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It sucks that this is how it works, but that is what the survey is for. They already know all the answers, they just want to see how you respond.

For eg. they already know the date, your flight number, your passport number, your history - it is all about getting you in a situation where you answer questions and can be analyzed.

The Isrealis are really good at it. They realized that security through innspecting every person and every square centimeter of luggage is too expensive and isn't as effective.

A lot of their security at airports depends on picking out people and just asking them a random question or two ('why are you here') and seeing the response. If you have ever been asked the time, or the directions to the mens room, or about a flight from a tourist looking person at an Israel airport, chances are that they may have been an agent. There is a front-line of plain clothed who look around on the ground and pass on potential targets to uniformed officers.

There was a paper I remember reading sub-titled "Can you really catch terrorist by asking them if they are terrorists" and the conclusion was that yes, you can - and you do - and not because you know they will answer 'no', but by how they answer and their body language, among other factors (much of which modern governments keep secret).

There was sometime in how your brother answered that steered them towards not allowing him in. There are a lot of people who also make similar mistakes on immigration forms and are still let in.

Article is here if anyone is interested (saves you a google) -

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1336571/Terr...

It works so well for us because nobody, and I literally mean no other state in the world speaks THE LANGUAGE.

When you grow up here you get used to being around all kinds that you previously never fully visualized as actual, walking-talking flesh-and-blood people. There's the Russian-speaking section to which I belong, the local Palestinians, the Ethiopian section, quite a lot of the Moroccan people, as well as many small _Iraqi / Druzi / some part of Europe that speaks not-quite-Russian_ escapees. They all have their quirky chains of characteristic behaviours and you sort of learn to place people in those groups pretty fast.

And yes, all of them have children that've grown up here, and fuck all knows what group any of them belong to (unless they look and act like their parents).

Israel is a sort of an ISLAND, and as anyone who visited Japan will tell you islanders are WEIRD. And sensitive to foreigners.

Interesting, do Arabs pretend to be Jews to pass the security?

Arab Jews certainly don't.

That's a strange question. How do you "pretend" something when the security personnel have your passport information, and for citizens, a lot more?

E.g. by buying a fake russian passport for $200, stating your nationality is Jewish.

It would be a career limiting move - to put it mildly - to try to pass Israeli immigration with a fake $200 passport that states that you are Jewish when you're not.

They already know all the answers

That's nonsense. Ever commit "moral turpitude"? You'd need to be a historian of the law to know what they're on about, and the peons behind the desks certainly don't know all the answers.

They also didn't know how to interpret my H-1B after my division was purchased by another company, even at the supervisor level, though I had a thick binder from the company lawyers to explain it all - I didn't use it in the end, I did the visa waiver instead.

I'd maintain that almost all people would be turned back by CBP if their lives were inspected closely enough and the laws and questions interpreted literally enough. It's a game; you need to know which questions they think they have the answer to, and answer as expected for them; and admit no wrongdoing elsewhere. And you may still end up with a jobsworth behind the counter - though my experience of most CBP personnel is that they are reasonably cheerful and pleasant.

I'm talking about customs and immigration clearance, not visa applications. All flights into the USA are now pre-screened with airlines forwarding all passenger info prior to departure. They literally know all the answers and have no real need for the cards you fill out.

edit: I don't have the link with me atm, but there was a Wired (I believe) story about the center that is responsible for collecting all the data in pre-screening and the technical challenge. As inputs they have airline data and data exchange agreements with governments that are part of the visa waiver program, amongst others

I've entered the US 15 times in the past 5 years; I've been through the transition from filling out forms in the arrivals hall, to getting landing cards with your boarding pass, to ESTA pre-authorization. I've gone through with visas and without, I've gone through the US embassy process etc.; I've even sometimes gone through CBP before I left Europe, in Shannon.

They still ask stupid questions, whether it's on a website or on paper.

They're not asking what thoughtcrimes/sins you've committed, they're asking you directly if you've ever been arrested, which they ~do~ know the circumstances of.

"Are you seeking entry to engage in [...] immoral activities"? - what on earth are "immoral activities", and what business is it of the state? Surely they should be asking about illegal activities?

"Are you a drug abuser or addict"? - I think almost every adult has abused alcohol at some point.

Etc.

> There was sometime in how your brother answered that steered them towards not allowing him in.

Are you a mind reader?

If not how do you know that?

All I see is an overzealous border guard refusing a family to enter a country to spend their money on a holiday.

Lose-Lose.

And dumb to boot.

On the other hand, you don't want to be the guy who let in a person who then goes on to commit an act of terrorism(or any crime, really). With that in mind, I can understand the guard airing on the side of caution, even if it is a bit ridiculous in this case.

There's a simple cure for that: Isolationism. Simply close your borders and call it a day.

I suspect it only goes the other way mainly in such minor, insignificant cases to build up the stats to satisfy the bilateral agreements, which go back for a long time.

This is what Churchill meant by "special relationship" and the agreement which Tony Benn oversaw when he was in office. The price set for the Polaris was Her Majesty's subjects' data. All of it.

My brother answered no because whilst he was arrested he was never charged or convicted

-> http://craphound.com/littlebrother/

http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/21783-the-government-is-profili...

Tony Blair I'd say. Not Tony Benn's sort of thing at all!

Like most politicians, Tony Benn changed with time. Although in the unlikely way: the other way around.
Tony Blair wasn't around Nassau (Trident, the successor to Polaris, was signed off by Thatcher, and it also precedes Blair).

youtu.be/rokTiJfL4WY

Sorry, I was about as wrong as is possible!

no problem, History isn't simple (for many reasons)

Certainly, the presence of nuclear weapons on their territory involves, for Europeans, multiple risks. Many of them are similar to the risks and dangers faced by the citizens of any of the countries possessing an atomic arsenal. The usefulness and desirability of which may be subject to debate. Including whether the risks are worth to be taken in the service of a politico-military strategy of national defence (or, conversely, must be rejected in view of universal peace and total disarmament). It is up to each and everyone to take a stance according to their beliefs, their world views, their perception and ranking of hazards, et cetera. For us here, all this is irrelevant. Because in this case, the question does not even arise. Thanks to another dimension of NATO nuclear "sharing", which is highly reflective of transatlantic relations. Whereas in the nuclear power countries the debate can focus on the articulation of the nuclear force with an overall strategy (importance attributed, or not, to the concept of deterrence), here, to the contrary, the (U.S.) nuclear force, and the myth of the protective umbrella that accompanies it, is a pretext used to justify the lack of (European) strategy. As well as providing a comfortable smokescreen that allows the governments of the old continent to stay, ultimately, flawlessly aligned on the United States – even if this means to become accomplices of a nuclear strategy in the development and implementation of which they cannot even dream of having a little bit of say. Alas, they already feel happy when they are, more or less correctly and more or less timely, informed on the subject.

It turned out that because he had been arrested aged 19 and failed to declare it that the border people felt that he had answered fraudulantly when challenged on "Have you ever been arrested?".

What interpretation should they have taken from it?

For example, that since Clinton also answered fraudulently when challenged, he shouldn't be allowed to fly either. Nixon got caught too -- I presume he also did fly afterwards. But obviously some are more equal; 1984 Was Not Supposed To Be An Instruction Manual.

He was turned back because he lied (unknowingly) when the asked him if he'd been arrested.

I have to wonder if they actually expect people to be honest about that. You paid a lot for that plane ticket, and these people can turn you away for what amounts to any arbitrary reason. Would you really want to tell them about how "undesirable" you are?

Apparently they do, if you are turned away for not being honest.

You're phrasing this as if he was dishonest, but he may have been merely forgetful. Ask me what I did 20 years ago and I probably wouldn't know either. Was that time I got taken into a police station for driving a French car in the Netherlands an arrest or not? I really don't know and I think if I judged that I'd never been arrested (not charged, nothing heard from since) that I would be on the right side of that line.

So this could easily happen to me. Or, it could happen to me if I still came to the US, which I don't.

The UK has a law called the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, within that is the notion of classes of criminal record being spent.

I don't know the specifics, but you always have to declare the equivalent of felonies, but for misdemeanours you can lawfully not declare them after some period of time in which your debt is considered repaid and the record spent.

The whole of the EU has such laws. I think most people within the EU would regard this as just a part of living in the civilised west.

And the most simple part of that is that if you arrested and never charged, or even charged but acquitted during trial, or even arrested and cautioned... then you never need to declare it. You can quite literally forget about it after some relatively short period of time, I think it's a year or 3.

Going back to my brother. Never charged, never cautioned, never went to trial, released without any impact whatsoever... just a bad day, worth forgetting and after 20 years definitely forgotten.

I think almost everyone I know would've said no to the question quite honestly believing that it's a perfectly reasonable and honest answer.

To reply to myself, the thing that I took away from his telling of this experience and watching his wife almost cry when they got to the part about boarding the plane back with the children... it's this:

Every thing that you ever do is recorded somewhere. Every person has a file whether they think they do or not. This file will only ever be used against you.

And Europe remembers such a thing... it was only 1990 that the Stasi was dissolved. Yet here we are constructing an even more powerful and permanent version of "a file on everyone".

My brother's demonstration was a worker's one, not political. But don't you see that if attending a political rally risks arrest and permanent repercussions, even if you were innocent of everything save for having an opinion... then are we not already at the point in which to hold an alternate political view is to risk inserting something into your file (it exists anyway) which could permanently affect your life.

Who knows what the future holds, but for my brother it's unlikely to involve working for a company that ever expects travel to the USA. Thus, one is forced to modify their behaviour to avoid being penalised by the current system.

Isn't that what the effect of the Stasi was?

I mean, being European, I find it hard to see how history isn't repeating itself on an ever grander scale now that there are tools that allow it to do so.

I think part of the problem is we have a perverted sense of "Godwin's law", such that making allusions to the past is considered "losing the conversation". The past it seems is no longer something that we are supposed to learn from, and the notion that there may be parallels between the past and the present is now termed 'offensive'.

In a lesser forum, you would likely be dismissed out of hand for mentioning the Stasi, even though your reasons for mentioning it are very sound. How can we hope to avoid the past if we refuse to talk about it?

obviously some needed the files the instant they were up for grabs:

CIA agents acquired the records after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall

only to return them, when they became only a piece of history (I wonder about any copies)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/703303.stm

I think about this often too. I think the answer ultimately lies somewhere in the realm of "history is cyclical." A society's collective memory seems to fade after a few hundred years.

America today is an excellent example of that. The founders came from a time of tyranny and oppression, and worked hard to try to prevent that in their new country. And yet a lot of how our government today works is, I imagine, very much contrary to what the founding fathers envisioned.

You can be detained for seemingly no reason by police almost anywhere (see the ACLU's "constitution-free zone"), prisons and courts have become a means of revenge, not justice or rehabilitation, the president is increasingly seen as a king-like figure ("Something's wrong with the country? Must be the president's fault. What's he going to do to fix it?"), and--without much exaggeration--we're a small jump away from a total surveillance state, as this article emphasizes. In many ways we're already there, and that's just the stuff we know about.

In Europe, as you mentioned, the Stasi were around until just recently. There are still grandparents alive who remember what the continent went through during WW2. (My own is one of them.) European society's memory is still fresh, and they won't repeat mistakes they remember. I think that's why there are so many privacy-protecting laws enshrined in the EU.

We should pay attention to how countries recently emerging from oppression or war, like Romania, Serbia, or Bosnia, handle the internet. I'll bet they'll be the bastions of internet freedom in the coming decades.

But what of the US? Maybe we're trapped in cyclical history. Maybe in 50 years things will be bad enough for people to get up in arms, and we'll start over just like we did a few hundred years ago. Who knows.

A society's collective memory seems to fade after a few hundred years.

A few hundred years? Try a few decades.

In the 1940s, the USA fought totalitarianism. Then we had a major fight against Communism. In both struggles, a major part of our self image is that we, unlike the totalitarian states we struggled against, were a free country. If, in a movie in the 70s, you saw the German officer saying, "Papers, please", that was a sure sign that they were the enemy - not living in a free state.

Today we live in a state that would be instantly recognizable as a totalitarian state. Just like past totalitarian states, the excuse is our security. Do you think that I'm exaggerating? 20 years ago it was common to not need an ID to board a plane, with it being reasonably common that the person whose name was on the ticket was not the person holding the ticket. (That would generally be because someone had bought someone else's return ticket because that was cheaper than buying a one-way ticket.) Today you not only need ID, you go through a thorough search and most take it for granted that we might go through a virtual strip search to get onto the plane.

Can I make this worse? Actually, I can. Nobody will show you the law requiring ID to fly. There was actually a lawsuit filed about this. John Gilmore lost, and STILL didn't get to see the law. (See http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2004-03-... for random verification.)

A few decades is spot on. The Bush era lies/media complicity to march us into Iraq were eerily reminiscent of the Gulf of Tonkin lie LBJ used to get us into Vietnam. It was so obvious to me. One of the things that spooked me out is that anyone who challenged the prevailing push to war was marked "unpatriotic" and "unamerican". Shut up and support our troops. I thought such sentiment could never take root in a country that had even the slightest clue about 20th century totalitarian history, particularly with regard to 1930s Europe.

This. I think this form of non-judicial "punishment" and its effects in terms of people being afraid and hence modifying their behavior can be a form of censorship and political repression that is rarely discussed.

This also has a bearing on discussions whenever someone talks about freedom of expression.

> The whole of the EU has such laws. I think most people within the EU would regard this as just a part of living in the civilised west.

The US is not all that different. You'd get a court order for the record to be expunged. Although each state has its own laws

In many (most? all?) states here you can have misdemeanors expunged from your record after a couple of years without incident as well.

In the USA, after 7 years, you can have past offenses removed from your record. In fact, you can have all public records removed. I know of a case where a person successfully petitioned a local newspaper to go back and remove the mention of her arrest from their web-accessible archive.

> What interpretation should they have taken from it?

It wasn't any of their business in the first place, but since they were nosing around where they shouldn't my money would be on 'forgetful'.

Police records are routinely exchanged between various countries. This is an entirely different matter.

Well, it's hard for me to feel much sympathy for him. They didn't ask if he was convicted, right? They asked if he'd been arrested. And he lied.