It was burying our heads in the sand at the very time when it's most critical to be aware of how we and our industry are affected and involved with politics. If someone in the tech industry who provided significant support to the incoming administration was also involved with YCombinator, the timing would almost be sketchy.
Pretty much every political thread on HN accomplishes nothing more than to increase the net amount of frustration in the world. The same ideologues rehash the same arguments. No one's mind is changed. And each time a few people get fed-up and quit HN, causing the remaining community to be slightly more strident.
The sooner these threads are dealt with, the healthier our community will be.
Not the case, of course. I've changed my mind thanks to political discussion on HN. I've seen others do the same. I don't believe you that there are people quitting HN because of politics threads -- there's no evidence for that or reason to believe it.
Politics can be really, really relevant to tech and vice versa. A lot of the things that have been discussed in this election are explicitly about technology and software (H1B visas, 'closing up the internet', social media to name a few). It would be ridiculous to plug our ears and pretend they don't exist -- that's how non-technical people end up making the rules about technology that we have to follow, i.e. how we got into a lot of the messes we are in today. Tech nerds like us love to pretend it doesn't matter because it's hard and it involves feelings and emotions and you can't reason your way out of it but we always, always lose big time with that approach.
> It was burying our heads in the sand at the very time when it's most critical to be aware of how we and our industry are affected and involved with politics.
That's one big problem with politics - it's a weaponized art of crying wolf. Everything, no matter how trivial, is an emergency, and "it's most critical to be aware" of it. Most of those things sort themselves out anyway, and are in fact of little real consequence.
I agree! One thing I loved about living in India was that politics and international issues could be discussed in most any forum, at least in the social/business circle I had there. People didn't feel that differences were bad, and people talked to learn and understand each other.
I mean, yes this is awful and shameful but is it really news? It has always been the case that you have virtually no rights when entering or leaving the US especially with regard to protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
It's awful and shouldn't be normalized: which is the point of the ACLU's argument. If this guy, whom is also a US citizen I might add, is suspected of breaking the law, law enforcement needs to meet the burden of proof of obtaining a warrant and not just walk all over the Constitution.
If I understand correctly, these searches and seizures are occurring before the person is granted entry, which means they have not yet inside the country, nor even shown that they are allowed to be in the country in the first place. To me, it (unfortunately) makes sense that the laws of a country only apply once you've entered it, so I actually can't fault their logic there -- if I were a judge, I would (reluctantly) rule that this logic is fine.
What is DO have a problem with, though, is that they seem to have deliberately structured the procedures this way in the first place precisely for this goal. People should be granted/denied entry first, then searched afterward if entry is granted -- because it would seem that their permission to be present inside the country should be independent of what they are allowed to bring into the country. So if the ACLU is fighting against this, I sure hope they're making this argument rather than the first one.
>Are you saying US citizens have zero constitutional rights the second they step out of the US?
This gets kind of close to word-play territory (no pun intended).
IMHO you still have your rights, but when you're outside the country, you can't expect the government to automagically recognize you as a citizen among the foreigners who don't have the same rights as you, and hence may not be able to exercise them. So that means you first have to convince them that you have the rights you claim before you can expect your rights to be recognized.
This would work just fine in a world where authorities were keen to recognize your identity before inspecting your belongings, so I'm saying the fact that they refuse to do that is the real abuse/violation here. So that's what you really have to argue against. Otherwise, if you assume that is OK, the rest of the logic doesn't really seem faulty to me.
> IMHO you still have your rights, but when you're outside the country, you can't expect the government to automagically recognize you as a citizen among the foreigners who don't have the same rights as you, and hence may not be able to exercise them.
Apparently even that is not true, because the US can actually assist foreign governments in detaining and torturing their own citizens [1].
Yes, either we are in US territory and US has authority to apply it's laws under the restrictions of its constitution or we aren't and they have no particular authority to search at all with some exceptions from military/coast guard.
Hmm... I wouldn't say they have no authority to search you there -- only that it is abusive for them to do it without good reason, or to refuse to verify your identity first if they can do so. (Extreme example, but if they had good reason to think you might have explosives on you, I would sure as hell want them to search you even before you've had a chance to talk to the CBP officers.)
I haven't though this through, so I don't know what the implications are, but I think it makes sense to say there are multiple "borders" that we need to think about here -- an "outside" border, which other countries recognize as the border of your territory & jurisdiction, and an "inside" border, which is the one you cross by showing your passport. In between these two borders -- assuming (crucially) that you're crossing these borders out of your own volition -- I would say that the country has every authority to do more or less anything it feels like: you're in its territory, and they have no reason to believe you belong there (effectively, you're a trespasser). At that point, the best you can hope for is that you're entering a sane country that does something humane. If you're not, then either you're a citizen and should have been advocating to change the system before leaving, or you're not a citizen, in which case it's other people's country and they get to run their country however they like (sorry).
Again, I haven't thought through all the implications, so there might be some glaring problems... but this is what my brain right now thinks would be logical. None of these would apply if you're being forced to cross borders (war, persecution, refugee, etc.); I don't really know what to do in that case. But those are rare enough that you can't expect the country to treat every single traveler as a potentially persecuted refugee.
If you let the gov create an extrajudicial zone where they aren't subject to their own laws that becomes a very attractive option. I agree that if there is resonable suspicion, that falls within the pre agreed upon laws. Ideally, to prevent hypocracy and gradual constitutional errosion via offshoring, the fundamental rules applied internally should also apply externally.
> To me, it (unfortunately) makes sense that the laws of a country only apply once you've entered it,
So, are you saying that a US citizen, before entering the US, would be allowed to kill a customs officer without any consequences? Or are you saying that customs officers could torture citizens as long as they are outside the US without any consequences for them?
> Or are you saying that customs officers could torture citizens as long as they are outside the US without any consequences for them?
The US government and its courts have ruled that yes, that is exactly the case.[1][2]
Eight years after Mr. Meshal’s rendition, his case ended up before a three-judge
panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The
questions hanging over the proceeding were: can the United States government
allow, or even facilitate, the rendition of an American citizen to another
country for interrogation? And can United States officials themselves conduct
rendition and interrogations of American citizens, including threats of torture,
on foreign soil?
According to a decision handed down last week, the answers appear to be yes. If
this decision stands, it will mean that an American citizen overseas who is
unlawfully targeted by the United States government for rendition, interrogation
and detention with the help of a local government will have no form of redress
in the courts.
Obama administration lawyers argued that Bivens did not apply to Mr. Meshal’s
case because the incident took place overseas and involved unspecified “national
security” concerns.
In addition to throwaway4891a's comment, it seems a little against the whole spirit of the constitution and the mindset of the framers as stated in the declaration of independence to make the point that "non-citizens can have their rights violated" even if in this case the party was a citizen. The idea is we were to yield our inalienable rights to the state so that we could secure our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. The whole idea "well, they're not citizens, so it's okay" assumes that it is the government that grants rights, instead of the other way around.
The border search exception considers the "border" to stretch 100 miles inland, corralling two-thirds of the American population within this zone of "virtually no rights."[1]
It's somewhere in the middle of ACLUs hysterics and "no problem". You're taking a strong control against abuse (warrant) and replacing it with police discretion.
Given the broad liberties that the modern government takes with things, I think skepticism is in order.
We don't have to wonder about this. It's come up more than once before SCOTUS, and SCOTUS decisively rejected the idea. To apply border crossing doctrines to a search, the case has to have some nexus with an actual border crossing.
People live a couple miles from the Canadian border do not, in fact, lose their 4th Amendment rights.
Law enforcement generally didn't treat places like Glens Falls, NY or Syracuse as the border zone. Now they do.
If you're a brown person or have an accent, and traveling via Amtrak from NYC to Buffalo, you may be hassled or pulled off the train by Customs or Border Patrol. That didn't happen until a few years ago.
35 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 90.2 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel
The sooner these threads are dealt with, the healthier our community will be.
Politics can be really, really relevant to tech and vice versa. A lot of the things that have been discussed in this election are explicitly about technology and software (H1B visas, 'closing up the internet', social media to name a few). It would be ridiculous to plug our ears and pretend they don't exist -- that's how non-technical people end up making the rules about technology that we have to follow, i.e. how we got into a lot of the messes we are in today. Tech nerds like us love to pretend it doesn't matter because it's hard and it involves feelings and emotions and you can't reason your way out of it but we always, always lose big time with that approach.
That's one big problem with politics - it's a weaponized art of crying wolf. Everything, no matter how trivial, is an emergency, and "it's most critical to be aware" of it. Most of those things sort themselves out anyway, and are in fact of little real consequence.
What is DO have a problem with, though, is that they seem to have deliberately structured the procedures this way in the first place precisely for this goal. People should be granted/denied entry first, then searched afterward if entry is granted -- because it would seem that their permission to be present inside the country should be independent of what they are allowed to bring into the country. So if the ACLU is fighting against this, I sure hope they're making this argument rather than the first one.
Does this make sense, or do people disagree?
Are you saying US citizens have zero constitutional rights the second they step out of the US?
This gets kind of close to word-play territory (no pun intended).
IMHO you still have your rights, but when you're outside the country, you can't expect the government to automagically recognize you as a citizen among the foreigners who don't have the same rights as you, and hence may not be able to exercise them. So that means you first have to convince them that you have the rights you claim before you can expect your rights to be recognized.
This would work just fine in a world where authorities were keen to recognize your identity before inspecting your belongings, so I'm saying the fact that they refuse to do that is the real abuse/violation here. So that's what you really have to argue against. Otherwise, if you assume that is OK, the rest of the logic doesn't really seem faulty to me.
What do you suggest instead?
No. It doesn't seem like you made any effort to understand what I'm saying. What I was saying did not reduce to something this trivial.
Apparently even that is not true, because the US can actually assist foreign governments in detaining and torturing their own citizens [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13145227
I haven't though this through, so I don't know what the implications are, but I think it makes sense to say there are multiple "borders" that we need to think about here -- an "outside" border, which other countries recognize as the border of your territory & jurisdiction, and an "inside" border, which is the one you cross by showing your passport. In between these two borders -- assuming (crucially) that you're crossing these borders out of your own volition -- I would say that the country has every authority to do more or less anything it feels like: you're in its territory, and they have no reason to believe you belong there (effectively, you're a trespasser). At that point, the best you can hope for is that you're entering a sane country that does something humane. If you're not, then either you're a citizen and should have been advocating to change the system before leaving, or you're not a citizen, in which case it's other people's country and they get to run their country however they like (sorry).
Again, I haven't thought through all the implications, so there might be some glaring problems... but this is what my brain right now thinks would be logical. None of these would apply if you're being forced to cross borders (war, persecution, refugee, etc.); I don't really know what to do in that case. But those are rare enough that you can't expect the country to treat every single traveler as a potentially persecuted refugee.
So, are you saying that a US citizen, before entering the US, would be allowed to kill a customs officer without any consequences? Or are you saying that customs officers could torture citizens as long as they are outside the US without any consequences for them?
The US government and its courts have ruled that yes, that is exactly the case.[1][2]
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/opinion/how-the-fbi-can-de...[2]: https://www.aclu.org/cases/meshal-v-higgenbotham
[1]: https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone
Given the broad liberties that the modern government takes with things, I think skepticism is in order.
People live a couple miles from the Canadian border do not, in fact, lose their 4th Amendment rights.
If you're a brown person or have an accent, and traveling via Amtrak from NYC to Buffalo, you may be hassled or pulled off the train by Customs or Border Patrol. That didn't happen until a few years ago.
But times change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Ressam