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Comment by WaylonKenning | Hacker News Reader

Some material that can be stored on your phone is not permitted into New Zealand, like child pornography.

If you had that stored in your suitcase, it can be discovered, and a prosecution started.

If you had that stored in your phone, it can be discovered, and a prosecution started.

Phones aren't magical parts of your brain, that can cross borders without being inspected. There's no digital 'diplomatic pouch'. Just because there's lots of sensitive goodies inside doesn't mean it's immune to inspection. Why would it?

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There is a digital diplomatic pouch though, it's called "the cloud". Anyone that wants to smuggle illegal bits and bytes into a country can simply do it over the Internet.

The reality is, nothing on your phone can cause actual danger to anyone in the way that guns or a bomb can.

I find this cloud argument rather weak.

So you have two ways getting illegal contents into a country. Instead of preventing both measures (which is what governments are trying to do [1]), you are suggesting ignoring one of the ways because the other way currently works?

The whole point of the customs and laws is to prevent any sort of measures to getting illegal contents into the country, either physically or via the cloud. Just because it is currently possible to do it via the cloud, does not mean the customs should give up checking physical devices.

[1] http://time.com/5344265/3d-printed-guns-legal/

Yes. Because it's too intrusive to search people's phones without probable cause and a warrant. I don't doubt that searching everyone's phone will result in criminal convictions. I do doubt the value to society in doing that.

3d printed guns are a simple bug in US law -- guns are controlled, but ammunition is not. Easy fix, make the ammo require a permit. Homemade guns are no longer a problem.

That argument is silly because all those things could also be stored (encrypted) on cloud servers and downloaded from NZ at any time. Trying to protect the country from CP via border checks is like a comedy skit to me.

Well, for one, it's a gateway into services/data that are not being brought into the country. I don't store a complete directory of all my contacts in my suitcase, why should the government be able to collect that from my phone? My phone can connect to my email and retrieve information, no one would print out their entire inbox and carry it in a suitcase...

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