"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."
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.
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.
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.
>I can tell you that the righteous feeling does little to counteract annoyance from fellow travelers (especially those in my own party).
Phuu.. then tell them up front you'll meet them at the gate.
I great excuse (I have read this somewhere) is that you've heard they keep screwing the calibration of the of the ray-machine and over zapping people and don't want to trust your life to some min wager who really don't care if you lose 10 years or not.
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.
It's just an argument in favor of a private sector solution. ;)
War with our government is rather hyperbolic. Only nation-states can go to war—citizens are just traitors and terrorists.
- The rule of law is only as good as the people's ability to hold each other accountable. Secret rulings and operations violate that contract.
- Nobody's talking about doing anything criminal. Law enforcement operated just fine before encryption, and they'll keep us safe even when everyone has secure private communications (again).
As for voting,
- As a politician, voting for "security" over privacy bothers a few constituents and just annoys the rest. Voting the other way has a non-zero chance to ending your career when the next terrorist attack happens.
- The national security agencies (and contractors) have a strong incentive to acquire power (funding/authority), which increases their ability to seek more power. The privacy charities seek to remove that power, which does not increase their ability to seek more power. In a fight between a self-reinforcing loop and a self-balancing one, I expect the former to win.
- J Edgar Hoover wasn't a unique phenomenon. Power corrupts.
But really, if everyone had unsearchable data, what's the worst that could happen (that couldn't already)?
I'm all for privacy protections and private sector solutions. I think that's just a good idea in general even in the absence of government surveillance. The network is compromised, etc.
I don't think we should throw up our arms and say that it is a waste of time to try and change the way DHS and TSA conduct themselves. If we do not protect our rights we will lose them. There is nothing new here. You seem to believe that citizens of the United States have no power to influence their government. I reject this belief.
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.
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.
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.
> 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. :)
Yes, this applies to U.S. citizens and permanent residents as well as visitors."
That is just insane and unacceptable.