My phone was searched at LAX, which apparently is the new normal
latimes.com
latimes.com
Instead of fixing the real issues this country has: poverty, homelessness, joblessness, hunger, drug abuse, health care accessibility, affordable housing accessibility - we prefer to look for a boogeymen outside of the country.
Around 500-1000 Homeless Americans die from hypothermia per year, 2000-4000 Americans die per year from hunger, 35000 people on average die from drug over dose, over 500,000 people die from heart desease so in the last 15 years we lost just to these causes - around 8million people!
According to a September 2016 study by Alex Nowrasteh at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, some 3,024 Americans died from 1975 through 2015 due to foreign-born terrorism. That number includes the 9/11 terrorist attacks (2,983 people) and averages nearly 74 Americans per year.
8million+ people dead vs. 3000? So where are the real issues?
Why do we allow the government propaganda machine to fool us?
Home team vs visitors
Republicans vs Democrats
Christians vs Muslims
Protestants vs Catholics
Hutus vs Tutsis
Walmart vs Target
It's adverserial programming 101. Is xenophobia really surprising given how many divisions our cultures cling to?
The Brits had special golf rules drawn up for playing through the Blitz. We need to grow up.
I'd say its a reasonable assumption. ISIS's goal is to actually succeed, not to get caught by surveillance before an attack.
> We need to grow up.
And stop trying to prevent terrorism? That's not growing up. While the Brits were playing golf during the Blitz, they were also investing vast amounts of money and lives into shooting down German planes.
later edit
In case this actually needs to be said: in the course of prosecuting a war against terrorism (itself a spectacularly bad idea, lending itself as it does to a perpetual state of war), we've invaded and more or less conquered Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, and are in what any reasonable person would call a state of war with Syria and Yemen. You can look at a map of west Asia to see what that adds up to.
I've had similar experiences and I'm not a Muslim and CBP would have no reason to believe I was.
And I resent you trying to use claims of racism to derail a discussion about reasonable precautions.
Sometimes, they don't even check the details, as when they pushed the story of an Olympian who was detained due to Trump's travel ban without realizing it happened under Obama.
We haven't conquered Libya. In fact, the Obama administration pulled out and left the country in chaos and more vulnerable than ever to terrorism.
Mine was simply that it's ridiculous to claim that the US has taken terrorism less seriously as a military objective than the UK took theirs.
Then what was the point of saying that the Brits had rules for golf during the Blitz?
Only "societal and public policy responses" can stop terrorism. What "mature" response are you suggesting?
Between bag checks and policing at stadiums, armored cockpit doors on planes, metal detectors, and descent passport checks backed by good intelligence most opportunities for foreign born terrorists evaporate. And practically it's impossible to stop lone, home grown terrorists when a rented van can be used as a weapon. So why search my phone?
I intend only to point out that when some claim "terrorism isn't a serious problem" they're using statistics collected while we do everything we can to prevent it.
No one is ever going to give the terrorists free reign to do what they want for a year so we can collect control data.
So we can only speculate about the consequences of not doing all we can to prevent terror attacks.
Terrorism ISN'T a serious problem, compared to homelessness, obesity and other health issues, lack of access to healthcare (see: obesity and other health issues), minority rights (especially for Muslims and Mexican immigrants), labor rights, poor public transportation, etc. It just isn't. God, if people cared 1/10th as much about some of these issues as they did about "being hard on terrorism", imagine how much we could get done. Instead we're groping ten-year-old boys at airports in the name of "safety".
Edit: add source.
[1] https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa798_...
And most people take precautions to avoid being hit by lightning.
A one in a million risk of death is easily enough to inspire action to reduce the risk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_suicide_bombers_in_the_I...
But if we actually followed their advice, terrorists would be an enormous threat because we'd take no steps to protect ourselves.
I feel as if you might be making my point for me.
If terrorists know you don't search children, they'll place bombs on children.
It's little use locking the front door while leaving the back door wide open.
Additionally I think you are vastly overestimating the number of terrorists out there trying to carry out these attacks. We didn't do much at all in the 1970's and 1980's beyond signals and human intelligence and attacks were very rare then. And this was when we were engaged in several proxy wars with Russia. There just aren't that many people out there that are both willing, interested, and capable of attacking US civilians in spectacularly deadly ways.
You are fear mongering. You are part of the problem, and people making you arguments are destroying our freedom of movement and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.
To quote Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Perhaps I'm misinformed, but I thought pat-downs were only used on people who refused to go through the back scatter machines.
And I haven't seen sniffer dogs or explosive detection swabs routinely used on all passengers.
Insult me if you wish, but at least try to be honest about reality.
And my main point was the even before the security theatre, at the height of post WWII global violence, terrorist attacks in the US were exceedingly rare and they still are. This suggests that we likely didn't buy anything for the sale of individual liberty.
Do they have the operational capacity to carry out thousands of attacks like this a year? You might as well say: "if we only lock cockpit doors, but don't weld them shut, well then they'll cut through them."
We make exceptions all of the time based on feasibility and cost/benefit.
Do terrorists have bombs? They seem to know how to make them with extremely limited resources.
What do you think they're missing?
They don't have operational capacity to carry out thousands of attacks per year outside their primary area of strength by any means, and this isn't really all that relevant to attacks in that area.
So the question is: how much of an impact on their operational capacity to strike into, say, the US would it be to do this. Doesn't seem like it would be much.
If you do not take a balanced approach at protection, you risk losing out the mind war. The result? The US becomes a closed country, no longer the land of the free much less the brave. The ultimate goal of terrorism is achieved.
My reference for correct behavior towards terrorism is the UK during the IRA campaign. Security was handled as a serious affair, but as silently as possible. Some fatalities were deemed innevitable, and reported as such by the media.
While these groups are less sympathetic than the IRA, early ANC, or ETA(to an extent), it's a mistake, I think, to view them as wholly different, or less human.
*Edit to clarify, these guys are definitely assholes and we need to have strategies to counter their goals.
Where and how will you spend your money?
95% on problem A and 5% on problem B?
or
95% on problem B and 5% on problem A?
Why are we not addressing the issues that hurt and effect our daily lives the most?
Whom we are chasing mostly because of the instability we caused in the region in the first place.
That's been tried before with little success. Some people will choose to use drugs no matter what the government does. Some people will choose to be homeless. Some people are mentally ill and unable to take advantage of government programs. Some people just refuse help.
What program would you suggest, that isn't being done, that would reduce homelessness or drug overdose?
Great success. Do some research. Spend effort expanding programs that work.
> Later, the Bush administration adopted the model, and cities and states started writing 10-year plans to end chronic homelessness.
...
> And even though many cities in the U.S. have also been doing this for a while, they still come to Utah to study why it's working so well here.
The article mentions several times that it's already being done. This isn't mutually exclusive with efforts to fight terrorism.
Just one of the 59 cruise missiles fired on Syria yesterday would fund intervening in and saving hundreds of lives - they cost $1.41 million each. Some people may refuse help, many, many people in these situations don't get help. Soup kitchens, treatment for mental illness, shelters, training, are all worthy causes which cost very little to run.
There are so many useful programs that could be funded, which are being defunded this year in order to prioritise spending on the military (already the largest in the world by some margin) and searching social accounts/mobile phones and storing passwords for who knows what reason (it certainly isn't to prevent terrorism).
I understand the numbers of terrorist-related deaths versus non-terrorist one are staggering as displayed above, but if we stopped funding these security measures at airports (scanners, staff, etc), what could the number go up to?
Are these 3000 deaths so low because of the security measures? If we were to remove/loosen security measures at airports, how could we even estimate the impact in number of terrorist-related deaths?
Are these fears of possible ramp-up of terrorist attacks (if security measures are loosened) unfounded?
[1] http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/29/tsa-punishes-boy-who-left-...
It seems that having some border control is prudent. Just having it in place reduces violence, if I remember correctly. It is kind of like closing your front door and having a lock does quite a bit to reduce property theft.
Outside of taking prudent measures, I'm not sure it helps at all, especially considering most terrorism is homegrown. In fact, there is a chance it makes some relations worse and more likely to produce radicalized individuals - at least as much chance of increasing other terrorism if we stop the screenings completely. If terrorism is indeed the evil we are fighting, perhaps some of the money might better spent to take care of some of the social ills. After all, these are the things shown to help reduce homegrown terrorism.
The US government was informed about the 9/11 hijackers and the Boston city Marathon bombers etc. But, they get 99.99% false positives, so such information is basically worthless unless it results in conviction. Further the 9/11 hijackers used weapons no more deadly than what people are still allowed to bring on aircraft. If there where enough terrorists to matter they could have repeated 9/11 any time in the last 10 years. The most 'useful' security measure from 9/11 is a 'secure' door that locks which directly relates do another crashed aircraft making even that if anything a net loss. http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/26/europe/france-germanwings-plan...
That said, like the 'war on drugs' it has nothing to do with the actual 'threat' it's all just politics.
Everything else is just a show of force to make people feel better.
Passengers fighting back only works if they know there is a problem and the attackers are in the passenger cabin. Once the attacker is past that door they can ignore them.
What have you got against pink pilots?
US military drones have actual weapons and they are not hacked so that part seems to work well.
(Let's not even get into 9/11 because numerous reputable sources have proved beyond doubt that the intelligence agencies had a lot of actionable info months or even years before it.)
And don't pull the card "you never hear about the prevented attacks" too, because the US government is very quick to flaunt and brag about their over-funded agencies catching the occasional boogeyman.
my current working theory is that US citizens have helped their Govt hone the tactics earlier. The propaganda machine was then turned at other countries( US enemies and even allies)
And US citizens fully supported it then and even now.
Even more strawman fodder: Influenza related deaths spiked to over 40k(50k?) in 2000 & 2004. I don't blame the previously worst President in modern times, although I wish I could.
But I felt bringing death caused by other problems (homeless or even reckless driving) is a strawman. First, terrorism IS a problem, both domestic and foreign. So whether we have more people dying because of hunger or not, isn't going to affect the searching policy in airport. We have to discuss death by drunk driving and death by terrorism separately. Is government prioritizing homeless issues? That's different from is TSA search effective. They are two completely different issues.
At first glance, Chertoff seems to be the poster child of "confict of interest", but he is the new norm, just one of the many who abuse their stations.
and, aside from that, many people really really really hate the notion that a terrorist, often from a foreign country, can kill people in their own territory, a place they consider "safe". people find this particularly disturbing because of the direct human malevolence involved. people are one of the scariest things people can face.
when we simply reduce these types of deaths into counts, we lose some of that human perspective and what makes people live their lives in fear and anger.
Looks to me like we're looking for bogeymen inside our country. This is what countries suffering hard times with poor leaders do when the real outside enemies are hard to find or don't actually exist.
We forget that we hired these people to run the government, when was the last time we fired someone? I think its about time.
That homeless guy is going to die of hypothermia from being out in the rain? Makes sense. He should try to get out of the rain.
Thousands of women are killed by their ex-boyfriends every year? Makes sense, some guys are crazy. Good thing I don't date guys like that.
Someone might bring a gun into Starbucks and shoot random people? Good lord what is the world coming to! Take all the guns away! Islam! It's those creepy loners again!
Well, no actually, it does not. Nor does it apply to non-Muslim citizens, or white citizens, or any other types of citizens.
And excuse me, but you were just "recently" made to wonder about this? Only recently?!?
We apparently decided after 9/11 that airports and any place within 100 miles of the border were going to be Constitution-free zones, where the laws around search and seizure just do not apply to anyone.
The following happened to me, for instance, in an airport in 2006:
https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/05/6767-2/
This is one of those things that kills me -- those of us whining about all this, especially under Obama, were "shrill" civil libertarians. But then Trump came to power.
Now that this crap is happening under Trump, and it's happening to ACLU lawyers and doctors and newspaper journos and so on (cue the scary music), it's suddenly a crisis, and people's hair is on fire.
It was a crisis over a decade ago, when we just abandoned the Constitution in airports and at borders. And the warning that civil libertarians gave, which was roundly ignored, was "wait until the wrong person gets hold of this power."
Like to ~1800.
ACLU, which I otherwise support wholeheartedly, does us all a mild disservice by perpetuating the myth, which is very widely believed.
Am pretty sure the checkpoints on I-10 in western AZ are >100 miles N of the border, the Tohono O'odham* rez lies between I-10 & the border.
* The elders have also stated no wall will be built on their lands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tohono_O%27odham#Border_issues
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Border_Patrol_in...
But I totally agree with you. We had eight years of domestic spying, increased TSA nonsense (I no longer fly within the US. I wish more Americas would refuse to fly), predator drones, secret kill lists and the first president in history to spend every day of this tenure at war. I wish everyone who is out protesting now was protesting just as loud during the Obama years instead of falling into the false left/right divide: http://fightthefuture.org/articles/the-fallout-of-american-a...
[1] What's the difference between 9/11 and a cow. You can't milk a cow for 16 years.
They're not a new phenomenon that suddenly started under the Trump administration.
A guy carrying a weapon into an airport. An old woman with a back brace who has done nothing wrong. Yeah, it's almost exactly the same thing!
I think it's finally becoming more common because the government is slow to adapt and they're only just now developing the tools to conduct these searches.
If the pretext is border security, there is a small difference, the documents stored on an electronic device won't explode or start firing bullets or be used in a stabbing (the contents of a case might).
We should absolutely fix the lack of foundational privacy laws in the US though.
Really?
Of course the attack schedule is not easily obtained, but just asking such a dumb terrorist if they are a terrorist should be similarly effective.
Is it easy to obtain in the US without being tracked?
Privacy does matter, but long ago society decided to suspend those rights at the border.
If you want to revisit that, fine, but don't claim current policy is a change. Searching people at the border has been standard practice for a long time.
But like every right, it has exceptions. One exception we mostly agreed on, until recently, was being searched when crossing the border.
Of course there is. My suitcase has my clothes, toiletries, and maybe a book to read when I get to my destination.
My electronic device has a list of everyone I correspond with, what we type to each other, all the websites I visit both at home and on the go (Firefox Sync), everywhere I've traveled with that device since I got it, every destination I've searched for since I got it, my home WiFi SSID and password, the SSID/password of any place I've been allowed to connect including work, access to every file in every cloud storage service I use, username/password to all the VPS and dedicated servers I manage for myself and for all my clients, remote access to my home network and my work network, and so on.
The scope of my suitcase is limited to what I'm wearing and what I'm reading on my trip. The scope of my mobile device is a huge chunk of my entire life. Do you get the difference now?
Were any of those ever forbidden from searches?
In 1973 and in 2017 your suitcase could contain a gun. searching and backing up the contents of your cellphone has nothing to do with preventing a weapon coming on board. There is a legitimate reason to search luggage, there is absolutely no reason to know the intimate contents of someone's device at the border. At most, x-ray the device to ensure it's not a bomb, otherwise stay the fuck out of my personal business.
Even in 1973 people had private info they didn't want the government to see, yet the Court decided other concerns overrode the Fourth Amendment.
If you truly feel we don't deserve and shouldn't expect privacy, I hereby demand that you immediately post your entire medical history, SSN, full contact list, passwords for all of your social media accounts, full text of every email and sms conversation you've ever had, your full browser history (porn and all), and links to every file in your cloud storage services, all to this public thread for everyone to see. Go ahead, I'm waiting. You have nothing to hide, right?
You see, it's not about expecting more privacy, it's about expecting them to fully respect the privacy we already enjoy when sitting at home.
That's the point. We don't, and that's not new. The courts decided long ago that we don't enjoy the same privacy when crossing borders that we enjoy when sitting at home.
Whether the information is written on paper or stored on encrypted supercomputers is, legally, irrelevant.
I still can't understand why you desire zero privacy at the border. Why would any citizen applaud the government for invading their privacy just to entertain security theater? The contents of my phone have zero bearing on whether I'm bringing a gun on a plane. You don't foil a terror plot at the TSA checkpoint by browsing someone's phone contents.
Advocate changing the law if you want but acknowledge that you're asking for a change in the law. Then consider the reasons the law exists in the first place and why they're no longer applicable, if you think that's the case.
And please don't misstate my position. I don't desire having zero privacy. I just recognize why searches are necessary.
Maybe that's a problem we should solve.
I can fit several lethal weapons inside a [suit,brief]case. The data on my phone is not a lethal weapon.
The entire purpose of searching luggage is to prevent someone from bringing a lethal weapon into a group of people who are physically incapable of leaving.
My cell phone's data contains literally zero threats to those around me.
If I understand terrorism, I will not react to it irrationally. The rational reaction is, in fact, no reaction at all. The problem is that those who do react to terrorism react in fear. They push this agenda of security over liberty.
In order to overcome this idiotic agenda, those of us who are sane enough not to react, must actually take action. We must actually vote. We must actually talk politics, instead of going on with the things we find more immediately important, we must actually take political action. It has just been too damn hard to get that to happen, so here we are.
But does this really make an overreaction legitimate - That other countries are doing it too? Please think again before writing some knee-jerk reaction like "other countries are the same or worse"...
I was once treated unfriendly by Austrian border agents while re-entering the country. Yes, I experienced worse things when entering other countries. I still think that this particular incident was unacceptable, even though things are worse in other countries...
edit: typo
No, but it can help calibrate whether people really are overreacting. I find it is quite common for people to decry their home country for doing something that they seem to think is egregiously bad when it is in fact something done by lots of countries and something that has been done for lots of history. This may lead you to condemn those other countries and the "lots of history", too, but it does tend to at least tamp down on the idea that we're doing something uniquely new and horrible which could lead to uniquely new and horrible outcomes.
I think there's some truth to the idea that what HN is complaining about is not effectively securing our borders, and that this is at best a waste of time and at worst a process that will generate a lot of false positives. But there is also some truth to the idea that some people seem to have picked up the impression that the standard around the world and throughout history is that border agents just wave people through every border without questions and with a smile, and that therefore any scrutiny beyond that is some sort of unprecedented betrayal of the very foundation of civilization.
Or, if you prefer, the US may be overreacting at the border, but it's probably overreacting a lot less than people think relative to what is common in the world and throughout history.
Then there's a relatively new issue (on a civilization scale, anyhow) of what to do about cell phones and computers at the border. Again, I think, once you get rid of the idea that borders examining what kinds of things you're bringing in with you being some sort of brand new imposition unprecedented in the history of the world or Western civilization, you can get a clearer picture of why this is such a confusing problem. If it isn't that abnormal to look at people's papers they're bringing in, how do you deal with the fact that people can nowadays literally slip the entire contents of a library down their sock? And, on the flip side... why exactly do you care when they could also just have SCP'ed that entire library over too? When this topic comes up, we often discuss how easy it would be to get around this by simply carrying in wiped devices and recopying everything we need over the Internet afterwards, which is a challenge to the entire reason the border agents think they have an interest in this matter.
My point here is not to defend or attack our current practices. My point is that if you consider these issues from a historically-informed perspective about how borders have historically operated in the real world, as opposed to how you think they ought to operate combined with the ever-present human cognitive temptation to conflate the is vs. the ought, that the current confusion around how our borders function in a highly-connected world at least starts to make more sense. And if you want to have an effect on how we go forward with our border policies, it is always a good idea to have a better understanding of how we got here rather than a worse one. I would imagine some people are trying to play the "but other places have it worse so who cares" game, but I think some people are also trying to do a bit of education as to how borders really work.
I've flown through Germany, Moldova, the UK, Ireland, Singapore, Australia, etc. etc.
America is the worst. Most other countries will not preform pat downs. The German head of transport security even mentioned the body scanners have over a 50% false positive rate (they're literally about the same as random chance; multi million dollar worthless pieces of security theatre shit that should be removed).
The only pat down I recall was Moldova, and even there it was just your legs. I won't fly in the US any more. If I need to leave the country, I'd rather just take a bus to Canada. At least if they violate my rights there, I'm not a citizen and it doesn't bother me.
That's nowhere near random chance, unless they're flagging half the people who walk through.
If they're flagging 1 in 1000, random chance would be a 99.9% false positive rate.
That said, there are much nicer places to visit than Florida. I live 5 hours away and have never gone voluntarily...
almsot anywhere on the ocean side coast is gorgeous. i used to visit a place on hutchinson island, one of my favorite places to visit in the country (though a bit of a drive from any of the airports)
http://www.waterpointerealty.com/wp-content/gallery/featured...
Thinking that one news story reported by the media is representative of the whole United States is like westerners thinking that if they travel to the Middle East there will be a roving bands of Muslims beheading people in the streets.
The media exaggerates EVERYTHING.
The absolute worst thing that will possibly happen to you is to get pulled aside for some extra questions and apparently somebody flipping through your phone. That sucks, but as an American who travels all the time, I have never seen or known anyone to have to go through anything like that.
The closest I can get to is one of my Indian friends being pulled aside for a pat down in Canada.
If you have an arabic sounding or looking name, it's really not a stretch to imagine that you have a name that is similar enough to someone on a watchlist and are interrogated for it, or held, or prevented from boarding a flight. If you are travelling with your family, this is not a minor inconvenience, but a real source of stress and anxiety. You just don't know the repercussions it will have on you AND your family.
The "get pulled aside for some extra questions" happens to a Maroccan colleague of mine every time he visits the US for work, and means sitting around in a crowded room for a couple of hours at best. He expects it, and just tells his colleagues to just meet him at the hotel after getting out of the plane, but this isn't something that I consider acceptable.
What has been slowly creeping in without enough people noticing is that instead of being welcoming, travellers are now foremost suspects instead of guests (not only the US). If you're funny looking, you suddenly have no rights, and there is no due process. That is scary, especially when you're far away from home.
Even for people like me, who aren't funny looking or are in any form or shape a threat, there is a chilling effect. I like to travel, and for example have been to Iran a couple of years ago as part of a longer trip. Today, I could not make that same trip as lightheartedly, and would probably "self-censor" myself out of it in fear of future repercussions when travelling to the US or other western countries with an iranian stamp in my passport. Even if it is simply FUD, and most probably would not cause real problems for me, I do not wish it to happen to anybody just because they were born in the wrong place or have the wrong name.
Based on my experience as a white Englishman with an American kinda name. It's not all about race and/or religion - it's just the way it's always been.
Also I just can't get over the fact that you have to handover your unlocked phone.
Unfortunately it takes the masses being encroached upon before we take it seriously.
This has nothing to do with who is leading our country. The only thing new here is that it's easy to point the finger at one person for everything you don't like; it's been in place for awhile now.
> The so-called border search exemption means that the 4th Amendment’s requirement of probable cause does not apply to customs officials, and the practice of “detaining” cellphones began under the George W. Bush administration. But cellphone searches by the Department of Homeland Security have exploded in 2017 — DHS officials searched more phones in February of this year than in all of 2015. (Four members of Congress introduced a bill this week that would require agents to obtain a warrant before searching a U.S. citizen’s electronic device.)
There could be a good reason, but it feels manipulative.
President Trump’s new security regime wastes yet more of our time and our taxpayer money and shows outright scorn for the spirit of the 4th Amendment."
The article is making it look like this is due to Trump, but if there was an ongoing increase for 2 years under Obama that would be manipulative.
It's incredibly frustrating. I hate the experience every time I go through it. But I understand why it's necessary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
Who is claiming any measure will reduce risk to zero?
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp....
Mocking reality is not an argument, even if it can create a popular TV show.
No one. But some claim that the current risk must decrease, while it is much smaller than almost everything else.
How many terrorist attacks would there be if no one was trying to stop them?
BTW, NSA never prevented any terrorist attack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance#Purposes
Upd: Also, if the risk is already small, why we need even more privacy invasions?
> NSA never prevented any terrorist attack:
> The director of the National Security Administration today told Congress that more than 50 potential terrorist attacks have been thwarted by two controversial programs tracking more than a billion phone calls and vast swaths of Internet data each day.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/nsa-director-50-potential-ter...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/25/nsa-re...
> Unfortunately the tools available to terrorists continue to change and so must the measures used to fight them.
From what I know, the current problem is not the lack of information, but how well it is targeted. For example, we knew about the terrorists in France in 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_2017_%C3%8Ele-de-France_...
Also, many think that the war on terror made more harm to the humanity then what we would have otherwise. At least such invasive war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_War_on_Terror
What's stopping them, if not our security services?
What terrorist organization wanted to attack us in the eighties?
What organization wanted to attack us in the nineties, other than the failed WTC bombing?
If that had succeeded, history might be very different. Success breeds success and the second WTC attacks on 9/11 inspired other terrorists.
Hezbollah (usually as "Islamic Jihad"), the Italian Red Brigades, the Red Army Faction, the Abu Nidal Organization, and the Japanese Red Army are among the foreign groups that not merely wanted to, but actually succeeded in carrying out attacks targeting Americans in the 1980s
The Armed Resistance Unit, The Order, and the Jewish Defense League are among the domestic groups doing the same.
> What organization wanted to attack us in the nineties, other than the failed WTC bombing?
This little group called al-Qaeda that you may have heard of carried out several attacks targeting the US in the 1990s, including the WTC bombing which killed 6 and injured 1,042.
Saudi Hezbollah also conducted a major attack targeting Americans, and there were several by Islamists for which no organization took credit or has been ascribed blame. This, of course, doesn't cover everyone who wanted to attack Americans, just those who actually carried out attacks that actually did.
There were also notable domestic terrorist attacks in the 1990s.
The embassy bombings, the attack on the USS Cole, the WTC bomb attack, and the Oklahoma City bombing were all notable terror attacks on the US in the 1990s.
Is there? How do you know this?
Recently worked with explosives haha, she buys fertilizer on the wrong day.
I'm pretty ignorant, I hope our country works itself out, would be a pity to go down after winning WW2 sure 70+ years later
Oh well... Like the Romans I guess
Edit: I really am ignorant to the world, busy being poor, chasing the dream of "entrepreneurship" 30% of nothing is nothing. Too scared to use the bike rack on the public bus so instead I'll walk for 1.5 hrs (6 miles) home. Scared of bums asking me for money.
Oh well, 1 in 330+million, some people will save us hopefully. It's just hard to see the bad stuff to me because I'm in my own little peasant world. Am I losing my rights/internet privacy problems? I don't know... I don't feel free that's for sure just because of finances but that's not permanent/my own fault.
Ahhh well live or die my life was alright, I was privileged. A bag of meat on a rock.
The USA "won" WW2?
I wasn't really making the point of the war itself (who did what) more on the number of people that died and what "we" overcame and then in the future we have this BS that we deal with. Still what about back then, their "ideals" with women cooking at home and that was their life. I don't know like I said I'm ignorant.
(easy way out of an argument just keep saying I'm dumb) also not take responsibility for what I say. Ahh well... I'm like a baby that was discarded and should not have survived but somehow I made it, defective unit. What is success anyway, money? Peace of mind.
When I refused to give it to them, on the basis of privacy, the employee said that Apple could not provide the service. He backed down a little when I asked to speak to his supervisor, but then said that not providing my passcode would void my iPhone's warranty. Eventually they performed the service without my passcode and had me perform the functional testing myself before walking out of the store.
I wonder how many thousands (millions?) of iPhone passcodes are stored in Apple's database? And of course the average owner probably doesn't think to change the passcode after the service is completed.
It is stored in a database, but the passcode is deleted immediately after the genius marks the service as completed.
My MacBook Pro battery had to be replaced too and the Apple rep asked the same thing. I just told them I rather have them wipe the machine instead and they were happy to just put that in the service notes.
I suppose if your device is beyond being able to operate then you are going to need to change your password or passcode when you get it back.
I don't understand this attitude.
I balked when my kids' school system sent a poorly worded letter including the term "social worker" on account of my child being tardy only 5 times (mostly medical reasons) for a total of about 30 minutes of missed time. Legal action was not in my mind, but a strongly worded response certainly was.
And public outcry seems to be the best measure at this point. It wouldn't be this story in particular, but repeating of similar stories. Naturally, it can backfire.
The question is: WHY I need to this counter measures to protect my right of privacy when entering a country like the USA.
But really you can spend 30 minutes loading some apps and games, copying over a few dozen pictures, contacts, etc.
National governments have never ever historical remained on the side of "the people". They eventually go bad, more quickly so when their citizenry is impotent.
So put up the good fight. Freedom has a price, and it's not paid on April 15th
They are not just looking for data at the border, they are imaging the phone and keeping those records for god knows how long and with what level of security. That is a level of privacy I'm not willing to give up, let alone the risk of having company confidential data end up in unintended hands.
I appreciate your want, but right now the rule of law with the Border Agents seems to be "As [they] like it". Providing any sort of privacy protection is likely to garner even more suspicion from Agents, especially those that have already made up a judgement on who is and isn't a suspect.
This isn't to say people should roll over and just open up their devices, but suggestions that will impede the Border Agents or frustrate their activities should be noted as such and readers need to be aware of the potential reprecussions so they can make an informed decision. It is important to have a staunch resistance to this nonsense, but people need to be able to choose their level of participation.
Your answers to this are:
1: "here you are", and hope you haven't said anything that'll get you turned away
2: "I can't remember them, because I use strong passwords", and hope that doesn't get you turned away
3: "I don't have social media accounts", but remember that lying to federal agents is a crime.
You're compliant as you can be.
Also, frame your vacation as a "getaway from technology."
Partner that with a candybar phone -- which you're going to buy a SIM card for in your destination country -- and you have a perfectly reasonable story.
At least I hope it's reasonable because it's what I've been doing for almost a decade
This is terrible advice to foreigners who may be denied entry, and then have that denial seen as prejudicial in trying to enter the country again.
Why are we paying them? Their "service" is, at best, inconvenient, and certainly unconstitutional.
The issue is not that this individual was inconvenienced.
The issue is that the constitution of the United States is being thoroughly disobeyed by the federal government of the United States.
Edit: Found relevant article at https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/what-could-happe...
In summary, yes. It is a misdemeanor (subject to a fine of not more than $1,000) to refuse to provide assistance (e.g. translation or decryption). Assuming you refuse, they will likely seize the device and detain you for some unknown period of time.
If by "required" you mean "to get on my flight and avoid getting arrested", then probably yes, it's required.
It's less compelling, but i guess you could have a trusted friend change your passwords for you and require them to later unlock them. (after you get out of detainment 5 days later and fight in court -- instead of the gov't winning, you both lose)
If they cannot perform the search no matter what your excuse is, I seriously doubt they will let that phone, or even you, enter.
If you are a US citizen, they can't really keep you out of the country for this. They can make it hell, but not keep you out. If you are not a citizen, then yes, they can send you right back.
I remember being questioned for about 15 minutes on my flight from the UK to Paris back around 2008. My trip from the US to Turkey from 2013 was pretty timid, maybe 2 minutes of questions and a mandatory body scan (stopover in Amsterdam). From the US to South Africa completely painless. I did get my hands swabbed for explosive residue on a trip from Detroit to Las Vegas a couple years ago.
I'm just curious if anyone here has personal experience as a middle class white individual getting treatment as harsh as I read in some of these articles.
I had to explain repeatedly why I liked Turkey in particular and kept getting asked over and over "Why Turkey?".
[NB Turkey used to be an extremely popular holiday destination for people from the UK and I've been traveling there regularly for 20+ years].
>Between October 2008 and June 2010, over 6,500 people traveling to and from the United States had their electronic devices searched at the border. Nearly half of these people were U.S. citizens.
... and none of them were non-belligerent white individuals traveling to/from non-suspicious countries.
Okay, I made that last part up, but c'mon.
WHY???? Of all people, the ones who get targeted have standing! Of all people, she might have a shot of pulling in the 4th AND the 14th amendments!
I know people want to live their lives rather than get embroiled in legal fights but the ones whose lives are interrupted by this sort of injustice are the only ones who CAN put a stop to this.
- purge your phone
- enter the US, let them search your plain vanilla phone
- restore backup
Here's the link: http://www.dailyxtra.com/canada/news-and-ideas/news/us-custo...
The US intelligence agencies are hell bent on creating a social graph of the world, and they will get to do it.
They will search your devices. They have a process flow to follow and 'empty contact list' will likely branch to 'second-tier inspection' and laptops will be searched.
Much better to keep an old previous-generation smartphone with a minimal but genuine contact list ( immediate family, emergency contact, work & insurance numbers ) and a couple of useful non-social apps and use that when travelling. And only for travelling. No trickery, just hand it over.
I don't agree with the policy, but it's policy. I can't change it as one foreign national standing in line, I can only minimise the damage it causes me.
So, i guess, not having something with (electronics, luggage, ...) you can also cause problems.
But yeah, this is only one anectote, so travelling without a phone / a laptop might be fine...
Get a $70 candybar, assume it will be lost, stolen, broken, pawned while overseas.
Problem solved -- at least the phone part.
Nobody has the "right" not to be searched or interrogated at borders (except for some politicians that have diplomatic immunity).
Is she a politician? if not, no right was infringed.
Try entering your country with a piece of nuclear grade uranium.
Could you help me out here?
Personally I wouldn't go that far but still, my point is that: not being searched at the border is a priviledge, not a right.
How is searching a phone any different than customs searching all luggage inbound to the US. How are the contents of digital devices considered to be sufficiently different that they don't warrant a cursory scan, if not automatic scan?
Then it comes down to, what exactly could you scan for anyway? Could they do short term scan/records and delete upon leaving the country or short duration? Where is the justification for doing this to citizens of this country or countries not considered to an active threat?