It’s not solely directed at you to single you out. Consider yourself a catalyst, rather than the object of our affection.
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I was going to suggest that maybe DHS either 1) knows more than they’re letting on at the moment, and/or 2) that instead of holding up a giant banner at the airport saying, “Your Security Practices Are Probably Shit, Mr. Mayor”, DHS is taking the Mayor’s now-besmirched digital devices to have their nether regions wiped clean.
Neither is likely, though.
I guess you could leave the country with a $150 Chromebook and a $50 Android phone and destroy them before you come home. $200 might be worth seeing the look on the DHS agent’s face when he asks you for your devices and you tell him you threw them away because you love America and the 4th Amendment too much to submit to the DHS’s terrorist campaign against our Constitution.
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It would certainly be interesting to see a shootout on the border justified by second ammendment rights giving one the ability to protect their fourth ammendment rights.
I mean interesting if you discount the bloodshed.
Sigh, I hate to repeat the tired meme, but it’s still true:
Behavior like this from the government is proof that the terrorists have won. And they’ll keep winning as long as the Constitution is ignored as a measure to fight them. They didn’t want specifically to kill us. They wanted to make us more like them. Sacrifice your rights and freedom. Subjugate yourself to unjust and illegitimate power. Become like a fundamentalist theocracy. And our weak and cowardly leaders were led happily by the nose into fulfilling the terrorist’s ideological goals.
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Telling the guy with your balls in a vise to go fuck himself may be a brave decision, but it is certainly not a smart one.
Micro-SD in a tamper proof package. If it doesn’t get there or has been opened you know what to think.
And our weak and cowardly psychopathic leaders were led happily by the nose into fulfilling the terrorist’s ideological goals saw this as a wonderful way to get what they wanted by frightening people who did not realise that the worst ever terrorist attack on US soil represented about 3-4 months of gun murders or a month of road deaths.
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If during that month the NRA stops all lobbying and bribes to politicians, I’d be in favour of that idea.
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if you are not cooperative they can put some kiddie porn on your machine, just like they used to plant drugs…a hell hole !!
4th Amendment
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.
You forget that the 4th Amendment doesn’t apply within 100 miles of a border, and that you can only even cite the 4th Amendment whilst standing in a 1st Amendment zone, etc.
The benign interpretation is that the US are checking whether the Chinese managed to infiltrate something onto the Mayor’s laptop and were clumsy about seeking the Mayor’s consent or obtaining his cooperation. Really, the Mayor should be being sent abroad with a burner laptop in the first place. Or, perhaps the Mayor is innocent and they know he’s innocent, but want to make a visible example that no-one is protected by the 4th Amendment these days.
What we might actually need is a full-disk AES-256 service, or equivalent, to allow hardware to cross borders. A service that e-mails you public keys before out-going and return travel to allow encryption, and couriers the private keys to your home address and overseas location. A boot partition that encrypts the rest of the hard drive before travel, and locks the computer down to requiring the private key that you type in once arrived or returned.
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There’ll be another mass shooting before then. I’d put money on it if anyone is interested.
Your heart is in the right place.
What about these? We’re still pissed off that the Lib-Caps have successfully managed to claim that they are the one true libertarian ideology.
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If we could go a month without a nut with a gun shooting a bunch of people too.
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You mean a service that could receive a National Security Letter (NSL) to hand over your data, backdoors the software, and which they can’t tell you about? I’ll pass.
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I have a friend who rants about this but I point out that the ship has sailed. In public discourse and media, for those that are even aware of Libertarians, it has basically one association and it isn’t anarchists and marxists.
Given that I didn’t say that, no. But thanks for assuming you can pull out the same old talking points from your creative misreading.
And this is why we can’t talk. Everything an Internet Hero doesn’t care enough to read well enough to understand can be crammed into a glib little space with similar words. Then you can trot out the same old bullshit in response to arguments not made.
Strong racial prejudice is something like fomenting race war as a kind of intellectual exercise, therefore if a libertarian can say, “I’m not racist”, that stops all criticism of the relentless driving trollies of discourse and arming of the population so you can wait for things to explode. Koch Industries is a very limited (and minor) example of the way your movement has been so easy for nutbar authoritarians to control. So in your mind they serve as a punching bag to deflect attention away from the universe of hero worship engaged in by authoritarian followers for authoritarian dominators, all branded for liberty and freedom.
If you can convince me that you really are dumb enough not to see the road to a destructive civil war in arming the society to the gills, then that would be a thing. If you were simply willing to put less stupid ways of improving society (Planned Parenthood, democratic regulation of markets, social safety net) ahead of guns-n-bad-econ, that would be a thing too. But you aren’t. You simply declare yourself an ally of liberty while doing very little on its behalf, and very many things against it. Here at least.
Maybe you could show us some receipts to show you’re legit. Right now we just have your words and the general inaction on the part of the movement you claim to know from the inside. We have good cause to be skeptical of you.
So let me see if I understand this subject with some degree of clarity. There would be no point to Chinese Communists attempting to slip some nefarious software onto a returning American’s computer. This is because that computer, and every other device being carried by said American, was built by Chinese Communists who could at any time have embedded in said devices whatever nefarious software/programmed hardware they wished when they were building it. Unless, our noble servants in the DHS carefully scrutinize every disk drive, smart phone, tablet, laptop, memory chip imported into this country everyday. Which seems unlikely. Plus the agents of Communist China seem of late to express little interest in bringing data/software into this country, and have a great interest in taking it out. I refer of course to the recent unfortunate loss of security clearance information, nuclear weapons technology, ad-infinitum. Therefore, the purpose of examining electronic devices brought into this country by American citizens is to examine data that originated in the United States, not Communist China. The idea being that such a search conducted while the citizen is in our country would be unconstitutional, but once a citizen leaves our country and wished to return to the bosom of our free land, such constitutional protections could be circumvented and said devices could be searched at leisure.
It is interesting how in our current age, constitutional protections (such as they are) cease at our nation’s borders. Any citizen who leaves our country may without due process be searched against their will, imprisoned, or even executed, by agents of their own government. A truly tragic state of affairs! I sincerely hope that following our next presidential election our leadership will address this and see that our country once again becomes a beacon of justice and freedom to guide a beleaguered world.
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