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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Er, I don't get it. I do the same thing at every airport in the US: walk off the plane and straight into a taxi.

I think they're talking about international travel and not having to go through border control within the Schengen space even though you're traveling to different countries.

I flew once from Iraq to Sweden (in a private capacity). There was zero controls other than stamping the passport, passport control but no customs inspection. No check of bags and no question of what I might have been doing in Iraq or why I would go from there to Sweden. It was shocking. Just welcome to sweden and off to the street.

Hopefully they haven't changed. It's nice to see a place still left without the paranoia.

Border entry at airports is concerned with a) smuggling and b) immigration control. Passport control may have been all you saw but there was almost certainly heavy profiling and background checking going on behind the scenes. If you had matched a more suspicious pattern than "high-power passport without suspicious history flying an unusual route", you likely would have faced more scrutiny.

Yes, but border control isn't security. I don't go through security when I arrive in the US either. (I do have global entry but that just means I usually go through immigration faster.) If I have a connecting flight after arriving in the US I do sometimes have to go through security again with my carryon but that's a function of airport layout.

Looks like even OP was confused about it so I guess it wasn't something to be made sense of.

Just to be clear: I understand the difference. What I couldn’t do was explain to someone who has no concept that customs are not a security check. Or that you don’t need customs for (effectively) internal flights. I suspect part of this is that in the UK, we don’t get many internal flights (beyond connections), so people don’t have an experience of just walking off a plane and out of the airport.

Yes, I meant you were confused about the nature of the comment/question (like you mentioned in a sibling response somewhere). :)

I think the point is that some people expect security even where it would be pointless.

Basically this. She was confusing Customs with Security, I think.

Neither did I, thus why I didn’t really know how to respond.

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