Individually? It's extremely difficult other than "try not to appear suspicious" and bring a dumbphone when crossing borders.
The real protection is collective. Stopping the current administration is only the beginning; the Democrats are merely "not as bad" on this kind of issue. Broader anti-racism and anti-racist-media action is needed, because otherwise this kind of arbitary brutal border policy will win votes.
The Mayor of Stockton, while returning from China, was forced to give up his password and then subsequently had all electronic devices seized. That was in 2015; this isn't about race, the broader issue here is privacy and where do I rights kick in.
STOCKTON, Calif. (CN) — Stockton, Calif. Mayor Anthony Silva was arrested at his summer camp for underprivileged youth Thursday and faces multiple charges over his suspected involvement in an underage strip poker game. Silva was arrested at his camp by agents from the FBI, Stockton Police Department and the San Joaquin County District Attorney’s office. The incumbent mayor’s bail was set at $20,000. The FBI also recovered evidence of Silva secretly taping a conversation with a Stockton city employee, while another witness told investigators that Silva has cameras in his bedroom and at the Stockton Kid’s Club, Riebe said. The charges come amid recent revelations from the San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office that a gun owned by Silva was used in the 2015 killing of a 13-year old. Investigators say a semi-automatic pistol that was stolen from Silva was used in two separate Stockton shootings. Silva says he informed authorities his gun was missing in March 2015, a month after the gun was used in the fatal shooting of Rayshawn Harris. Officers recovered the weapon during a domestic disturbance unrelated to the mayor.
Silva is no longer mayor(lost re-election for some reason), trial proceedings are still going on.
Broader anti-racism and anti-racist-media action is needed, because otherwise this kind of arbitrary brutal border policy will win votes.
This is an issue much bigger than race and as soon as we stop compartmentalizing it into that it will be better for us all.
You turn it into another about race thing and people will tune out. You make people realize they are at risk no matter who they are and they might pay attention. That might sound tone deaf but the reality is people first and foremost care about themselves and their in-group before anything else. It's hard not to.
The problem is, the reason it does win votes, and the reason a lot of people want "law and order" and "tough on crime", is because they reason it won't apply to them, but to "those people". What is "those people" defined by in their minds, at least to a first a approximation before they consciously reason about it? Race.
Now, they might think in terms of it being for thugs and terrorists, instead of black people and Muslims, but they 'know' they themselves can't possibly be mistaken for either because they 'don't look like a thug/terrorist'. While the searches are indeed applied along racial lines, it will be hard to convince them otherwise, because they are mostly right.
So, sure, this is about liberty, about forestalling totalitarianism, about our human right to privacy and our political right to protection from unreasonable search, but it is also about race and about xenophobia. I am not sure failing to acknowledge that does us any favors strategically. At risk of going full Godwin's Law, there were a lot of things wrong with Nazism besides anti-semitism, but analyzing why people allowed the rise of Nazism without talking about anti-semitism is foolish.
Xenophobia != surveillance state or totalitarianism
For example japan or poland are fairly xenophobic and isolationist, but they don't practice a surveillance state or ask for your social media accounts at the border. Foreigners are free to enter as long as they don't overstay their welcome.
I would say that xenophobia is the natural state of homogeneous populations. Everything different is treated with suspicioun, but not necessarily overt opposition or hatred. Xenophobia only gets used as leverage by politicians to amplify and deflect other issues (such as income inequality) onto other groups. Fix those issues and some latent xenophobia isn't going to turn into problems.
I am not saying xenophobia inevitably leads to searching phones. But in the US, right now, the justification for the surveillance state is in a big part due to xenophobia and race relations. It is a major factor in the current pathology and we ignore it at our peril.
The law and order type will always find something to increase their powers. You're just trying to fix their current attack vector, which means they'll just use a different scare tomorrow. To have lasting improvements the security apparatus needs to be scaled down.
You are projecting your theoretical model of government-public relations onto the world, and ignoring the fact that race has been a major motivating factor in American politics for the last few centuries. I disagree with your claim that this is just strategic opportunism.
I think you are talking about two different groups. As in: will three letter agency type people have the incentive and the desire to expand their capabilities, independent of xenophobia and racism? Yes, absolutely. Do xenophobia and racism play a significant part on why large swats of the population are going along with this? Also, yes. A U.S. where most Americans don't fear foreigners from any part of the world is one where justifying scanners, pat downs at the airport and massive data collection becomes a lot harder for the kind of people whose core objective is to justify scanners, pat downs and massive data collection.
But this is also ignoring that there are very real reasons this is happening. Within the last couple of years we had the Bataclan, Nice, Orlando, etc, all directly from Islamic terror.
Does that mean Muslims should be discriminated against? Obviously not. However, this is a very blunt way of people trying to protect themselves (even if it's not effective or overreaching).
We also had significantly more deaths from things like school shootings and other violence not related to terrorism from Islamist groups, and yet we are pulling out funds for counter-extremism from all causes not related to Islamic terrorism (say, white-supremacist terrorism). By the numbers, the current counter-terrorism policies are an over-reaction, poorly thought out and unfairly target an enormous population that doesn't seem to pose in expectation a more significant risk than others:
http://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/27/14412420/terrorism-muslim... : "The study found that only 46 Muslim Americans (defined as “Muslims who lived in the US for an extended period”) were linked to violent extremism at home or abroad in 2016. The total Muslim American population is 3.3 million."
So, to prevent 46 or so crimes, affecting 54 or so people (say 300 if you think there are large numbers of wounded), we are de facto abrogating the rights of 3.3 million people, plus visitors. Nevermind that terrorism represents only 0.05% of violent crime, that violent crime itself is at its lowest in decades and that we never felt the need to become a surveillance state over said amount of crime. The only reason why people think it reasonable to do so now is that they associate Muslim with terrorist at a visceral irrational level, not because it makes sound logical sense. Hence, racism and xenophobia is a perfectly reasonable explanation.
Also keep in mind that, over time, treating any group better both at home and abroad reduces incidence of terrorism from that group. But the point is that the current incidence itself is not anywhere near the point where putting millions under surveillance is worth it.
Wikipedia: "Mateen was born Omar Mir Seddique[6] on November 16, 1986,[7] in New Hyde Park, New York, to Afghan parents"
(Similarly, the Bataclan attack was carried out by French/Belgian nationals)
So he was a US-born US national. Not an immigrant or green card holder.
> Does that mean Muslims should be discriminated against? Obviously not.
Yes! Exactly!
> To wave that off as "racism" isn't really fair
.. what? It's discrimination against a group of people by religion-inferred-from-ethnic-origin-or-skin-colour. That's exactly what racism is. It's not "waving it off" at all.
>The problem is, the reason it does win votes, and the reason a lot of people want "law and order" and "tough on crime", is because they reason it won't apply to them, but to "those people". What is "those people" defined by in their minds, at least to a first a approximation before they consciously reason about it? Race.
Well, race or nationality. I don't think Trump voters think American citizens will be subjected to authoritarian measures, or should be. They think their in-group is safe.
I don't know why you were downvoted; while it's true that racial minorities are targeted more often than most, many don't empathize with that. They only care once their own rights are threatened.
By making it clear that these issues harm everyone, we can prevent these actions from happening to anyone. People are willing to take away the rights of others, but generally are not willing to sacrifice their own.
Not sure why you are down-voted but this is true. Most of the anti-liberty policies come in disguise of we v/s bad guy arguments. The bad guys are often minorities.
I've observed this pattern: 'bad guy' is part of another group? That whole group is bad. 'bad guy' is part of the group of the person speaking: That's just an individual rotten apple, but it does not say anything about all of us.
Obviously. It all boils down to which group is in power and who is powerful. Minorities are going to get a fag end here. For example I see very little talk of illegals from Canada or Europe who are in USA. But authorities will only talk about Mexicans painting them as some kind of gangsters and criminals always. Indians or Chinese aren't that active in organized crime but their education and high skill is portrayed as evil "stealing jobs" phenomenon.
Do you think that, perhaps, the fact that all the Canadian gangs keep it under the radar while Latino and Black gangs do all the "represent" game with leaving disfigured bodies, tagging cities, hanging around streets wearing gang colors etc is relevant? I am sure that Canadian cartels and gangs are just as dangerous, pushing all the contraband maple syrup and making our kids addicted to sugar, but, somehow, they figured out the PR game and keep the news of their kidnappings, executions and drive-bys out of sight.
Unfortunately, I suspect that failing to have a the ability to grant border agents access to social media or email accounts will soon become grounds for detainment and further scrutiny by itself. If you are carrying a "dumb phone" or don't have email or social media set up on your phone, then what are you trying to hide?
Exactly - and some smart people do actually have "dumb" phones.
Or sometimes I think about ditching my GUI Linux for something really basic - same reason why some people stick with dumb phones - now what happens if I hand over full control over my neat z-shell to the TSA? Will he grep around or just consider me dangerous?
They're just going to copy the data off and some software will look for things by hash.
It would not surprisee if at some point, if we leave this tyranny unchecked, we will all be forced to hand over our devices while deboarding so they can be scanned while we wait in line for initial interrogation.
The documentation that comes when you are compelled to give over keys mentions that they will retain complete copies of any disks, drives, flash card, any piece of data until it is no longer relevant (read, forever).
I suggest installing a shell OS (with a neat GUI, no hacker-ish looks) on the Notebook's first partition, the rest (where the main Linux installation is residing) will be encrypted and can be decrypted and booted into only using a USB bootloader with the missing LUKS header (which can be downloaded later using a VPN, for example).
If they ask you "is there any hidden data on this device", you would have to respond in the affirmative. Lying to a border guard is a felony, there's no cute technical solution to this. They will, according to their own paperwork, make copies of any data they find interesting for future analysis.
Hmm, what if we keep some encrypted porn in the shell OS? "Yep, there is hidden data. Do I really need to decrypt my special folder because I really wouldn't like to? OK then, the password is.."
Disclaimer: this is all being speculative, of course. I'm not suggesting to lie to or misdirect a border guard in a real-life situation.
This is a perfect example of why the correct place to fight this is at the judiciary.
Trying to outsmart the border guards essentially makes you a smuggler. Sure you're trying to smuggle your own personal data rather anything nefarious, but either way - you're trying to beat them at their own game, on their own turf, where they have every advantage, constant practice, and effectively get to write their own rules.
Every fantastic example you dream up, you have to pray no-one's thought of it before. The game's rigged.
The only real way to win is to double down on the legal position of such searches.
TrueCrypt supported plausibly deniable encrypted partitions. When using something like this it'd be possible to deny the existence of encrypted data and lab analysis wouldn't turn anything up. Or so they claimed.
Individually? It's extremely difficult other than "try not to appear suspicious" and bring a dumbphone when crossing borders.
The real protection is collective. Stopping the current administration is only the beginning; the Democrats are merely "not as bad" on this kind of issue. Broader anti-racism and anti-racist-media action is needed, because otherwise this kind of arbitary brutal border policy will win votes.