4 ms·

"In other words, CBP is now claiming the authority to confiscate your cellphones, laptops, memory cards, and any other electronic devices if you won’t tell CBP

"In other words, CBP is now claiming the authority to confiscate your cellphones, laptops, memory cards, and any other electronic devices if you won’t tell CBP your passwords, and to retain the passwords you give them as well as the contents of those devices. Yes, this applies to U.S. citizens and permanent residents as well as visitors." That is just insane and unacceptable.

_jal 9y ago
People need to push back. I know there's risk, but if you take this shit, they just keep pushing. I will be traveling with throwaway, obviously tailored devices with insulting passwords, lock-screens and documents and a huge pile of encrypted chaff. Let them document me as a troublemaker. Better, let them document hundreds of thousands of us as troublemakers. CBP and ICE have been drifting towards authoritarian-shitheaddom for a long time and really needs a serious pruning/lobotomy. It won't stop until there's noise about it.
- throwUsVisitor 9y ago
  I'm happy to say that I do everything to make Border Control life miserable. I have big clients in US and while I generate for them big profits, I cannot accept payments due to my ethics. So I complained to legal divisions of my clients and asked to funnel money there. Every time I cross US border I refuse to show any data and insist on contact with my lawyers. And by my lawyers I always have big co legal divisions in mind. At average I spend 6 hours per border entry but I feel good about myself. I believe that Border Services still had worse that day.
  - tehlike 9y ago
    Thank you. Seriously. You are the real hero.
  - manicdee 9y ago
    Ah, so you are the reason I got an invasive cavity search. Sure you are the big hero, but you upset the people with the power to make everyone else’s lives miserable. Good to see that the rich still get things their way.
- mLuby 9y ago
  I understand your desire to push back. Having "opted out" at TSA checkpoints for a year, I can tell you that the righteous feeling does little to counteract annoyance from fellow travelers (especially those in my own party). Yes, en masse it would be effective, but until then it's not worth the individual effort IMO. Anyway, governments can't tolerate explicit affronts to their authority. The better course of action is for us to work together toto make it 1. trivial for everyone to hide their data, and 2. trivial for everyone to maintain vanilla data for plausible deniability. The end result is still a victory for privacy, but with far less friction with government at the individual level.
  - mulmen 9y ago
    This is an argument against representative democracy and assumes that we are already essentially at war with our government. Civil disobedience has a long and successful history in this country. The rule of law still stands. Establishing privacy measures as tool of criminals operating outside the law does no good. TSA/DHS needs to be lobotomized/euthanized. Vote.
    - mc32 9y ago
      The main problem for this is the vast majority of the population is totally okay with these procedures, so one cannot even argue against it nit being representative or it being repressive because if you put it to popular vote, you will not get the result you wish for.
      - mulmen 9y ago
        That's not how representative democracy works. We don't put every single issue up to a popular vote, we elect people to advance issues that we care about as voters. If you care about an issue then it's up to you to promote it in the public eye and work with your elected representatives to pass legislation. That may sound idealistic but it is the system we have and it does work. Vote. Support the ACLU. Support EFF.
    - mLuby 9y ago
- oefrha 9y ago
  Hopefully more U.S. citizens stand up and push back against this bullshit. As for me, a foreigner living in the U.S., there's really nothing I could do other than complying, since they can just kick me out at any time.
  - vlod 9y ago
    > As for me, a foreigner living in the U.S., there's really nothing I could do other > than complying, since they can just kick me out at any time. Be care.. on HN "there's really nothing I could" sounds a bit defeatist.. :P Some ideas.. One could use this as an opportunity to learn about how to still do work without using your predominate computer. Assuming if you lost your computer it would be a PITA to reset it? Not a good position to be in. But it's a solvable problem. Can your project be dockerized? Before you leave can can you have a AWS instance primed for you to hit it rather than localhost. Don't know about docker.. great opportunity. Do you have crazy configs/environ-files stored on your computer? Stick them in github with scripts that set them up from a clean machine. Is this all a pain? yeah of course.. but I'll bet you that you'll gain a whole bunch of new skills. The general thoughts here (AFAIK) is to bring a clean burner phone and a clean machine (such as chromeos with maybe a clean ubuntu crouton on it). Good luck... I'll look forward to your how-to post.. I'll sure there will be many HN'ers that will too. :)

_jal 9y ago

People need to push back. I know there's risk, but if you take this shit, they just keep pushing. I will be traveling with throwaway, obviously tailored devices with insulting passwords, lock-screens and documents and a huge pile of encrypted chaff. Let them document me as a troublemaker. Better, let them document hundreds of thousands of us as troublemakers. CBP and ICE have been drifting towards authoritarian-shitheaddom for a long time and really needs a serious pruning/lobotomy. It won't stop until there's noise about it.

throwUsVisitor 9y ago
I'm happy to say that I do everything to make Border Control life miserable. I have big clients in US and while I generate for them big profits, I cannot accept payments due to my ethics. So I complained to legal divisions of my clients and asked to funnel money there. Every time I cross US border I refuse to show any data and insist on contact with my lawyers. And by my lawyers I always have big co legal divisions in mind. At average I spend 6 hours per border entry but I feel good about myself. I believe that Border Services still had worse that day.
- tehlike 9y ago
  Thank you. Seriously. You are the real hero.
- manicdee 9y ago
  Ah, so you are the reason I got an invasive cavity search. Sure you are the big hero, but you upset the people with the power to make everyone else’s lives miserable. Good to see that the rich still get things their way.
mLuby 9y ago
I understand your desire to push back. Having "opted out" at TSA checkpoints for a year, I can tell you that the righteous feeling does little to counteract annoyance from fellow travelers (especially those in my own party). Yes, en masse it would be effective, but until then it's not worth the individual effort IMO. Anyway, governments can't tolerate explicit affronts to their authority. The better course of action is for us to work together toto make it 1. trivial for everyone to hide their data, and 2. trivial for everyone to maintain vanilla data for plausible deniability. The end result is still a victory for privacy, but with far less friction with government at the individual level.
- mulmen 9y ago
  This is an argument against representative democracy and assumes that we are already essentially at war with our government. Civil disobedience has a long and successful history in this country. The rule of law still stands. Establishing privacy measures as tool of criminals operating outside the law does no good. TSA/DHS needs to be lobotomized/euthanized. Vote.
  - mc32 9y ago
    The main problem for this is the vast majority of the population is totally okay with these procedures, so one cannot even argue against it nit being representative or it being repressive because if you put it to popular vote, you will not get the result you wish for.
    - mulmen 9y ago
      That's not how representative democracy works. We don't put every single issue up to a popular vote, we elect people to advance issues that we care about as voters. If you care about an issue then it's up to you to promote it in the public eye and work with your elected representatives to pass legislation. That may sound idealistic but it is the system we have and it does work. Vote. Support the ACLU. Support EFF.
  - mLuby 9y ago
oefrha 9y ago
Hopefully more U.S. citizens stand up and push back against this bullshit. As for me, a foreigner living in the U.S., there's really nothing I could do other than complying, since they can just kick me out at any time.
- vlod 9y ago
  > As for me, a foreigner living in the U.S., there's really nothing I could do other > than complying, since they can just kick me out at any time. Be care.. on HN "there's really nothing I could" sounds a bit defeatist.. :P Some ideas.. One could use this as an opportunity to learn about how to still do work without using your predominate computer. Assuming if you lost your computer it would be a PITA to reset it? Not a good position to be in. But it's a solvable problem. Can your project be dockerized? Before you leave can can you have a AWS instance primed for you to hit it rather than localhost. Don't know about docker.. great opportunity. Do you have crazy configs/environ-files stored on your computer? Stick them in github with scripts that set them up from a clean machine. Is this all a pain? yeah of course.. but I'll bet you that you'll gain a whole bunch of new skills. The general thoughts here (AFAIK) is to bring a clean burner phone and a clean machine (such as chromeos with maybe a clean ubuntu crouton on it). Good luck... I'll look forward to your how-to post.. I'll sure there will be many HN'ers that will too. :)