviewing or searching.

There's not really any good reason to not do it as the questions are not overly intrusive.

Your statement it costs nothing is completely untrue.

Firstly the staff would need training to effectively ask the right questions and interpret the responses.

Asking the public questions cost time. If you have two lines and one does the required checks and the other also asks questions and conversations happen, the later will be slower.

Slower lines means more staff are required.

It doesn't seem to me as though it would require a huge amount of extra training - they're just ordinary questions about where someone is going and the reason for the trip.

The questions are usually asked at the same time as passport checks are performed so I doubt it takes much longer at all.

They do ask where are you going and where you will be staying, even if you have a permanent residence permit. Depends on your passport.

Are you sure that US border agents ask this? I don't recall ever being asked this when reentering the US as a citizen. They may ask where I went, but never where I'm going within the US or what I'm doing there. Not sure if my experience isn't representative?

Yes, I'm sure. Many, many data points over many years.

UK is crazy for this. Border police can detain anyone they like for literally no reason and if they do you have no right to lawyer or no right to silence. Your devices can also be taken and you must hand over any passwords.

I know the UK is an authoritarian state and not really comparable to the US, but as a Brit it's kinda weird hearing Americans complain about flock cameras and arbitrary border searches – these are common place things in the UK and no one cares (well, apart from me and maybe one or two others).

All the shady stuff the UK does, it does at the behest of the US.

I don't think so. I think the British public genuinely want to live in an authoritarian surveillance state.

Once they do, they might stop wanting to live in one. But for now they want it.

They don't. But cameras - like where I am now - came in gradually, and the public only get to see motorway crashes and the stuff the .gov want you to see. If the aussies have facial recognition, so do the brits.

One eye. That will rule them all.

If the country is thoroughly taken over by crime, an authoritarian surveillance state does have its perks. I heard there are no-go zones in London that tourists are warned about, so maybe that is the case over there.

Citizens had been cheering when the government over in El Salvador was rounding up all the gang members and just locked them up without due process.

If a country is "thoroughly taken over by crime", wouldn't it stand to reason that the criminals are running the surveillance state? Certainly starting to feel that way in the US at the federal level.

'No go' zones are massively exaggerated. There are nicer areas and less nice areas, but crime is generally pretty low (compared to other comparable countries) in every area. No one ever describes dodgy parts of US cities as 'no go' areas even though the crime happening there is typically much more prevalent and visible (e.g. Hard drug use on the streets).

The UK is a divided country. Pensioners are the most important demographic for getting reliable votes and they live in fear because they read crime news every day, so they support any measures if they believe it can help put the criminals in line. Most politicians do everything they can to have pensioners on their side. Touching the triple lock was unthinkable for years while liberal and socialist economists were all warning against it.

Fascists are split between young American influenced ones who want freedom and hate the Online Safety Act, and racists who support anything as long as will make Muslims lives harder. The freedom loving ones are winning today so you see Green and Reform MPs standing together against the government.

Middle class professionals see Dubai, Singapore and China as good examples and don't mind losing freedom for safety. The rich technocrats running the country are the ones who came up with all this, because they see the world as uneducated masses who need a nanny state to control them. And it helps their investments grow.

The types of people who are most affected by the surveillance state already gave up on politics years ago because there's no one to represent them. There is no party fighting for young or working class people's actual interests, so they vote for extremists in the hope that something will change.

When Thatcher said "there is no society" she was wrong at the time, but her successors did everything they could to make it real.

That is not true. The specific powers of arrest and detention by UK border force were set out in this freedom of information response here https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/uk_border_force_power...

Summary is they can’t detain people for no reason, they can detain people for specific offences relating to immigration and citizenship, customs and excise and also the normal stuff any regular police officer can arrest people for.

I’m no apologist for how much state authority they have, but it’s not as bad as you’re making out.

It is true.

The UK border agents (technically counter-terrorism) can stop you at the border, force you into a room, ask for your passwords to all your devices and you don't have the right to refuse.

You also don't have the right to a lawyer to be in a room with you and you are compelled to answer all their questions and they do not need to tell you why they stopped you.

Then, if you are lucky they return your devices 7 days later after they have been through everything.

This guy went through it last year and talks about what happens when they stop you: https://youtu.be/991kRp8KUmo?si=-5S1uLE7K9KG_gNj

> you don't have the right to refuse

What happens if I still do? Or pretend that I forgot my pin and accidentally lock my phone down?

The guy in the video explains exactly that.

If you are a UK citizen, they will charge you under the terrorism act if you refuse to answer their questions or if you try to conceal anything or if you refuse to provide all the passwords to all your devices.

As for what happens when you can genuinely not remember your passwords, I honestly don't know. The guy in the video just gave them access to everything because he travels a lot and did not want to have to explain why he has a terrorism charge to his name every-time he has to apply for a new visa.

Maybe you can refuse and stay silent and fight the charge later in court with a good lawyer but who knows. IANAL so do your own research before doing anything.

As for what happens if you are a foreigner and refuse to unlock your devices/ answer their questions, they can deport you and potentially ban you from entering the country for a certain amount of time or indefinitely.

> Maybe you can refuse and stay silent and fight the charge later in court with a good lawyer but who knows. IANAL...

You ask who knows. Then you say IANAL. I'm excited for you. You're so close to identifying who might know! Keep doing your own research, you got this.

There is a problem when the laws are so convoluted that you need a professional interpreter, and those interpreters are prohibitively expensive.

Lawyers make YouTube videos. Lawyers, academics and legal advocacy groups often write copiously about these issues. You can find ways to interact with a lawyer which can be useful short of a prohibitively expensive retainer or representation.

The decision matrix around these things is often obvious. Most people simply comply. If you want to be one of the few people willing to stand up to these things, then good I commend you. But you're going to have to put in some basic effort.

Or you could be extremely lazy and watch some random guys overwrought personal narrative which the commenter basically admitted was completely uninformative in explaining how the system actually works and then extrapolate from this video to make broad claims while simultaneously conceding you know pretty much nothing, and therefore are wasting everyone's time. I'm not asking anyone to become a lawyer but is that really the best evidence they could come up with? It just seems like a basic information literacy failure that should not be encouraged.

Yes the law is convoluted and complicated. Free societies that need to balance the same tension humans have always struggled with - between freedom and safety - and try to do so in a fair way despite all the impulses and incentives for abuse are going to be complicated. Justice used to merely be the mob. Are you sure you don't want the law to be complicated? You resent the modern need for the expertise of specialized lawyers? Do you complain medicine has gotten too complicated when the doctor doesn't begin by hacking your limbs off?

> Lawyers make YouTube videos.

Above you mocked "Doing your own research"; most of the people "Doing their own research" are watching these Youtube videos by people who claim to be lawyers and may or may not be. You can't have it both ways.

Information literacy 101 would demand looking the person up. Or going to a law school's channel rather than some random.

This really isn't that hard.

Stop making excuses for mediocrity.

> As for what happens when you can genuinely not remember your passwords, I honestly don't know.

This is pretty scary. I don't know any of my passwords because they are random strings of letters, numbers and symbols, and they're only kept in a password manager that sits on my powered-off PC at home. How do these border agents expect me to recite my passwords from memory?

Not necessarily a problem (for them). The police can serve you a s.49/RIPA notice with a "period for compliance which is reasonable under all the circumstances" (49(4)) so you can go home and get the keys. I expect they'd have grounds to impound your devices, though, if they've grounds for invoking RIPA at all.

If you've genuinely forgotten/don't have the keys, that could be a bigger problem. It is a defence, if charged, not to actually have the key - and they do have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt if "sufficient evidence of that fact is adduced to raise an issue with respect to it" (53(3)(b)) - but that does ultimately involve convincing a magistrate or a jury.

They serve you a RIPA notice and you either provide the password or they prosecute you. Penalties are 2-5 years in jail depending on the nature of the investigation.

I avoid flying anywhere near the UK or its territories.

> Or pretend that I forgot my pin and accidentally lock my phone down

Err our policing and judicial systems weren't born yesterday. You'll be treated as having refused to unlock/decrypt, as devices are so ubiquitous and people unlock tens or hundreds of times a day.

I've seen ordinary people forget things they've done every day for years. It's not something that never happens.

I'm not saying it's an impossible defence. But a jury has rejected the "I forgot it" defence in 3 or so cases IIRC

I'm just saying the police will unlikely drop their line of questioning after you claim you forgot the PIN. They'd probably then seek to prove you did know it - eg ask where's your boarding pass is, ask if you messaged/called anyone before/during your flight, try to establish the time the phone was last used, reducing the period of forgetting etc

IANAL/officer of course

Thanks for stating this. The UK is far more authoritarian than the US. No first, fourth, fifth or sixth amendment. And HMRC can search your house without a warrant - see my other comment.

The anti-Americanism on this site is bizarre. The USA gives people the greatest protections in the world.

GAVE, not gives - past tense. What good is an amendment if the govt can ignore it at will (2025+) and you can't sue successfully because SCOTUS will find some made up reason to make you lose?

Can you please share with me the UK equivalent of Guantanamo ?

Stoke-on-Trent

Depends on what aspect of authoritarianism that you're looking at. In the UK there's very little chance of getting shot by the police (especially as they don't routinely carry guns) and police shootings garner a lot of press coverage.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has gangs of armed ICE "agents" that can pretty much murder people at will without even getting arrested.

I just want to say, as one of those filthy American types, that you always have the right to refuse anything, in any country for any reason.

You might be persecuted for it - but that right to say, “F-you I’m not talking” is always an option, it’s just that it tends to be more pain than most are willing to endure. Myself included, to be fair, but the right to “STFU” is pretty hard for them actually to force you to comply with if you decide not to talk.

Welcome to the "democratic" regimes of US, UK, Russia and Turkey. Arbitrary border searches, interrogations and imprisonment, if you are on the wrong end of the political spectrum.

> these are common place things in the UK and no one cares

That seems like a YP not an MP. Just because you and your fellow countrymen gave up long ago is not the problem of those fighting to not lose those rights now. Except maybe you guys make it easier as an example of for the government to show as an example of other countries are already doing it. Thanks for that.

The fight might be a losing cause, but at least it is being fought as long as it can be fought instead of just laying down and accepting it like the UK seems to have done.

> Americans complain about flock cameras and arbitrary border searches – these are common place things in the UK

We complain about those things because we can clearly see that "the UK is an authoritarian state" because they are common place in the UK.

> no one cares

More like people pretend to not care for fear of being locked up for seemly arbitrary reasons, which seems to happen quite a lot over there based on the news reports, because "the UK is an authoritarian state".

It's not illegal in the UK to say you don't like the cameras everywhere. But if you ask UK people, they seem to actually like them. It's a different culture I guess.

> It's not illegal in the UK to say you don't like the cameras everywhere.

That is exactly how authoritarian state looks like.

"It's not illegal in the <our-authoritarian-state> to do <something-our-authoritarian-state-does-not-like>" (but if you do, you'll be f.ucked. Probably. Because it is not illegal).

No. Nobody is being punished in the UK for saying they don't like cameras everywhere.

I'm not sure why they wouldn't be. People have been arrested for peacefully protesting (https://www.amnestyusa.org/urgent-actions/united-kingdom-ove...), asking who elected the king (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-62878954), holding up signs (https://apnews.com/article/palestine-action-terror-ban-arres...), flying flags (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/04/02/flag-raising-act...), posting photos of current events online (https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/08/30/fdbr-a30.html), trying to avoid facial recognition (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/facial-recogniti...), and in countless instances where people expressed themselves on social media.

Punishing someone for saying they don't like cameras seems like it'd be perfectly on brand for the UK at this point.

Notice all of these are time/place/manner violations, except for Palestine Action which is explicitly ruled illegal.

If you go to the US inauguration and yell "hashtag not my president!" you'll get arrested too.

You'd be far more likely to get away with it in the US, if you can get past security and the efforts to corral you into "free speech zones". Many people did exactly that.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-tru...

I don't believe if you yell "hashtag not my president" at trump's inauguration you won't be arrested.

Maybe more Brits should care? I've seen some complaining online and in the media about living in a surveillance state.

This is in line with what I was discussing with my friends recently. Governments across the world weaponised their border protection for all their invasive data collection citing terrorism and other threats. This more or less started post 9/11, and used that as the reason. Now, the AI agents and their hacking is exactly going to be used as an excuse to introduce the real ID verification they've been trying to implement for a while now

I recently wrote a short blog post about exactly this worry. Link if anyone's interested https://www.vinoth.net/internet-for-humans/

> Yeah, people are unfortunately not informed on just how much power border agents wield.

The question is how the fuck did everybody devolve into invertebrates and let it become that way

If you're not pissed at all the laws that treat you like a bitch, you should at least be pissed at how the ruling class is immune to those laws.

> how the fuck did everybody devolve into invertebrates

This law actually predates the discovery of evolution by some decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_evolutionary_though...

I dream of a future where the disk image in my laptop both functions as an operating system, but can also be decrypted into secret files. We'll keep the extra entropy in a pile of AI slop next to the other piles of AI slop. That way, under scrutiny, it just looks like an OS full of AI slop.

My work computer seems to already have this feature!

Do you have to be careful not to use it in a way that clobbers the hidden secrets, or do they shift around while you work so that they're always recoverable?

I’m pretty sure you’re replying to a joke about AI slop filling a work computer.

Right, my point was that if it's not steganographically effective slop, then it doesn't fit the bill.

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