Hacker News Reader

Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

Not everyone who goes into illegal endeavors is the criminal mastermind you fancy that you would be if you turned to the dark side.

Hell, there are plenty of people dumb enough to video themselves or friends breaking and entering, beating up people and stabbing people, stealing cars, and the like and POST THESE VIDEOS TO YOUTUBE OR ON SOCIAL NETWORKS.

People do in fact cross borders with ridiculously incriminating things on their laptops and phones, such as photos of the kiddie sex tourism, email or logs of chats from the person who talked them into carrying drugs, and things like that.

View on HN

Clearly, if anything, we should have more random stops and searches, maybe even in the streets. That would catch more of these dumb criminals.

Why did you post this as a response to my comment? It has nothing to do with any point I was making (namely, correction of factual errors in rl3's comment).

Hmm, I read it as justification of the policies. If you didn't mean it as that, I retract it.

I took rl3's comment as basically saying that since it is so easy to send data across the border using the internet, only someone so extremely stupid that such people are unlikely to even exist would actually try to cross the border with a laptop or phone that contains evidence of a crime. The implication is then that it is fruitless to look at phones and laptops at the border to try to find criminals.

My response was trying to say that he's way off in his understanding of what people of average intelligence do when they do criminal things. There are plenty of arguments one can use to make a plausible case against widespread border searches. The argument that basically no one is dumb enough to carry a phone or laptop with incriminating data across the border is not one of them.

Should we randomly go into people's homes and demand people to open up their houses and kick them out pending investigation? Clearly, we can do that now if they are 100 miles from the border if we can confiscate laptops and hold it then we can confiscate homes and cars and hold them for investigation as well.

The same logic suggests that all customs searches are unreasonable; after all, they could also take place in your home.

Not exactly. You aren't considering that there's a threshold to overcome. All customs searches would be unreasonable if there were a trivial way to send items without going through customs.

Invading everyone's privacy to catch a few dumb criminals (because all non-dumb criminals would have just sent their data through the internet) is a really really bad tradeoff, because the cost:benefit ratio is too high.

I wasn't implying dumb or incompetent criminals don't exist. As you said, they do exist, and they do sometimes cross borders with ridiculously incriminating data in their possession.

My point was, I fail to see why such people can't be brought to justice via methods that don't involve shredding travelers' personal freedoms, the vast majority of whom are completely innocent.

Policies often have to strike a balance between positive and negative effects. When the negative greatly exceeds the positive, then the legitimacy of the policy should be called into question, even if the policy is effective at achieving its stated goal.

Data can be an extremely personal thing, and rummaging through it or storing it indefinitely, without any cause whatsoever, should be an embarrassment to any Western democracy that engages in the practice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com