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Comment by sseveran | Hacker News Reader

Correct. You have no legal right to privacy in the US and enjoy none of the legal protections from our government that citizens enjoy (or should). You can be renditioned, spied on and wiretapped with no legal recourse in the US. Similarly Americans don't enjoy legal protections from the governments of other countries.

Now two countries may enter into an agreement not to surveil each other or their citizens. That is completely a different issue. But if you are not a US citizen or don't have a visa than the Constitution affords you no protections.

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how about when the government makes you renounce citizenship and waive your right to sue them?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasser_Hamdi

They should have just manned up and charged him with treason. That seems like a relatively simple case.

But my point is specifically not about legality.

"Similarly Americans don't enjoy legal protections from the governments of other countries."

Yeah right.

What governments are extending me legal protections?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_jurisdiction#Univers...

In general, these are laws against things like war crimes. The UK (Brit here) also extends some child protection, fraud and bribery laws to cover acts worldwide, the former intended to be used to prosecute sex tourists who are unlikely to be prosecuted where they committed the offences.

I'm unsure whether any of these laws have actually specifically protected you, but the reason for their introduction is to afford people in other countries similar protection from UK-based criminals to the protections people enjoy in the UK.

Personally I hate whole "war crimes" thing. Since it WW2 it has been applied only to enemies. There was a lot of contention with the Russians over what was a war crime, since Stalin had done many of the same things as Hitler. It was generally agreed that it was only illegal when the Germans did it and Stalin went home happy.

It seems that Universal Jurisdiction allows people to prosecute me, but doesn't specifically protect me.

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