It shows a hole in our rule of law. There's a case in front of SCOTUS, Hernández vs. Mesa, exploring the Constitutional protection of foreign nationals at the U.S. border [1]. In 2010, an unarmed fifteen-year-old Mexican boy was shot in the head by a U.S. Border Patrol agent. The boy was in a culvert jointly patrolled by the U.S. and Mexico, but officially, the agent was in the United States and the boy in Mexico.
This more proximate story profiles a single U.S. Customers and Border Protection agent traversing the personal and sensitive data of a minority (by sexual orientation) citizen of a friendly nation. The agent wields sole and arbitrary power to detain, question, seize and arrest. And he does so with impunity. (Our government declined to prosecute Jesus Mesa, Jr., from Hernández vs. Mesa, despite him having made up claims of the victim throwing rocks at him, later disproven.)
We're on Hacker News, so instead of depressed drivel I'll suggest a solution. We need legal insurance for the U.S. border crossing. Get extrajudicially harassed by a numpty? Your monthly fee covers a competent lawyer. (Maybe use the AirHelp model [2]--you only pay if they succeed.) We also need rapid data exfiltration and reintroduction techniques. Wiping my iPhone and Mac, traversing the border, and then hoping my Internet on the other side is fast (and secure) enough to reload my apps and data within a day isn't reasonable.
