Norbert Preining <prein...@logic.at> writes: > So while I consider it great that the judges in the case you mentioned > have decided in this way, I don't think this is the *norm* and we - > those travelling to the US - have to be aware of that.
Well, the norm is that your electronics aren't searched at all. Because, well, border patrol has limited resources, lots of people travel into the US, and mostly no one cares. My general impression is also that people who fly into the US are much less likely to run into this sort of thing than people who drive into the US because of the official purpose of these checks (see below). You're worrying about the exception cases, not the norms, already. The 100 mile thing is real: https://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/fact-sheet-us-constitution-free-zone and stopping people to ask about citizenship has been accepted by the courts, although I don't believe it's gone very high on appeal. Stopping for general searches has *not*, so far as I know, been upheld by the courts, but of course that doesn't stop the border patrol from doing it anyway and confiscating equipment and making people fight to get it back. However, they're primarily doing sweeps for drugs, high-value illegal imports, and undocumented immigrants, not for anything related to cryptographic keys. You'd have to get doubly unlucky: run afoul of one of these fairly rare random stops, and then get an individual officer who decides to harass you about something unrelated to the actual purpose of the stops. This sort of thing does happen, but it's not common. Most of this is part of the US political fight over immigration, and is mostly confined to some specific border states and is targeted at people who look Hispanic. (I'm not saying this to defend it, just quantifying the risk.) For nearly all visitors to the US, this 100 mile border zone thing is a theoretical risk, not something that's at all likely to happen to you personally. That's not to say that it hasn't happened, or that it's right, just that it is not a norm. I certainly respect your decision to not travel to the US because of the way that the US treats visitors. I am embarassed about the things that my country does in this area, and vote against the people who support this nonsense every opportunity I get. I would welcome this sort of boycott in a way that would bring sufficient pain to embarass parts of the US government into changing these policies, although I don't know if there's any way to get there from here. However, I do think that the actual risk level for a professional visitor such as yourself is not horribly high. (It is, however, non-zero, and I do think the US is substantially worse than many other countries in this regard.) -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/877g4gja0y....@windlord.stanford.edu
