The 4th Amendment says, exactly:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United...
People keep misconstruing this.
The border search exemption only applies when someone is actually crossing a border, and it does grant broad authority to search whatever they're carrying with them at the time. The authority to do border enforcement within a 100-mile zone around borders does not grant a broad authority to search. It does grant a narrow authority to do things like traffic checkpoints, but those don't permit searches for anything smaller than a person without additional evidence.
I do think the ruling establishing the authority to run checkpoints other than actual border crossings was wrongly decided and harmful, but it's not what's at issue in this case.
1. Forcing you to unlock - in this case, Alisigwe unlocked their phone willingly after being asked.
2. Forensic extraction - the ruling does not give authorities the power to run a sophisticated off-site break-in on your phone without reasonable suspicion.
So if you are a US citizen, and you are willingly unlocking your phone at the border (or you don't have a passcode), the Fourth Amendment no longer protect you from a suspicionless manual search of the phone at the border
The scale of surveillance now wasn’t even thinkable back then. The ability to encrypt. The bandwidth and latency of communication. The sheer nunber of people, the research into manipulating minds. Does the second ammendment apply to an f35 or a tank? Well it doesn’t really matter, they clearly weren’t in scope when it was written. There were no wiretapping laws in the constitution because there was no wires. unreasonable in 1780 was different to unreasonable today.
The US has famously failed to update its legal framework via the legislative branch, so It’s upto the judicial branch which seeks to be about interpreting what some wealthy farmers from 250 years ago thought, rather than asking what laws make sense today.
The structure of the Supreme Court is foolish. It made sense initially, having the people who drafted the constitution adjudicate it. But I think it would be better to drop SCOTUS all together, letting the Federal courts sort out their disagreements via consensus. Or have a review panel setup like the House (elected, population based) who have the ability to override rulings and censure/discipline judges who make poor rulings.
Either way, we need more people involved in the process.
Non-citizens don't get the right to bear arms as far as I know.
And also various other parts of the construction, like the interstate commerce clause does some comically heavy lifting.
There are a lot of issues that fail the constitutional grep test yet somehow they are deemed (un)constitutional. The constitution was written to protect the people and states from the overly zealous congress. Not to fix the situation in which the congress is so dysfunctional that the judiciary has to replace it.
I'm a little confused. Canadian police barred you from the US for life?
Also sounds like you did not take your lawyer's advice not to talk. Regardless, sorry you went through such a stressful ordeal over a false positive.
"To be sure, nonroutine searches, which are “more invasive searches, like strip searches, require reasonable suspicion.” Id. But we have held that “the label ‘non-routine’ should generally be reserved for intrusive border searches of the person (such as body-cavity searches or strip searches), not belongings.” United States v. Levy, 803 F.3d 120, 123 n.3 (2d Cir. 2015) (emphasis added)."
You never know if a stance you have now will be frowned upon in 5 or 10 years from now.
I’ve heard you can’t pass customs with a phone without your social network accounts.
It's trivial to acquire a list of real people tied to email addresses, phones, social media. And that's what's out there for "normal" businesses.
Who knows what kind of tooling is available to people who serve on the boards of tech giants?
Does HN comply with CCPA requests?
Most employees just receive a wiped phone/laptop for the duration of the trip. Depending on the country its either a device that only has access to the bare minimum of Services, or for countries like Russia they issue a dumb phone that can only call and text.
And as far as I can tell you still don’t have to give them your pin code.
best case scenario is that a higher court overturns this but not holding my breath.
It would be vastly superior to their current solution, which basically guarantees contempt charges.
I hope they change their mind soon!
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I'm a US citizen returning home. Do they just... send me back out of the country? :) I don't suppose they'd have the grounds to arrest me since there is no law that I can see being broken. I suppose they could keep the device until such time that a warrant could be obtained to digitally search / break into the device (but that requires some reasonable suspicion - simply refusing a warantless search isn't it).
Well, they probably release you. If you're brown or just dealing with the wrong people they may unlawfully beat, kidnap, and exile you anyway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportations_of_U.S._citizens_...).
Because who in their right mind is ever going to travel there at the moment?
The Constitution gives you some rights but maybe not this one (to not be searched without warrant at a border). The problem is not The Constitution but the legislative branch that didn't make laws to ban it.
>>what some wealthy farmers from 250 years ago thought, rather than asking what laws make sense today
It's not the job of judges to invent laws or ponder what laws make sense. That would be legislative branch.
Find me caselaw where a “basic” phone was used as valid evidence. Or where the phone was already empty when someone began to approach the border.
It's not Nazi Germany, but this administration has certainly demonstrated that they're not above inventing reasons to justify their actions later.
You’re fearmongering. Find me a case of someone getting prosecuted for having a burner phone. It doesn’t exist.
Ps: we also don't have some special paramilitary border police. Just regular police stationed at the border.
The 100 mile zone is a good example - that 100 mile zone assumes the entirety of the great lakes is international waters, even though Lake Michigan is 100% American Territory and over 300 miles long. So, you could be in a landlocked county of Indiana, and be harassed by the federal government for being in a border zone.
Whats to stop someone from saying, the entire Mississippi river and its tributaries are a border zone? With that you could get 80% of the US population into the border zone.
By enabling some "rule based" decisions that skirt the constitution, you enable a legal mechanism for constitutional rights to be violated without any legislation.
Likewise we now have the technology to automatically surveil the border 24/7 (maybe modulo tunnels, though I wouldn't be surprised if we could detect those too?), so a 100-mile exception only ever becomes more and more dubious. We could've built the wall and lined it with a surveillance system for less than the cost of this Iran war (never mind all the m̶o̶n̶e̶y̶ ̶p̶r̶i̶n̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ stimulus this decade), shutting up the whole border debate once and for all, and ending justifications for internal surveillance for trafficking.
I'm actually pretty curious about this. You can't easily sneak on/off a commercial international airplane, but that's because they've got the gates set up in the airport to funnel you through a specific path that leads to customs. Showing up on an international charter or GA flight seems squishier. http://www.canada.eaachapter.org/FLYING%20TO%20and%20FROM%20... The process seems to be that you schedule an ETA, taxi to a CBP station and wait there until a CBP officer arrives.
On the other side of it, it looks like CANPASS would let you land in Canada even if the CBSA station is closed...
About 213 million people live in this zone, so 2/3 of people in the USA. So I guess the 4th amendment doesn't actually apply to most US citizens?
[0] ^f Supreme Court: https://forumtogether.org/article/explainer-u-s-border-patro...
What home country is that? Some places (UK I think is one) have less protection at the border for citizens than the US does. The risk of being searched for Average Joe is so small that most people don't even think about it. HN is disproportionately worried.
A citizen may only be denied entry if they're entering the country for the purpose of committing a crime, and if the government can prove that, they'll probably admit the citizen and immediately arrest them instead.
For a non-citizen, it's basically comply or go home, possibly with a fun stay in a detention center first.
I don't get why some people end up in a detention center. Why not send them back home on the next flight? Even if people can't pay the ticket a lot of embassies will immediately pay for their citizen's ticket. Especially if they have a job and will be able to pay it back in a reasonable time. If it's an EU citizen they can be sent back on any flight going to Europe. So there is usually a possibility to leave within the hour.