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Comment by Proof | Hacker News Reader

Always use Encryption. This news is disturbing but understandable since Americans hardly batted an Eye when it was revealed to them they were being spied on.

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You definitely should, but the border agent will also ask for your passwords. If you don't comply, and you're not a citizen, you will be sent back.

The saddest thing is this will be the sole reason to not travel to US. Sad, because I have family there now and I do love the people and the culture.

The way to travel to the US will be to never physically bring personal data with you. They can't search what's not there.

You can't win here. It will be suspicious to bring no devices, or devices that look like they've just been restored.

> It will be suspicious to bring no devices

Just like the Chinese government's Integrated Joint Operations Platform surveillance software. "Not using a smartphone" is one of the 36 data points which mark you out as having "suspicious behaviour":

https://www.hrw.org/video-photos/interactive/2019/05/02/chin...

Not if you are poor enough.

That used to be true. Poor people can often afford a smartphone now, even in really poor countries like Ethiopia, not just the US. It may be a crappy old or limited model, but it doesn't have to be a feature phone.

My phone is an important part of my diabetes control. Travelling without or giving it away is not an option.

I'll survive without it, but will lose the extra control of glucose in an already stressful situation.

The "people and the culture" are what brought this forth.

I never understood this differentiation either. "I like the people but not the leaders". Who do you think put those leaders there in the first place?

Well, not most of the people, even though it advertises as a form of democracy.

You can trivially make a partition so that it shows some data when you enter one password and some other data when using another password, next. i did it when i travelled to the US in 2018 but they didn't bother checking att

I used veracrypt btw, no way to tell that there is a hidden nested partition without in depth crypto analysis of the harddrive(in which case you're probably screwed anyways)

I suggest that people not do this.

Were there a perception by someone that you were possibly giving a false statement or violating some other rule (or just disrespecting them), consider how much misery and expenses you might incur, long before lawyers finished debating the question.

Minimize travel through problematic places, minimize sensitive data and access that you expose when traveling through problematic places, minimize being clever.

what perception? most interactions go thusly- "Please unlock your phone/laptop and submit it for processing->i enter the -clean- password/log into my carefully normal looking user on my android phone by using the -clean- pattern" <they do something, mostly just look it over themselves> "ok fine you're free to go"

there is LITERALLY no way for them to tell that i've done anything to the data without carefully analyzing the partition(which they wouldn't know existed because i'm using boot level encryption). obviously if i had REALLY sensitive data i wouldn't carry it with me and just get it from "cloud of choice" but this is just a case of privacy(i don't want them looking at my private texts/photos/notes/media collection). And they won't.

It's difficult to talk responsibly about some kinds of security practices. One reason is that you don't want to tip off bad people who don't already know. Another reason is that you don't want to inadvertently give mistaken advice to good people.

The problem is that us here on HN can probably take the gamble on it and bypass it either by using burner devices, bringing devices which have been wiped and then restoring them from the cloud, or using plausible deniability encryption like you have. But 99.9999% of travellers to the US don't have the knowledge or access to these methods, so it's completely insignificant in standing up to the surveillance state that US is enforcing. It feels good to say "yeah but I know a way around it" - but the problem still exists.

Well the war is already lost imo, customs gets to run roughshod over every right in the name of "national security". all we can do is protect ourselves at this point.

The tech big companies don't care to make an issue out of it and the issue is too complex(seemingly) for the every man so no progress is going to be made in the short term(5-10 years) until more tech literate people get elected. All we can do is campaign and mitigate

Is there any basis in the Immigration and Nationality Act for deporting you for refusing to provide you password? From what I understand, it could make it practically impossible to ever return. I’m wondering if not giving your password is a basis for something as serious as this. Does this have any lawful basis?

I'm not convinced lawful basis matters in the average persons situation where they're being detained for questioning without access to legal representation, then sent back.

That sounds like a way to get things fixed best sadly. Do it to big business clients who in face of millions to billions of liability go and tell them to fuck off and let their clients know why they couldn't show up. They aren't doing anything wrong following security policies if the policies weren't already a work around.

If it causes an international incident all the better to humiliate them. Sad that the system is so oligarchic but bullies learn only through force.

Wouldn't "big business clients" be TSA pre-checked, have global-entry and all the magic keys "big business clients" use to not have to suffer through the same awful things regular peons have to stomach?

International incident with whom exactly? What was the fallout of the "incident" when the world found out that the US was spying on NATO allies and heads of state?

In that case one would just be denied entry. If one would be high target one would just be beaten during the interrogation.

https://xkcd.com/538/

A reminder that if you are a US citizen, they can deny your devices entry, but cannot deny your body entry.

They cannot _legally_ deny entry.

But what exactly are you going to do about it? If you have a lot of money maybe you can pay lawyers to go to court to demand you be allowed to enter, but there's a good chance the court will be persuaded that since you're not there there's nothing to discuss. And why aren't you there? Because they never allowed you to enter the country.

The "No fly" list allows them to make it essentially impossible to enter without even the inconvenience of actually turning you away at the border.

Unlike Nature's laws, our laws are not facts. Writing that "We hold these truths to be self-evident" did not make them so, Americans are free only if and to the extent that all Americans make them free, and in the modern era I'm afraid there's precious little sign of that.

For all the other shenanigans that they’ve done, can you come up with even one case where an American citizen has been detained indefinitely at the border?

Also, you’re already across once you meet the border people. You’re not in no-man’s-land; the border is infinitely thin and you are already in the US at the checkpoint. This is the simplest habeas corpus petition ever.

There have been several cases where legal American Citizens have been put into deportation proceedings or formally deported. All it takes is for a border agent to choose not to believe the documents you’re handing over. There is no rule at the federal level that entitles noncitizens to trials. So a border agent declaring you a noncitizen without court oversight strips you of your constitutional rights. One US citizen was detained by ICE for 3 years, other reports exist of 1-year detentions. It all really depends on how poor you are and how backed up (by design) the system is.

Anyway, a citizen being turned away, shipped back, or put into deportation at the airport isn’t a far reach from any of this.

Do you have a link to any of these stories? I have heard of US citizens being detained and bullied at the border, but they were always eventually admitted into the country after a few hours of "purgatory".

Where would you even try to deport a US citizen? "Here, Spain, we don't think this guy is a US citizen, his passport doesn't look legit enough, can you take him?"

The 3-year detention story: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/01/540903038...

An incomplete wikipedia list with a number of citizens that were wrongfully deported from the U.S.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Americans_from_...

U.S. citizens having deportation detainers placed on them is suprisingly common: https://www.cato.org/publications/immigration-research-polic...

This guy was held for weeks: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/12/04/born-philad...

U.S. citizen detained without charge for a year and then freed: https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/detention/us-cit...

There are dozens of stories like these. I've listed a few, but to go further I'd recommend doing a web search.

Thanks for sharing. I guess the difference is that none of these stories involves crossing the border (or maybe I missed some details, that was a lot to read :). Still positively frightening that the system could so badly fail.

Unless you have the financial and time resources to fight back, “they” can do whatever they want. Just like cops “can’t” abuse their power, the power dynamics are so asymmetrically against most people that you simply have to hope everything goes well. Or know a senator who will go to bat for you.

I wonder how long until such unilateralism provokes nasty consequences - the law is to protect them from grudges as well. The solution to diffuse it is obvious yet sadly difficult - accountability.

Being "immune to justice" leads to taking matters into their own hands which is never pretty. It has a very long history - terrorists and insurgent can be called the descendents of Sicarii style attacks - original Zealot Hebrew fundamentalists knifing Romans and vanishing into crowd.

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