6 ms·

If you're traveling to the USA or China, take a burner phone.

• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• NoImmatureAdHom 3y ago
  I get the sense the implication is that the U.S. doesn't have strong protections. That's wrong. Many governments in allegedly civilized Western countries have security services with much more power than in the U.S., permission to seize and search your phone being pone of them (the U.K. and Australia are especially bad). The U.S. actually has unusually strong protections against the police in this regard and in others. You also might consider that usually these protections don't apply to you if you're a foreigner who's trying to get in to a country not your own. They have no obligation to let you in and they can ask anything they want in exchange for access.
  • jltsiren 3y ago
    The US also has unusually large differences between the rights of citizens and non-citizens. In the European way of thinking, most rights are human rights. Citizens only enjoy a limited set of additional rights. In particular, citizens have the right to enter the country, while non-citizens can be turned away. However, border officials do not have substantially wider powers at the border than the police have inside the country. You don't lose your constitutional rights just because you happen to be a non-citizen trying to enter the country illegally with the intention to commit crime.
    • refurb 3y ago
      https://www.wired.co.uk/article/europe-immigration-refugees-smartphone-metadata-deportations https://www.wired.co.uk/article/europe-immigration-refugees-... “In 2017 both Germany and Denmark expanded laws that enabled immigration officials to extract data from asylum seekers’ phones. Similar legislation has been proposed in Belgium and Austria, while the UK and Norway have been searching asylum seekers’ devices for years.”
      • jltsiren 3y ago
        Note that the powers were given to immigration officials, not border officials. Those people are bureaucrats working for the local equivalent of USCIS.
      • jacquesm 3y ago
        Border officials != immigration officials, asylum seeker != all people crossing a border.
        • refurb 3y ago
          I was responding to “the EU is not like the US where foreigners have the same rights as citizens”. Whether it’s immigration or border officials is irrelevant to that comment.
          • jacquesm 3y ago
            No, it is very relevant and if you don't understand why I wonder why you would bother to comment in the first place.
            • refurb 3y ago
              Huh? My comment directly disproves this claim I replied to. “However, border officials (in the EU) do not have substantially wider powers at the border than the police have inside the country. You don't lose your constitutional rights just because you happen to be a non-citizen trying to enter the country illegally with the intention to commit crime.” Clearly asylum seekers in the EU do not have the same rights as EU citizens. Hence, my response was directly relevant.
              • jacquesm 3y ago
                No, you are conflating the immigration process (which is an attempt by an individual to obtain the same rights that citizens have whilst in the country) with the crossing of a border (which is a much simpler process and is usually handled right at the border). The two are completely disjoint. The article deals with border crossings, not with the immigration process as such, though usually if you want to immigrate you first have to cross a border. This is why the United States is so picky about people that start their immigration process once they are already inside the United States. They would much prefer you to start that process from without so that you can be stopped and refused entry at the border. Doing that later - for instance, through deportation - is much harder. Asylum seekers anywhere do not have the same rights as the citizens of that particular country or immigration area: if they did we wouldn't call them asylum seekers. Asylum seekers are simply a special class of immigrants for whom special processes and documentation requirements may apply and who may have extra rights based on their asylum seeking status. There are whole bodies of law around this theme. Finally: the EU doesn't have a constitution. So you can't directly compare the EU situation to the United States one anyway, and from both a border crossing and immigration perspective the two are vastly different. The thing you are referring to is that specifically undocumented asylum seekers (of which there are many) can have their phones searched to ensure that their story matches. You can agree or not with that policy (personally I'm conflicted about it, I can see both sides here) but that isn't anything at all like the border guards being allowed to search any phone they think is interesting.
    • networkchad 3y ago
      [dead]
    • HWR_14 3y ago
      The US has very few rights that apply only to US citizens. All visitors have 1st amendment rights to free speech, rights to legal council, to a jury, to avoid self-incrimination, etc.
      • is_this_valid3 3y ago
        The US Constitution does not authorize delegation or re-delgation of right-granting or selective-right-limiting to law enforcement (or to physicians). The US Constitution serves to specify dates and times, values, and specifically what the government may not do. Write a function to determine whether a given person has a given right. What attributes of the person are constitutionally relevant to determining whether a person has a given equal right? Which conditionals are acceptable in a function that equally protects equal rights? Then, Write a function to determine whether all persons have Equal Protection of Equal Rights.
        • HWR_14 3y ago
          Other than "law is not code", I have no idea how to respond to you. I have no idea what you are saying.
          • is_this_valid3 3y ago
            The government has Unconstitutionally and thus illegally limited the rights of persons where the government has discriminated on the basis of disability and of citizenship. John Locke and John Stuart Mills wrote about Liberty. If it be unequal, it isn't liberty at all. Why this phrase? > Equal Justice Under Law
      • jltsiren 3y ago
        The situation is as you describe if you believe the US Constitution. Unfortunately the Constitution is an obsolete piece of paper that no longer serves as the constitution of the US. The real constitution has long been the set of creative interpretations issued by the Supreme Court. According to those interpretations, non-citizens often have substantially fewer rights than citizens. That was particularly obvious in the aftermath of 9/11.
  • soraminazuki 3y ago
    > The U.S. actually has unusually strong protections against the police in this regard and in others. Uh, what protections exactly? The article explains in detail how nobody has any protection against phone searches at the border, including lawyers with privileged information.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • john_the_writer 3y ago
      Agreed. The right to complain I suppose. Like blowing raspberries up wind.
    • NoImmatureAdHom 3y ago
      Yeah I did a bad job of explaining myself. I was thinking of border searches as a subset of the protections of privacy (in the U.S., operationalized as protections against unreasonable search and seizure). Overall people tell the police to fuck off all the time when they come asking, and you have strong protections when you're doing that. The police rely heavily on people not knowing their rights.
  • avgcorrection 3y ago
    > I get the sense the implication is that the U.S. doesn't have strong protections. That's wrong. Many governments in allegedly civilized Western countries have security services with much more power than in the U.S., permission to seize and search your phone being pone of them (the U.K. and Australia are especially bad). The U.S. actually has unusually strong protections against the police in this regard and in others. But I'm confused. How does this apply to people who would use burner phones in the US? Presumably US citizens who live in the US won't use a burner phone in the US and keep their real phone in a stash in Mexico/Canada. > You also might consider that usually these protections don't apply to you if you're a foreigner who's trying to get in to a country not your own. They have no obligation to let you in and they can ask anything they want in exchange for access. Oh right, so this doesn't apply to people who the advice was addressed to. You were just having a nationalistic knee-jerk reaction. Good to know.
    • NoImmatureAdHom 3y ago
      Yeah I didn't do a great job of expressing myself. Here's another try: the list [U.S., China] implies the U.S. does a really profoundly terrible job of protecting your rights to privacy (in the U.S., a prohibition of unreasonable search and seizure) because China is dystopian-abysmal on this scale. When, in fact, the U.S. does a pretty good job especially in comparison to other developed Western nations: you can absolutely refuse a search when the police show up, and indeed you should unless YOU called them. Their tactics include trying to make it seem like you don't have a choice, but you do. Many other developed nations are much worse in this regard (the U.K. and Australia are particularly bad). But I was thinking of France, personally. It's hard to imagine French people refusing to help the police because, as far as I know, you really can't and you have to answer their questions. This ruling in the 5th Circuit (so it only applies to the 5th Circuit?) is bad and reduces the U.S.'s standing with regard to how strongly it protects you against unreasonable search and seizure, but the U.S. still does a pretty good job overall. The 100-mile thing is, in practice, not a thing for U.S. citizens in the U.S. It's still very bad. But the border police aren't the people seizing and searching your phone if you're already in the U.S., it's the local police or the FBI and they have to get a warrant. It's a similar situation with strong protections of other rights, like the right to free speech. Denmark is considering making public Koran burning illegal, for instance, or the right to peaceably assemble / protest, which the U.K. just got rid of. Part of it is the very concept of "rights" as instantiated in the U.S. Constitution. >Oh right, so this doesn't apply to people who the advice was addressed to. You were just having a nationalistic knee-jerk reaction. Good to know. The notable part of the article to ME was that the border police can search returning Americans' phones without a warrant. I think the default situation in developed countries is that if you're a foreigner trying to get in the police can search you without a warrant, and maybe that includes phones? It's a shitty situation, but that's how it is. As it turns out, I have a passport from somewhere other than the U.S. :-)
• knifie_spoonie 3y ago
  Add Australia to that list
  • john_the_writer 3y ago
    And Canada.
    • throw0101b 3y ago
      > And Canada. As a Canadian: what?