If the alternative to invasive surveillance is terrorists flying planes into our buildings and killing thousands of innocent people, then a little extra hassle at the airport is a small price to pay.
That's how most people think. Finding the incorrect implicit assumptions made by these arguments is left as an exercise to the reader.
Easily countered with "So what's your email account and password?".
(I love watching the logical contortions that come out next "Well I didn't mean _I've_ got nothing to hide! Or I didn't mean I don't have the right to hide it from _you_ Or or or... Think of the _chiiiiiildren!!! You're probably a terrorist!")
But this affects your own people even those people, that have enough money to fly out of your massive country and not some messy and suspective underclass.
They don't fight for democracy elsewhere. They fight for dominion and economic subjugation of those people.
They fight for the right to buy up all their mining and oil rights, set up Walmarts and McDonalds, subject them to Hollywood movies and American music, and convince them they need to buy iPhones and iPads for every person in their household...
If you're treating the phone as a 'good' as indicated in the quotes on this story, you can inspect my phone as a good. You can look at the phone. You can xray it. You can open up the back cover to ensure it's a real battery inside and not something more sinister. All that would be fine and fall within what the law was intended for.
What the government is actually asking you to do is unlock your digital key to your entire digital identity for them to do with as they wish. Your phone has direct access to all your email accounts, all your personal and work files within the cloud (Dropbox, Box, iCloud, Google Drive, etc), your entire address book, your chat history, all your personal photos, your private PGP you use to sign communications to prove they came from you, etc, etc.
Asking to inspect your phone is fine. Asking to have complete access to your entire digital life, history, and identity is not. If I'm asked for the former, go ahead and inspect it, I put it through the scanner on every flight. If I'm asked for the latter, the answer will be no.
This is vastly different than physical goods inside boxes or briefcases, which all physically pass through the border in an inspectable manner.
As an aside I am not surprised this happened in Canada. I lived in Canada for a few years and then returned to the UK. It's not obvious to people who have not lived in both places, if you only visit you would not see this but Canada carefully cultivates an image of itself abroad and there is a stark difference in how authoritarian Canada is compared to the UK. I still know people who live there and the way the authorities at all levels treat even their own Canadian citizens would not be tolerated in the UK. Often times you cannot talk about this with Canadians as they will defend the way things are done and say the infringements on freedom are for a good reason. The citizenry is generally happily compliant and only outsiders who are used to more freedom notice it.
I think the compliance reasons are why they also put up with government restrictions on business in telecoms, air industry and even the dairy industry, look up the Canadian cheese smuggling arrests made a couple of years ago :-)
Border guards demanding your phone will likely happen in every country soon if not already. They take mine at US border and France.
Telecoms in Canada are just as corrupt as the US where they established monopolies long ago and now squat on spectrums to prevent any new competition. Huawei almost bought their way in to Canada then the Americans panicked and the deal was lost http://www.cbc.ca/m/news/politics/canada-at-risk-from-chines...
Even if allowed access to personal devices, data is slippery enough that it could be stored in almost anything. Here's yet another example of taking away rights in a way that does nothing to deter actual crime. Hopefully the court understands technology enough to make the right call, but I'm not counting on it.
Since I now had time to waste, I asked to see the customs lady's supervisor, and then berated the person who inspected my laptop for not having any idea how to do this sort of search properly. So, I ended up sitting both the customs lady and her supervisor there for another hour or so while I taught them how to use undelete and some basic free forensic tools.
I then handed them a bill for an hour of my time and left to wait for the next plane.
I like to think it took them a while to process just what the hell had happened. Mindless securistas like that need to be humiliated at every turn, or they'll never stop. Society - the segment of society with which they interact - must make it clear that their job is not wanted, not needed, and not welcome.
This was in Montreal in 2009, if anyone cares.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/18/glenn-greenwald...
>"Officers are trained in examination, investigative and questioning techniques. To divulge our approach may render our techniques ineffective. Officers are trained to look for indicators of deception and use a risk management approach in determining which goods may warrant a closer look"
This statement makes it look like they noticed something about him that prompted the search.
- Here's my phone, sir. - I see it has a password, give me the password. - Mhhh... OK. It is 1234. - Oh, I see you have Dropbox app installed. I need the Dropbox password. - Mhhh... OK. It is 5678. - Oh I see you have a GPG encrypted file in Dropbox. I will need to decrypt that. Give me the password. - Mhhh... I can't... It's encrypted with a public key and I don't have the private key on me. - Ok, boys! Take this guy! He is clearly obstructing.
You could then perform an over the air recovery once safely away from the border.
(Preferrably one you can actually live in?)
The shrinking life space makes me contemplate suicide.
I'm hoping Elon gets us to Mars and we get to leave the B-Ark behind on this once-nice rock that we're busy destroying for ourselves...
I can no longer assess my own security in this world. What if the country I reside in decides to go after my kind of minority?
The problem is not in suppressing impulses, but in finding a way to live a satisfactory life. Which is becoming harder and harder. Rationally, why continue living if you feel under water most of time?
This is horrible and ridiculous.
I fly internationally on business and the Canadian border officials are the worst I've run across.
I personally don't care what invisible, made-up lines you were born within or without. Do you?
Considering the amount of rights you posses correlate directly to what invisible lines you're currently in, I think just about everybody cares, actually. Until nation states actually go away, they are very much important.
Personally, I don't want to be "ruled" by anybody and I don't really believe in "law". However, I don't assume possible to believe that people actually would be kind to each other and live in utopia: it is very likely that there will be somebody who will want to make use of other's unprotectedness, so the society will have to regulate it somehow. But the real problem is there is a lot of tasks to be done by the members of the society "together" (like building roads and stuff), and the most active/authoritative people in this society are practically the government, so there will be governments. And who has power, can abuse it. Therefore, it doesn't matter how much I dislike current governments: it is as it is, no use to talk about that.
However, it is relatively fair to want "not to be touched as long as you don't touch others". So I don't really care how those, who are "the government" will solve questions like who controls some territory: as long as there's no war between these countries and I'm not doing anything that was allowed in the first country, but not in the second one (like carrying a gun on the street) I'd like to never notice I actually "left country". Somehow it is possible in Europe (to certain degree: to the less degree that I can wish for, by the way, but nevertheless), but not between USA and Canada, who aren't fighting with each other, AFAIK.
Also, it is trendy to justify everything with some "dangerous aggressive nation out there, being terrorist menace for us". But as it happens, things usually have some reason to happen. And "aggressive nations" aren't that aggressive unless you abuse them somehow: say, by invading their country or at least drawing (without any real purpose: just because you can) obviously offensive pictures on public resources about people they love and respect.
Agreed, but the tail of that particular dinosaur is going to do some horrific damage as it thrashes around in the tarpit. Nation-states are becoming more powerful at the same time they're becoming less useful and less necessary.
False statements, evasion of duties
153. No person shall
(b) to avoid compliance with this Act or the regulations, (i) destroy, alter, mutilate, secrete or dispose of records or books of account, (ii) make, or participate in, assent to or acquiesce in the making of, false or deceptive entries in records or books of account, or (iii) omit, or participate in, assent to or acquiesce in the omission of, a material particular from records or books of account;
I'm not a lawyer, but I would be pretty dismayed if a court agrees that this covers withholding a password.
The question is "Can I be forced to unlock my own phone? Under what circumstances? Under what circumstances can I be charged for refusing to do so?"
If you haven't already guessed, I use a complex swipe pattern, one that uses all nine points and cannot be determined from reading the grease streaks, at least not easily. I know this because I moved to the current pattern after my daughter unlocked my phone by reading the grease streak. I changed the pattern and handed it back. It even used the previous pattern. She took one luck, uttered an obscenity, and handed back the phone.
Can I be compelled to describe how to perform the swipe? To describe the pattern? To guide the agent? Interesting questions....
Yes, yes and yes.
Until there is legal precedent, if they want into your phone and you don't provide them access, you'll be in trouble. Any "cleverness" regarding a security code will likely make it worse.
More operating systems should be doing this, including desktop ones. Windows makes multiple accounts too obvious.
From now on, I'm backing it up and wiping it before I get to the border. Just on principle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
"This doctrine is not actually an exception to the Fourth Amendment, but rather to the Amendment's requirement for a warrant or probable cause. Balanced against the sovereign's interests at the border are the Fourth Amendment rights of entrants. Not only is the expectation of privacy less at the border than in the interior,the Fourth Amendment balance between the interests of the Government and the privacy right of the individual is also struck much more favorably to the Government at the border.This balance at international borders means that routine searches are "reasonable" there, and therefore do not violate the Fourth Amendment's proscription against "unreasonable searches and seizures"
I would say that at least 70-80% of these stories leave out very important details and contexts - to mold what happened to fit whatever narrative the spinners subscribe to.
For example -
The person could have been importing a large amount of goods with him that exceeded the value he stated.
Once questioned about the disparity, he might have made statements about having the transactions documented in his phone.
The boarder agents would then have asked to see those transactions. Or even said, "could you just turn on your phone, move the screen towards us, and show us (or just email it to us so we can print out and attach the record to your declaration)".
I've looked into pretty much every major story, and once you get passed the superficial reporting, and into the actual details, it becomes depressingly clear that the media (at all levels and all sides) are just political (or ideological) organizations that filter, mold, and in a lot of cases make up, everything they put out.
One good thing about this story is that electronic device searches on Canadian borders are somewhat in the legal grey zone and this will force the courts to clarify the rules. And... allow public to voice their approval or disapproval of this ongoing practice.
Where I come from (Europe), you aren't required by law to help police (or border officials). If they come with a warrant to search your house and your door is closed, you aren't allowed to obstruct them by barricading your door but you are not required to help them by opening your door either (be prepared to pay for your new door though). Is that different in Canada?
Leave the phone off or turn it off before you get to the airport Security line then when you turn it on the app auto-starts which makes the phone slowly boot.
Then when the phone does finally boot it shows a fake screen showing "Installing update 1 of 44" and make it so it never ends.
My password is my index finger I should change it to my middle finger, my password is written down and really complex I'd never be able to remember it without seeing it.
See you in a decade when this all shakes out.
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/the-u-s-border-a-c...
For those unaware, here in Canada they've started playing catch-up ever since the snowden leaks, and they've been doing it with the same strategy (wait for any kind of terrorist attack and manipulate the people)
Even if you "have nothing to hide", this is worrying. Who knows what has been changed on your device?
