I’m no fan of the current administration at all, but I’m also weary of just accepting stories that confirm my bias.
I _feel_ like the administration would brag about blocking potential European terrorists or something of this was actually going on intentionally.
My gut tells me that the people getting blocked at the border are either running into extremely overzealous border guards OR are making some kind of ruckus anyway and complaining to the media after provoking guards somehow.
Still not acceptable behavior by border guards, but it’d be a far cry from a top down order.
I guess we’ll see how often these stories keep popping up.
My guess (judging from similar historical events) would be that it's a combination of:
* New administration means people (including border guards) are now feeling emboldened to act in a certain way. This means people that already had that leaning, will be unabashed in their action, and middle-manager level will be less strict on stopping these behavior since it might backfire on them.
* Now suddenly the topic is interesting to the vast cohort of the population. Which means that in the media boardroom, where they decide what to cover, put out, etc, they take that in to account and report & investigate more of it. Sometimes, things that was already endemic but unnoticed get a huge bump in coverage and create a perception that it's top-down, while in reality there have always been the issue, but now it's more blatant.
Days after the Brexit vote, people went out of their way to vandalize non British business establishment. One Polish boutique was trashed and people now felt it was "ok" to leave graffiti in the form of "get out you're not welcome here". Those sentiment was always there and if you go to any immigrant community in any country and ask locals they usually have stories about it, but with the brexit vote many felt that was justified and did it in excess, which lead to media coverage. Did leave campaign say any of that, or instructed people to do anything similar? No. But part of the follower of that campaign already had the leaning to it, and it wasn't until the comparison to Kristallnacht started to pop up until the parties took a firm stance to it.
Probably same thing happening here. So the thing to watch out for is probably what would be the official reaction to it. a silent nod might just mean this is the new norm.
There is a lot of idiocy in UK immigration (most often random decisions that someone is an "overstay" risk when they are clearly not) but it is less dramatic as it happens when issuing visas rather than at the border.
> Days after the Brexit vote, people went out of their way to vandalize non British business establishment. One Polish boutique was trashed and people now felt it was "ok" to leave graffiti in the form of "get out you're not welcome here".
That is also attributable to your second reason about the topic being interesting and reported in the media. The number of people who actually did things like that is tiny, but because it happened to people originating from the EU after Brexit it was newsworthy. When it happens to people from other countries or if it happened before Brexit it was not newsworthy.
We had racist stickers put on your door in the 1990s, and quite people had a lot worse happen to them in the 80s, but it was not newsworthy at the time unless it was extreme or happened to someone who was high profile or knew some jouranlists.
Both are quite valid, though, I think Column A receives a majority of the ticks. Not just at a Federal level, but state and city as well. A lack of morality is the hallmark of this administration and their movement in general. At least the horrors of reality is waking up some of the people who let themselves get hoodwinked, the rest of us will just have to hope it’s not too late.
I agree, to a point. If an order were coming from the top, it would be happening many times a day.
But it could also be that the overzealous staffers feel like they want to impress the higher ups. So it could well be happening bottom up. The administration certainly isn't jumping in to fix it when it happens. If so, that's something you need to take into account if you want to travel here.
Many are going to boycott us entirely anyway, just because of how hostile the administration is to our erstwhile allies.
If it were an express order from the top, it would easier to fight against. This is more of 'obeying in advance' where people in various positions get the vibe that they both can and should be doing this kind of thing and that not only will they get away with it, but may even be rewarded for it. This stage affects of the already willing participants. At later stages 'obeying in advance' will be done even by unwilling participants out of fear of retribution.
Generally speaking corruption and abuse by law enforcement never comes from the top. It will be stupid to be officially liable for it. What happens is that they look away.
> This is more of 'obeying in advance' where people in various positions get the vibe that they both can and should be doing this kind of thing
Yeah like meta killing their DEI programs to suck up to Trump.
I don't see a similar hatred of such programs here in Europe luckily. I work for an EU company that has a big footprint in Europe and they have no plans to reduce their inclusivity programs. I'm directly involved in those.
And really, no they are not about quotas at all. It's all about being "colourblind", to remove inherent bias, exactly what the Trumpians claim to want.
That's a totally unrelated issue. And just some grandstanding by Trump.
Besides, Zuckerberg has more than enough money to evade US law if he needs to (and that's if Trump can manage to make such BS into law!). Even Snowden has successfully done that and he wasn't even rich.
He's not really at risk of going "to prison for life".
If Trump wanted to, he could simply send the marshals to arrest him. Zuckerberg has a lot of ability to evade, but it's not infinite.
Trump probably was just grandstanding there. He makes hundreds of meaningless threats per day, to make it impossible to tell which ones he means to carry out. But they do cause fear, because you can never be 100% certain. And not even other oligarchs are safe.
It doesn't matter whether it's an official policy or just overzealous border guards. It's a real risk that people now need to account for when making travel plans.
> My gut tells me that the people getting blocked at the border are either running into extremely overzealous border guards OR are making some kind of ruckus anyway and complaining to the media after provoking guards somehow.
My default guess is Goodhart's Law.
The current administration expressly values 'tough' border enforcement, and it publicly uses removals and associated statistics to describe how 'tough' it is being.
Border agents respond to these incentives by looking for any excuse to deny or remove would-be entrants, minimizing the independent judgment and discretion that's an ordinary part of the job.
It's not a 'top down order', but it's an entirely predictable consequence of the administration's messaging.
It is difficult to read this as anything but an attempt to absolve yourself of accepting confirmation bias.
You feel like, your gut tells you. And you land exactly where your beliefs are confirmed and where any response/call to action outside of the status quo is unwarranted.
If you ignored your feelings and took a look you could find the people responsible for these policies gleefully advocating to accelerate and enhance the abuses. It is easier to accept their self-serving lies and Kafkaesque legal machinations than it is to confront the realities of the world we face.
This here. I’m European, we’ve been told for years that should we travel to the US we should bring a wiped phone AND laptop because of that.
This is nothing new but maybe exacerbated by the current administration. From what I gather from the news and from a European citizen point of view what’s new are the detentions.
> complaining to the media after provoking guards somehow.
I don't know if there are many people who want to provoke guards, at the risk of being deported, or worse. Just for the fun of telling a nice story to the medias?
> it’d be a far cry from a top down order.
Trump has been sending a clear message that bullies were getting a free pass, for instance when he pardoned the rioters. It's not because there's not a top down order that the administration isn't directly responsible.
I'd imagine a combination. Overzealous and probably demanding border guards, the traveller getting offended by that and not showing them the respect they think they deserve... Then they throw the book at you :(
The problem is that normal US law doesn't apply at the border. They even held an American NASA employee with a security clearance and this was before Trump.
It does look like it's getting worse now though. I'm definitely not going to the US anymore even if my work asks me to.
Outside the EU, I have a travel kit which has a cheap Android phone and cheap Android tablet. Both have convincing stuff on it, but in reality, everything goes via my personal vpn/ssh vnc for which I carry the keys well hidden.
I have 'nothing to hide' but free speech is not what Elon thinks it means (in many countries), including now, the US. I don't want to be arrested for something I said 10 years ago which was now mined, or hallucinated, by Palantir AI scanning my phone.
I know my bank account PIN, and it's linked through Apple Pay. My other cards - credit x2, building society I have no clue. Those PINs are stored and given I'm never out without my phone I always have access to the numbers.
I was constantly stopped and quizzed by the TSA to the point I would wipe my macbook and phone before travelling. Using the NFC chips that had all the details I needed made sense.
Socials for me are mostly reddit/lobster/hn, I use aliases there and use VPNs/Tors to login to different ones. I have insta/fb with lovely shot that cannot possibly get me screwed over. Although... I have glasses... If a mao/pol pot returns and I fake not having glasses, I'm done even that way :( It is not a great time to be paranoid, I agree.
I've heard Russia uses Cellebrite devices at borders, which means cloud-storing an image of your entire device for foreign intelligence agencies to carve up later is possible.
I only bring a secondary, recently factory reset phone with a basic account setup overseas. But I haven't been overseas since prior to COVID. My primary phone stays at home, it's too potentially valuable to allow any country's airport security to paw through freely.
I used to buy a local SIM card when I got to the airport. Next time I go overseas I might have to buy a new phone and SIM card.
Edit: from what others have said, I'll also be making sure my phone is shutdown before the plane lands.
I might also be looking very closely at GrapheneOS on a second hand pixel.
In Texas it was explicitly disallowed to shut off your phone. You needed to sign a paper to have enough power, not shut it down and keep it unlocked. They threatened to send you back if you won't comply
Hypothetically, what would happen if you did a cloud backup and wiped your phone before going through customs, then restored the phone on the other side?
If you did it well, and of course are willing to lie when asked if you'd done such a thing (major red flag for the CBP flunkies) you'd probably be okay, but with an obvious caveat: entering the country with a phone and other electronics normally stuffed with personal information but in your case curiously empty would probably cause you to get flagged for special attention much more than if your device content looked normally cluttered.
That's why plausible deniability should be implemented in such a way that one could have multiple encrypted profiles on a phone, each one with its hidden and encrypted storage, but the safe one wouldn't be empty or unused to avoid raising warning flags; all sensitive social media and communication would take place only on other accounts, still the user should maintain their day to day communications (family, friends) on the safe one. Encrypted profiles would activate only after entering their unique password, but the phone would immediately default to the safe one at each sleep or power off. This however doesn't protect from cell traffic analysis which would reveal for example the phone (tower+___location+source and dest. IP+IMSI+IMEI+time) was connected to that server at a certain time, still would require more efforts from an officer than merely scanning all mail or posts on social media. A VPN helps, but as per above, now one would have to explain why they're using one, and I totally expect VPNs to be criminalized very soon.
All of that's great advice and quite detailed, but i'd just bring a second burner phone with some basic social media and etc content on it from intermittent safe use so it's always ready for travel.
They can deny entry to non-citizens for basically any reason, including "you have a wiped phone and won't give us access to your cloud account", so... yeah probably best not to do that. Or at least make up a plausible reason for it.
I think a better option is probably just to delete any app that might have critical comments on it, like social media etc. And then you can just say you've quit social media.
Suppose I want to do this with my laptop, and dump my drive to the cloud (say accessible via SSH) to reinstall another operating system overwriting it. It's likely that the new operating system won't touch most of the blocks in my drive, so when restoring after having passed the boundary I don't want to transfer those unchanged blocks. Is there a good tool to do that easily?
If you use a SSD or above, you do not have any control over these "blocks" (called cells in these technologies). You cannot access them at all once they are unliked (i.e. the slack source you had with HDD which you could access does not exist anymore).
Supposedly for the French guy that you are referring to it was because he had confidential information on his phone from JPL, and not for the reason the French minister was saying.
But I find that hard to believe - that someone in CBP would recognize what’s confidential government information, and then just deport him and not arrest him for spying…. I did find it curious though that the French guy himself never said it was for his messages about trump - only some people in the French government were saying that.
So he had confidential US documents and they did not arrest him? Or he had confidential French documents, the CBP recognized that, and sent him back? The initial stories reported messages criticizing Trump and his science cuts. From a scientist, going to a science convention. CBP being thuggish is the simplest and stupidest explanation making it most likely.
It's not just the French researcher (and I agree with you about the CBP's suspect official statement); three members of a British punk band were also recently denied entry for an "another issue, which they wouldn’t disclose": https://consequence.net/2025/03/uk-subs-detained-denied-entr...
I don’t know that it’s “obvious” that anything more is happening than the simplest explanation that the current administration (and its lackeys at the lower rungs of government power) is delighting in humiliating and disempowering its critics, domestic and foreign.
Yes because that always happens. Did you not notice the last decade of negative press on Trump and other Republicans? That's just noise and frankly I'm baffled I have to explain this.
France is probably one of the most capable military intelligence centers in Europe, have a large amount of nuclear power and supporting infrastructure and is a Muslim stronghold in some areas. So clearly, something more than just surface level WWE-style drama is going on.
I think a lot of news stories are pushed out too soon without proper context, leading to sensationalized headlines that fuel the doomers.
Maybe some of these stories shouldn't even be news... because the details that come later usually turn it into a nothingburger. Like of course someone is going to be detained if the government legitimately believes they could be connected to a terrorist, nobody is getting upset at THAT.
And if these news stories WERE actually something that was happening regularly, it wouldn't even BE news anymore. The mere fact that it's a headline is supposed to mean it's something NOT normal that's going on.
Right but you would expect an administration of the party which likes to yell about free speech to come out and try to reduce the concerns about free speech restrictions. As a self labeled free speech crusader Musk should be absolutely distraught that the administration is considering protests against Tesla terrorism. The comments above boil down to: when someone shows you who they are believe them.
Isn't this something which Craig Murray was highlighting in the context of the Julian Assange extradition case?
Namely that the US Government argues that the 1st Amendment "free speech" right only applies to US Citizens.
The deal to drop the extradition of Assange only came about after the UK Judge quizzed in on if Assange would be able to depend upon that protection, rather than simply assert it (and have it denied).
So I'd not be surprised at a French citizen not having "free speech" in the USA.
It is weird... The 'potential terrorist' was sent back because
"US authorities accused the scientist of sending "hateful and conspiratorial messages" related to the Trump administration's treatment of scientists and scientific research."
The Constitution binds the government, it's not something applied to citizens. The government cannot infringe on speech period. Doesn't matter if they want to infringe on it for citizens, non citizens or someone living in a territory the government controls
The Canadian woman who had her visa revoked for no reason was subsequently incarcerated under deplorable conditions and denied access to council. If I recall correctly they held her for two weeks. In batch holding without proper clothing or heat and with 24hour lighting which I believe has been previously classified as torture.
> As Justice Francis W. Murphy described the law in his concurrence in Bridges v. Wixon (1945), “the Bill of Rights is a futile authority for the alien seeking admission for the first time to these shores. But once an alien lawfully enters and resides in this country he becomes invested with the rights guaranteed by the Constitution to all people within our borders.” [1]
The first amendment (and to my knowledge most of them) at least in theory if not in shit-smeared practice, apply to all people within US borders, not just citizens. In any case, it's an absurd argument to essentially say, "meh, he was a foreigner, it's fine".
> The first amendment (and to my knowledge most of them) at least in theory if not in shit-smeared practice, apply to all people within US borders
Moreover, the First Amendment is held (not just philosophically, but this is the legal theory behind its incorporation against the states under the 14th Amendment) to be declarative of a universal right (a right "fundamental to ordered liberty"). It is therefore monstrous to try to excuse its violation by the US government against any person subject to its power under any circumstances.
You don't deserve to be down voted by hackers for your comment. There is a huge difference between what rights you should have where you are born or are a citizen, and what rights you should have when you come as a guest to another country.
Huh, I found this interesting, "Because the agents couldn’t bypass Malik’s password, they sent the phone to a forensics lab, which extracted all the phone’s data.", I wonder how they bypassed his password unless it wasn't fully encrypted. Well AFAIU my Pixel 6A is extractable even withe encryption and a long password via a cellebrite device now. Unsure if GrapheneOS would help prevent extraction.
It depends on a variety of factors, including whether the device has previously been unlocked after the most recent boot (AFU: after first unlock) or not (BFU: before first unlock).
If your phone has fingerprint unlock support, there’s usually a second chip (TPM, Secure Enclave, equivalents) that is in charge of providing the phone with its encryption key when the fingerprint lock is used. Finding a vulnerability in this chip can often be a way to get access.
Also if the phone is on and was unlocked at least once, the encryption key is in memory somewhere and is vulnerable to regular old software exploits.
(Both of the above can be prevented by shutting down the phone before the search attempt)
Finally, if there’s a vulnerability that lets you reset the number of passcode attempts (which has to be loaded in memory somewhere, meaning a bootrom or kernel exploit could be used to modify it) and your passcode isn’t super long (4-digit PIN, some 6-digit PINs, pattern lock), it’s possible to make what is effectively a password guesser and use it to break the password lock within an hour or so.
To be clear, one can and probably should restart the phone after shutting it down, just so long as one doesn't login with the correct password. It might even be useful to enter the wrong password twice to further reset any memory imprints.
AFAIK most devices wipe the key from memory after a certain for this reason. My iPhone regularly forces me to enter my passcode instead of allowing me to use FaceID.
iPhone added this feature very recently (just a few months ago, it basically just randomly restarts the phone if it is unused and not connected to a network for over 24-48 hours - phones connected to a network can be erased via iCloud). Android doesn’t have it at all.
There is a shortcut, however, on iOS to secretly put an iPhone into BFU mode - quick tapping the power button 5 times will lock the phone and erase the aforementioned in-memory keys so that it needs a password to unlock.
(EDIT: it does not actually put the iPhone into BFU mode. It just disables biometrics.)
Since most apps are syncing with something behind cloudflare, an AWS, Azure or GCP endpoint doing MiTM, I am pretty sure all they need is get a warrant and ask those companies to get a valid certificate, poison DNS and wait for the smartphone to give out its credentials to the forensic lab.
People should never use apps that sync to something else than their own servers.
How would apps grant access to all the phones data though? Sure, they could intercept Google or Facebook or Microsoft, but I don't see how theyd get full access to the phone without an OEM helping them.
Apps are sandboxed. I don't see how it's possible.
> Apps are sandboxed. I don't see how it's possible.
How many phone apps there are these days that are strictly local storage and don't communicate externally to anywhere? It's all cloud cloud cloud, which means it is most likely passing through one or more MITM points.
Wow why would they give GrapheneOS such a marketing boost?
I don't think they're lying, after all if they did they'd lie about much more common mobile OSes too. But personally I wouldn't inform the public of my weaknesses if I were a 'security/forensics' company.
Because they want to advertise that they CAN break into phones loaded with GrapheneOS. Just not the latest version. Likewise they "announce" that they can't unlock BFU iPhone-s running latest iOS, and the real message is "we can unlock just slightly older iPhone-s and you may expect us to be able to unlock current version after few months".
It was never safe to travel to the US with your phone since the Patriot Act was in action, since they made it possible to search all your electronics and decide to refuse you entry for any reason.
It's safer to come with a phone that's completely empty of private information, and re-image it remotely once reaching your destination.
Not that I am planning to travel to the US at any point but the first thing that came to my mind was: why not just sending the phone by parcel, fly without it and pick it up later on? Even tough I find it embarassing that such hacks are necessary in the first place.
International shipments, not to mention transcontinental, are expensive and unreliable enough. Then you have to manage receiving international package at the hotel or in some temporary housing....
If you are a non-citizen, they can also use that refusal as evidence that you are not 'entitled to enter the United States.' In theory that alone is not sufficient to result in denied entry, but in practice it seems that border guards have a great deal of subjective leeway about things.
If you are a US citizen, they cannot deny you entry at the border. However, the device might still be confiscated.
When I travel presumably I'd want to have a smart phone to take pictures, check internet (maps, recommendations, itineraries, etc) and to make communication with people back home or people I'm visiting.
What would be the best way to protect myself with a phone while still being able to do all of this? Having a burner smart phone with an ESIM so I keep my number (for communication), itineraries saved to device, and no account logins or apps?
Yeah just buy a $100 smartphone, set up a brand new Google account for it, a prepaid SIM with a data bundle and off you go. Use only temporary accounts on it. Use your traditional comms apps through a web browser not apps.
Not exactly no. It also has an anonymous function where you can use an account from a larger pool provided by aurora. It loads these dynamically from a pool hosted on their servers. The only issue is that Google tends to rate limit them.
I don't know why it says that there but it definitely has this function. Perhaps they don't want to draw too much attention to it due to its unreliability and resulting support issues. There have been periods of a couple of weeks where it didn't work at all due to Google blocking these accounts but lately they have backed down.
But technically it's not really without a Google account. Aurora just has a batch of common accounts it assigns randomly when you log in with the "anonymous" option.
You don't need a dumb phone, the only important thing regarldess if it is a dumb or smartphone is it has to have been reset, without any google/apple/social account. You may just put the number of your parents and significant other if you are fairly sure they are not partaking in any activity (even associative) related to human rights, journalism, environmentalism, science, aren't working for a company that is currently in trial or whose headquarters are in a country with sanctions or tariffs and/or aren't public persons. But you should really know the number of your close relatives from memory anyway, it isn't that hard.
You can access some data remotely afterwards but I wouldn't restore it and make sure it doesn't stay cached on my devices. Better to connect to a remote desktop with credentials you know from memory. What you could do is find some recommendations for a good lawyer in the area you plan to go beforehands and have his number stored somewhere.
Users flagged it. I've turned the flags off now, but it's easy enough to understand why HN readers would be flagging an article like this: there have been a bunch of other major recent threads on the same topic cluster. Avoiding repetition, and especially the deadly duo of repetition/indignation, is a core principle to keeping the site interesting.
No, it's not. It's also not safe to live within 100 miles of any border in the US... which is where 2/3rds of all US citizens live... because the CBP decided to themselves that they can search anyone, any time, within 100 miles of any border, for any reason, with no warrant. And sometimes it ignores the 100 mile limit too. So just warrantless searches on anyone of anything at any time for no reason. Warrantless searches all round.
The EFF and ACLU have been fighting that belief for years. They're making progress but they're not quite there yet.
But generally speaking, don't bring your real phone to the USA. Bring a burner phone that's empty. Download whatever it is you need on the phone well after you've cleared the border.
It starts making sense once you consider that those type of measures are not intended to be secure, but to bully the 95% who won't/can't defend themselves. Security Theater at it's finest.
I was driving up i-75 and i-95 in Florida yesterday and saw three or four border patrol agents posted in the middle of the highway over a couple hundred miles. They were acting like Highway Patrol how they were positioned in the median after bridges or hidden in the trees.
I don't think it was that. I generally pay attention to those and don't remember it being near a weigh station for any of them (it was only one car at a time, and was spread out over a couple hundred miles that I saw them). I haven't seen any other CBP agents on the rest of my trip so far after I got out of FL up to NJ.
5. Continue to shut the fsck up but otherwise comply with lawful demands.
6. If you need to deny a request to search, clearly state that you do not consent to a search. Don't answer yes/no to the question because they might try to weasel word you.
7. Fight your battles in the court later with a lawyer if they do something wrong. Arguing on the street rarely works in your favor.
Canada does not have the 100 mile constitution exclusion zone that the US has. It only exists at the border itself. This is something the RCMP regularly complains about.
As a Michigander within 80 miles of several border crossings, I don't think you need to worry. I've never heard of border patrol doing anything weird up here in 50 years. Canada is just not a big concern.
As a Michigander in Grand Rapids... You're not up to date. ICE considers the beach of any international waterway (according to them, all of the Great Lakes including Lake Michigan, ACLU disagrees) a "border crossing", so the entire state is in warrantless border zone.
They've made I-213 arrests as far inland as Grand Rapids and even Mount Pleasant, which is about as far from the lakes as you can get.
Records do show that only 1.5% of cases involve people with "Light" skin tone, so if you're white you're unlikely to be affected directly by this. It's not about Canada.
Apparently it’s a bigger concern than Mexico these days. Something about Fentanyl I heard, presumably Trump is unhappy that Canada imports many times more fentanyl than it sends back or something about as insane..
I have also heard some people claim that the 100 mile zone also applies around ANY international airport, but I have no idea if that's true. That would certainly close the rest of the land gap though, as not many people live more than 100 miles away from an airport.
No, but while the situation in the US is (relative to our own history and the Constitution) very bad, in this particular instance there is nothing particularly special. It's equally "unsafe" to travel to any country on the planet "with your phone" where that means "your phone as you would go about your day-to-day life with". In many cases far more so since you could face far worse then deportation, but if nothing else every country gets to keep non-citizens out at will and even citizens can still potentially have stuff confiscated for long periods with irksome requirements to get it back, even if they themselves cannot be barred from return under any circumstances.
Of course, traveling is also a higher risk time anyway in terms of having your phone stolen or lost. So it's definitely not a bad idea regardless to consider workarounds. Used phones drop in value very fast for example while still being extremely powerful and useful given how the pace of improvements in smartphones has leveled off heavily in the last 5 years. Like an iPhone 12 or 13 Pro are still fully supported, likely will be for another 2-4 years, and still solid devices. Both can be readily found at this point for $250-400, something like 1/3 the price of a current gen. Depreciation in price is very fast vs depreciation in relative performance or features. So simply flat out having a phone for travel and not putting anything on it sensitive is an option, and then if something happens it can be abandoned with less concern.
Alternatively in some cases one could erase their main phone, set it up for travel, and then restore via VPN after crossing borders. This is more trouble then ideally it should be, and depends on either having a high bandwidth connection at your destination or some other workaround (mailing yourself a hard drive for example), but can let you stick to one main device.
But I'm glad it's getting more attention even from those who typically haven't thought about it. I hope it spurs demand for better technology answers as well. The more convenient privacy and security are the more adoption and the better for all of us.
Exactly. One of the big tech companies, maybe Google, had employees travel with essentially a "burner" Chromebook to certain countries.
At some point, the answer is to revert to pre-electronics travel--or just not travel. Or just decide that the individual risk is pretty minimal compared to all the other things that can happen if you leave your home.
The French authorities did not like what a French publisher published about them. So they asked Britain to fuck about with one of the publisher's employees who was going to visit a book fair in London.
They arrested the employee on terrorism charges, because they demanded to search his phone when he arrived in the UK, and he refused -- that's a crime, because the UK is a shit nation with evil laws. That should not be a crime.
> Also, the USA is not alone in doing trumped-up bullshit
I see what you did there :D
But yeah. Other countries do it too and they should be called out.
The government at that time in the UK was the Tories though and they aren't really all that different from the Project 2025/Heritage Foundation guys. Also very conservative.
I'm afraid to say this is bipartisan. The law the Frenchman was charged under - the Terrorism Act 2000 - was passed by Labour. Both Labour and the Tories are rather authoritarian. However, on left-rightness, both Labour and the Tories are to the left of the US Democrats, who are themselves left of the US Republicans.
The specific issue of it being made illegal to not reveal your passwords/keys caused an enormous outrage in the UK, but the Labour government passed it anyway.
Activists sent Jack Straw, the home secretary at the time, encrypted files on disk, and said that because the files are now in his possession, they want to demand he decrypt them, and because he definitely cannot - he never knew the password - he should go to jail for two years under his proposed law.
Jack Straw's response to this was not "I see, what a stupid law, let me get rid of it". His response was to write into the law "this law doesn't apply to government ministers"
Ah I didn't know :( I see more conservative (anti-LGBTIQ+ in particular) talking points from tories though.
The UK is also on my list of "never travel to" countries anyway, it has been since Brexit and the xenophobic sentiments that empowered. Really the "taking back control" was really a euphemism for "less black faces on our streets". At least it seemed that way when I spoke to some of the more outspoken Brexit proponents in my circle. They turned totally rabiate anti-immigrant. All people that were decent before, by the way.
Obviously I will never go to the US again either. Though nobody has asked me to go there. I did get asked by work to go to some Google thing in London and I refused for that reason which was totally ok.
> Really the "taking back control" was really a euphemism for "less black faces on our streets".
I think you need a better understanding of the UK. Brexit was a "fuck you" to the white Polish, Romanian and Bulgarian faces on our streets.
While the political right of the UK had been "Eurosceptic" since losing the 1975 referendum, and there was the Cambridge Analytica scandal... the massive popularity of UKIP that gave rise to the Brexit was backlash against the mass immigration from the poorer eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007.
The Labour government at that time imposed no constraints on migration while all other EU countries (save Ireland and Sweden) did. It was a deliberate choice, partly to boost GDP and partly to "rub the right's nose in diversity" (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8326501.stm)
And now that Brexit has happened, we have massively more immigration from (South) Asia and Africa. We replaced white faces with brown and black faces. Therefore, "taking back control" must have meant "we want more black faces on our streets"? (https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...)
I feel people from post-Communist countries heavily underestimated the importance of labour law and social systems for the British. They were extremely cynical towards these, while for British both are part of their national identity as the industrial revolution took place on their soil. The competition on labour market was indeed the strongest argument that British populace picked up while voting for Brexit. The "white faces" and "black faces" dispute is irrelevant in UK, because in the racist "theories" Poles, Irish, and many others are not even white, while people from the former colonies are their countrymen. Did I earn my UK settled status with this comment?
Well, sort of. I'm not going to say there's no racism, there absolutely is, but the whole black/latin/white divide of the USA belongs in the USA, and trying to view British social status through an American lens produces inaccurate results.
The British have always been stratified by class. They are more likely to look down on you for your accent than your skin colour.
For example, people who graduated from Oxford or Cambridge are less than 1% of the population, but are 44% of the newspaper columnists in national newspapers, and are 71% of senior judges: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/elitist-britain-2...
In fact, you can go back to the Norman conquest of Britain (1066); people with Norman surnames are more likely to be well-off in modern Britain than those with Anglo-Saxon surnames. Generation after generation has kept wealth and power "in the family": https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-014-9219-y
Effectively, there is a governing class of specific families and bloodlines that runs Britain; the middle classes aren't in it, the working class aren't in it, the colonies (when Britain had them) weren't in it, and foreigners definitely aren't in it. The USA had a little sniff of this classism, with the W.A.S.Ps that could trace their roots back to the original US colonies getting uppity about more recent arrivals and classifying them as "not white", but it's nothing compared to the UK.
Atop that you have religious sectarianism. Britain colonised Ireland first, murdered the Celtic chiefs, and installed loyalists to King Billy. What you're seeing with EU immigration and Brexit already happened in the 1920s-1930s in the Second City of Empire; read about the economic conditions that brought about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_razor_gangs -- white (Protestant, native, working class) people feeling threatened by white (Catholic, Irish, deprived) immigrants looking for better economic opportunities
I would take a brand new phone, with crowned King Trump as a background, browser history full of Tucker Carlson, and Horst Wessel for a ringtone. Then I'd fly through customs.
In fact, I often cross borders into/out of totalitarian countries. I usually uninstall all messengers, Firefox, financial and security apps and use Shreddit to wipe the free space. Then I restore everything after crossing the border. My laptop has a large movie file which is really a VeraCrypt volume where all the programs and data sit.
It's best to stay neutral because political parties can change. You don't want the next party to classify you as a troublemaker either when they get their hands on the historical dataset.
This is truly the way. If we are to beat them we need to play their game, blending in 99% of the time and then subverting them at the most prime opportunities. USA #1!
... Honestly, no, because they're gonna slap it on a Greykey, Cellebrite UFED, or just call up Cellebrite Professional Services for a remote crack on the spot. At a minimum power it down so the best extract they can gank is a before-first-use dump.
I _feel_ like the administration would brag about blocking potential European terrorists or something of this was actually going on intentionally.
My gut tells me that the people getting blocked at the border are either running into extremely overzealous border guards OR are making some kind of ruckus anyway and complaining to the media after provoking guards somehow.
Still not acceptable behavior by border guards, but it’d be a far cry from a top down order.
I guess we’ll see how often these stories keep popping up.