You’d think so. However, our Constitutional system depends on all parties being interested in maintaining the balance of powers, or at least all parties being interested in maintaining THEIR powers. Congress has done NOTHING substantive to push back at Executive excesses. The courts have only rarely and gingerly brought rulings against this kind of thing, and the courts only really work if the Executive is willing to follow their rulings.
It’s not all that robust when the parties concerned aren’t interested in fighting for it. As Speaker Pelosi once infamously said in reply to an interview question about impeachment, “The Constitution is worth it if you can succeed.” (Emphasis mine)
No shit Sunspace. I see a day when you or your puter get detained or just plain locked up because you’ve got a little too much Billy Bragg or Sun Ra on your iTunes, or an experimental film made by artsy-fartsy Stalinist dupes in 1937, or something that’s been out of print and unavailable for 20 years that you had to have obtained illegally.
Once the machinery is in place to do ultrafast copy-and-search and peg certain files on people’s hardrives and portables, any piece of culture that doesn’t generate a minimum number of hits can become thoughtcrime. Patriotic Americans will be those who travel with nothing but Lee Greenwood and the latest Disney crapfest on their persons, all with the proper DRM stamps of course.
There’s a huge difference between “we are not required to disclose our credit card numbers upon entering our country, nor our bank account numbers, and yet the US requires this of all foreign national entering its borders.” and “means of payment” for your airline ticket.
Disclosing ‘means of payment’ means your account details are disclosed, from there it is not hard to check out your previous transactions, but actually what is worse, is that you don’t get the choice, because a third party does the disclosing for you without informing you or obtaining your consent.
Some of the things that may well be checked without your consent are your funds, not those with you or which you plan to spend upon your visit to support yourself, but other funds you may have.
Still feel sanguine about that?
I have a friend who applied for a visa to visit family in the US this was denied because they are HIV +.
Another who was turned down entry when she was due to marry a US citizen in the US - so they married here in the UK. He has lived here since for the last four or so years, and has never had any problem from UK authorities - he was called in to the immigration office to check that his paperwork was in order and was interviewed, and has since been left alone.
Another who had health insurance was denied because ‘they could become a burden to the healthcare services in the US’ - perhaps we in the UK should return the favour.
As for being a ‘subject’ of Her Majesty - tosh, piffle and rubbish we have not been subjects for some time now since the British Nationality Act was passed in 1949. The last vestiges of this archaic term were swept away in the 1981 Nationality act which removed the word ‘subject’ from those UK citizens born in other countries.
As for the protections that EU law affords - far better than those offered by UK law, to such an extent that UK judges preside over EU case law which sets precedents right across the EU zone.
It’s said that the UK does not have a constitution - not true, we have a constitution not only the EU law, but also collective law built up over the last thousand or so years, its built upon the judiciary and built upon laws and precedents, and believe it or not, the US constitution is largely based upon interpretations derived from supreme court rulings, becuase although the US contistution makes statements, those statements have to have boundaries set upon them.
Two of the great UK myths, we have no constitution and we are all subjects, remember, you read it here and its the mission of this board.
My own opinion is that the DHS seizure regulations are less about safety and pertectin’ us from terriss as they are ALL about restricting our movement–not by enacting laws, but simply by using intimidation and threats to make it so uncomfortable to travel that we just stop bothering. There’s no rhyme nor reason to the seizures, it’s just all about showing us they CAN and reinforcing how very powerless we are. If a side benefit to the random seizures is that the government ends up with incidentally incriminating evidence on citizens, or confidential business information that might be of interest to administration cronies, that’s just a nice little lagniappe.
And for those who think that “scrubbing your hard drive clean” before you travel is adequate, I can tell you right now that commercially available forensic tools are more than adequate to pull over 90% of file info from a multiply low level formatted/overwritten hard drive with enough time and effort, and that the government is not using anything so wussy as RStudio.
If McCain gets elected, I’m taking pool bets on how long it takes for internal passports to be implemented.
Interesting - my company requires that all laptops be encrypted with very secure software (128 bit encryption), to prevent company secrets/intellectual property from being compromised in case a laptop is lost or stolen.
If the government takes this laptop, am I compelled to give them my secure password for the encryption? If so, is my company going to hold me liable if subsequent to this some competitor gets its hands on my design data? Because I certainly am not going to trust some hired DHS lackey to keep my company’s multi-million dollar secrets safe.
Another question: Do you HAVE to submit the laptop? Or do you only have to submit it if you want to continue traveling? In other words, if I get to the border and they want to inspect my laptop, an I just say, “Forget it - I’m canceling my flight”?
If the latter is true, then that may be the loophole they use to make this constitutional - it’s not a mandatory search and seizure - it’s merely a regulatory search which is completely optional - like having your bag searched for booze before going into a rock concert, or going through the metal detector. Doesn’t make it right, but it might make it legal.
It was discussed on these boards only a week or so ago, you are required to hand over your password or encryption key - the debate was wether this constituted a non-warrnat search, with non-probable cause.
Quite a few of the usual suspects said it was no big issue, that it wasn’t an infringement of privacy or personal liberty. Some thicko’s really could not see why this should be a problem.
As for turning around at a border, well, given that your freedom has already been stripped from you, can you imagine that you would be free to return from whence you came without allowing DHS to inspect your storage when they already demanded to see what you had?
As far as DHS is concerned, I would expect that from their POV, anyone turing around would be all the more suspicious.
The effect of this is that organisations will either not wish to travel from the US to do business, or will not take information with them - to the detriment of their performance, and other companies, especially purchasers, will not wish to come to the US to do their business.
It gets better, because those who wish to bring intellectual valuables will not wish to come to the US.
The US is already losing tourist trade.
What you have to remember is that given the relative fall of the US doolar against the Euro, tourism should be increasing quite dramatically, instead it continues to decline.
The decline is far worse than you might expect, because its the high spending tourists that are not coming, the long haulers, whilst the US neighbours are still fairly bouyant - even if they are the lower spenders.Its not just about numbers, its about attracting the spending powerif I have $5000 to spend on a couple of weeks vacation, it sure as hell isn’t going to the US.
This means there is less cultural exchange, it means the US is becoming less of a talking point among tourists, and DHS operations are putting off US tourists from travelling abroad, which again reduces cultural excahnge further, and makes the US tourist dollar less relevant as the rest of the world adjusts to the new tourism landscape.
…and to keep the tourists rolling on in US officials have come up with this bright idea,
That’s the ticket, welcome your guests by making them pay a surcharge upon arrival - its not a huge amount and its supposed to be for their conveninece, but its a fee that will rise and, in a world of higher fuel costs thus increased fares, I think this is proof of an idiotic administration.
This sucks. Then again, I remember when the US started putting up cameras. I was laughed at for my concerns.
See - I was behind the Iron Curtain back in the 80s for a brief period of time. I took some photos of the cameras that the Commies had up in their streets. I showed those to friends, “look - they are so distrustful of their people that they need cameras on their streets!”
When we did it in the US, I was (and still am) disgusted. My government does not trust me.
Here’s the trick, Sam Stone, if you want to get back INTO your country, you damned well better give up whatever they say you have to give up! Sure, you can decide not to travel OUT–I’ve done so and I refuse to get onto an airplane until I can do so WITH my shoes on and WITH my bottle of water and WITHOUT having my smartphone, USB flash drives, camera and laptop fucked with. However, if you’re coming home from abroad, what reasonable alternative do you have? Gonna stay in a foreign country forever? They have you firmly bent over with five fingers in your ass to the penultimate knuckle and they know it. You can cry and bitch afterward but good luck with that. The courts obviously don’t give a shit about such trivialities as the Fourth Amendment.
Algher, not only does your government not trust you, your government has de facto defined you as an enemy combatant whose freedom to move about exists only as long as their sufferance does. Piss 'em off in any way and you could find yourself vacationing indefinitely in any one of a number of fabulous, out of the way secret locations where even the integrity of your skin is unlikely to continue undisturbed.
The current administration is fully aware of the fact that they have created a huge gap between the haves and the have nots. They are aware that eventually the have nots will figure out they’ve been fucked over. They are aware that some long time after that epiphany that the have nots will stop making excuses and defending those who have stripped them of their paltry possessions and turned them into paupers. And they are aware that there are very many more have nots than haves and that due to those pesky ass Constitutional rights those have nots have lots of guns and other interesting implements of destruction. In anticipation of the time when all these forces come together in a perfect storm, they are very busy implementing many interesting programs to aid them in keeping themselves from ending up swinging from lampposts, and the DHS and its nasty little rules are just a small part of those preventative measures.
Me, I’m voting for Obama–I’m not really fond of armed insurrection and would prefer not to have to take part in it.
Again, you post indicated that one would have to give up all account and CC numbers. "“we are not required to disclose our credit card numbers upon entering our country, nor our bank account numbers, and yet the US requires this of all foreign national entering its borders.” Whereas you really only have to give up a single account number. Too many bad guys pay by cash.
And although it certainly appears that the US can take away your laptop, I have never had mine taken, nor has nyone I know or work with. And, I know a bunch of folks working with a large Int’l oil company- and none of them have ever had it happen either. Nor a strip search
I have had to turn my laptop on. I did have to go through the “puffer”, once.
The sentence is pretty ambiguous. The “s” on “numbers” doesn’t necessarily imply that casdave was saying that you have to give up all bank account details on entry. See the “our”, earlier in the sentence.
I encourage everyone who finds this an appalling infringement of your civil liberties to make a pledge to the ACLU pronto (and explain what you want your money used for).
Nitpick right back at you: My representatives to Congress are my two Senators and my Representative to the House. It’s a case where capitalizing the word really makes a big difference. All three of those people in my Congressional delegation are supposed to be there, in theory, to represent my interests.
Still, they’re not your representatives, either- we all know whose interests Congresscritters are protecting, and it certainly isn’t those of anyone so unimportant as their constituents.
