Riddle me this - what is the alternative? Don't look at a phone? Why do we look inside suitcases? Why have the concept of customs?
We search things across borders for things our country does not want. We don't want drugs. We don't want fresh fruit (which will trip up more people than drugs).
We don't want child porn. And if a phone is a container for that content, we want to be able to explore the container.
Of course, there's a million different ways around this. Get burner phones. Store content in the cloud. Have seven firewalls. Whatever. But that doesn't change the concept of inspecting things across a border to make sure things we don't want, don't come in.
And if that's a totalitarian purgatory, then name a country (or external border for the EU) that isn't a totalitarian purgatory.
I get your point....but a similar and more worrying thing is happening at the Canadian/US border right now.
Entry to the US can be denied (for life even) if the customs agent suspects the traveler has involvement with Cannabis.
That includes having investments in Cannabis companies.
So if the take my phone and find any information on it connected to Cannabis I could be barred FOR LIFE from entry into the US.
That means that I am leaving a country where that is legal, and entering into a state that it is also legal some border gaourd can ban me for life - even if all I did was search for "Cannibis legal in Canada".
That objection seems orthogonal to the point though. The US could make it so that owning a blue shirt means you are barred from the US for life. They open up your suitcase and find a blue thread.
Ultimately it's the law itself rather than the enforcement of it that you're objecting to.
Cannabis use is considered a “crime of moral turpitude”. So it’s legality elsewhere is irrelevant to the US.
However your scenario is inaccurate. Just as having a google search about murder weapons won’t bar you for life neither will search history about cannabis. They may ask why your interested in it... But learning about a crime is not equivalent to commiting the crime.
>Even though Znaimer didn’t admit to personally using pot,
he was given a lifetime ban anyway because of his
investments in U.S. marijuana companies, he said.
>In one case, Saunders said an Edmonton man received a
lifetime ban from entering the U.S. simply because he was a
part-owner in a Colorado building that leases space to a
pot dispensary.
So what is stopping them from denying entry due to search history?
The rationale in the US law is that the crime is an equal moral failing to murder. That may be irrational to you and I, but that is the law.
Just as being an accessory to murder would be considered "very bad" so too would supporting cannabis use in any way. According to US law he is investing in a criminal enterprise, similar to funding a cartel in Mexico. The law doesn't match the common person's perception of severity, but the US border guards will enforce the law as written.
Again, none of this prevents you from merely learning about cannabis. It requires action of some sort to further the use of it.
Its more like leasing a room knowing it was Dexters kill room. That said I'll go no further justifying US pot laws. But the failure is in the severity assigned to the "crime", everything that follows is rational if you accept the premise that it truly is akin to murder.
This is kind of thing is not new. Canada doesn't let people with DUIs enter the country. They also inspect electronics and have for a number of years.
And marijuana is not legal anywhere in the US at the moment. There are simply some states that don't have state level criminal laws associated with marijuana.
> We don't want child porn. And if a phone is a container for that content, we want to be able to explore the container.
I could be 100% wrong, but I feel like you could check every digital device entering the country all day with 100% accuracy and have less than a 1% impact on the amount of child porn (or any other digital contraband) being trafficked.
Given the content of most people's phones, a file by file phone search should be considered at least equivalent to a strip search, maybe even a cavity search depending on how freaky the person gets with their selfies.
Worse still is it's a nonconsensual, uninformed strip search of any sexual partners that person has...
But I wonder why. If I am a resident of a country, why is that my rights suddenly go away at the border? Why is it that I have rights when I step out of the airport but when I am in it, I have no rights.
Because they can. Civilisation spent centuries building up rights and due process, and then the authorities suddenly decided none of it mattered in this specific context because we let them. We should be livid. It's an absolute disgrace and an embarrassment to post-enlightenment humanity.
I can't use the visa waiver program to travel to the US because I was arrested once. Not convicted of any crime, mind you, just arrested. In the rest of society it's a pretty strong principle that guilt is decided in courts, not by police officers. No matter: anything that makes you seem less than the lowest possible risk is enough to deny you something. No presumption of innocence, no visa waiver program for me.
My girlfriend's mother has applied for a family visa that would allow her to immigrate to my country (where her daughter lives) permanently. The application takes several years. In the meantime she applied for a tourist visa to visit us for Christmas later this year. It was denied. We can only speculate why, but of course I suspect that since she has demonstrated a desire to immigrate permanently, the authorities consider her at risk of overstaying the visa. A mother who has done nothing wrong can't visit her daughter for Christmas because of this, and it makes me furious. She has no intention of overstaying: if this is why they rejected the visa it is again an assumption of guilt instead of one of innocence.
I wonder if there is any way to make it an election issue in any country. Parties seem to be unanimous on the topic, and most people don't travel, so it's probably not much of a pull for votes. Influential people travel more though.
And probably have sufficient influence to sidestep most such problems.
Clearly the U.S. political system isn't interested in anything that sounds like weakening border security. I think we're all going to be suffering indefinitely.
One of the problems with this is that it is trivial to evade for someone intent on serious wrongdoing. A person who manufactures child porn for money, for example probably won't use their phone to transport it across a border. They'll transfer it over the internet, most likely in a surveillance-resistant manner.
Instead, these kinds of searches catch people who don't know they're doing something illegal, or who the government finds undesirable due to their associations or business activities that are legal in their home jurisdiction. They may also be used to map out networks of contacts.
I do not want governments doing the things in the second paragraph.
We search things across borders for things our country does not want. We don't want drugs. We don't want fresh fruit (which will trip up more people than drugs).
We don't want child porn. And if a phone is a container for that content, we want to be able to explore the container.
Of course, there's a million different ways around this. Get burner phones. Store content in the cloud. Have seven firewalls. Whatever. But that doesn't change the concept of inspecting things across a border to make sure things we don't want, don't come in.
And if that's a totalitarian purgatory, then name a country (or external border for the EU) that isn't a totalitarian purgatory.