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It's troubling to watch one of the most amazing places on earth transform itself into a totalitarian purgatory. Access to physical phone/laptop is only the fir
by jackhack 8y ago
It's troubling to watch one of the most amazing places on earth transform itself into a totalitarian purgatory.
Access to physical phone/laptop is only the first step -- mark my words. Big Brother's bureaucrats are never satiated. Next, we will have demands for passwords and unrestricted access to : email, facebook, photo sharing, hacker news posts, social media, etc.
I see sudden spike in the market for burner phones. ANd a long-term opportunity for a company that can create a "burner" social media profile.
- djsumdog 8y agoI was in Wellington during the GDPR protests. Instead of arrested and fining those who illegally searched and handed over Kim Dotcom's servers, they just changed the law to make it all retroactively legal; making spying legal on all citizens. At least they banned software patents.
- HarryHirsch 8y agototalitarian purgatory Nitpick: in Catholic dogma purgatory is a place of purification, those in purgatory know that they are there for a reason and only for a certain time, afterwards they enter heaven. Hell on the other hand, is for eternity and ugly. That's why the two are easily distinguished in their iconography, both involve imagery of flames, but souls in purgatory look joyful and those in hell look despondent.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- robertely 8y agoHonestly, thank you for explaining that. It's nitpicking, but i don't think learning is ever a bad thing.
- mark212 8y agosounds almost exactly like going through customs at the border.
- jackhack 8y agoThank you very much for the explanation,
- caf 8y agoPerhaps limbo would be more apposite.
- ryandrake 8y agoFactory reset and wipe your device before travel, and restore when you get to your hotel. I’m a privacy nut and while this is a disturbing trend there exist straightforward work arounds. EDIT: I do this all the time and it’s not even remotely difficult or a big deal.
- NewRapGods2 8y agoRestore from where? Are you giving all your data to the evil likes of Apple, Google and Microsoft?
- klohto 8y ago>there exist straightforward workarounds Exactly and that’s why this a problem. This law will never catch anyone that actually is troubling for NZ because anyone who is shady, already uses some workaround. Now it will only bother and waste time of people who are serious about their privacy to apply this workaround as well.
- bernardlunn 8y agoNail on head! This does not increase real security and it is a real privacy violation. Dumb lose lose authoritarianism. Disappointed that smart Kiwis do something so dumb
- jl6 8y agoWhile I don’t agree with this law, it’s not dumb. Security is about defence in depth. A determined attacker might have a way around this law, but perhaps not every criminal would know about this method, or think to use it. It’s easy to scoff at blunt-tool laws because you can think of a way to undermine them. But law and society are built on a patchwork of imperfect systems which can individually be broken, undermined, manipulated or worked around. In aggregate, they do achieve some semblance of a result, because they are layered together - even if each one alone provides only a marginal element of security.
- 8y ago
- crispyambulance 8y ago> I see sudden spike in the market for burner phones. ANd a long-term opportunity for a company that can create a "burner" social media profile. I am sure that some folks will try those things and it may work for a while, but the way things are going, it's not going to matter whether you bring your device, a burner, or nothing at all. All it will take is one more 911-like crisis and inevitable fear-mongering. Then, your online profile is going to get mined along with everyone else's, continuously, by multiple state-level organizations who cooperate with each other-- whether you've booked travel or not. By the time folks get to a border it will just matter of diverting anyone with a "red X" next to their name.
- bigiain 8y agoI have spare factory-reset phones and laptops for family/friends who visit - in case they choose to travel without devices.
- plg 8y agoquestion: what countries on border entry can demand usernames/passwords to online services?
- gdhbcc 8y agoAll countries can demand it. They are sovereign. Are you asking which countries do demand it?
- eesmith 8y agoI think you should read that as: "Which countries have laws which allow border inspectors to demand usernames/passwords to online services?" Those which do demand it are a subset of those which can demand it. Your sovereignty argument is such an extreme interpretation of the question that it's almost certainly not what plg had in mind - if plg did have it in mind, then I find it hard to believe that question would have been asked in the first place. Consider the question "what countries on border entry can draw and quarter entering citizens?" Your viewpoint seems to be that the correct answer is "all of them", yes?
- DavidHm 8y agoDepends on whether you consider the ICCPR and in particular articles 6-8 as superseding country sovereignty or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Covenant_on_Civil_and_Political_Rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Covenant_on_Civi...
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoLaws are irrelevant. What are you, the individual, going to do when a border agent takes your device and demands your password? “We’re just going to take this for a few minutes, what’s your password? Oh you won’t tell us? Sit in this room for 400hrs. Ok, thank you, you’re free to go, enjoy your stay.” Nothing. There’s nothing you can do. Lodging complaints after the fact doesn’t unviolate you. You can be a renown children’s author and the best you can hope for is an apology. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-25/mem-fox-detained-at-los-angeles-airport-by-us-officials/8303366?pfmredir=sm http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-25/mem-fox-detained-at-lo... And that from an ally. Not just any ally, Australia is the US’s best friend.
- Tloewald 8y agoTwenty years ago, Nicholas Negroponte pointed out the irony that when he passed through Singapore customs, they searched his atoms but not his bits. Is being searched before you get on a plane or enter a customs checkpoint some kind of hideous infringement of your civil liberties? No! There’s no problem with this in principle. The problem is that it’s silly, and it causes a privacy and security violation while not accomplishing anything.
- bambax 8y ago> Is being searched before you get on a plane or enter a customs checkpoint some kind of hideous infringement of your civil liberties? No! Of course it is. We're simply used to it, because we're sheep and cowards. But it is. Searching everyone, without probable cause or reasonable suspicion of anything, is a violation of civil liberties, and of basic human decency. It's also pure theater and useless. And because we have accepted this, other privacy agressions seem justified.
- scrollaway 8y agoHey Tloewald, please don't pretend to speak for everyone when you say "being searched" isn't a problem in the first place. It's not a problem for you, fine. I'd ask you to let me search you but that'd only be to prove a point, so by all means keep accepting it. But when you say it's not a problem, you do not speak for me. It's pointless, degrading, and above all it's sad that you and many others accept it without questioning it.
- Tloewald 8y agoThe principle here is people can agree to surrender some of their privacy for safety. The problem isn’t that searching my bits is a greater violation than searching my atoms, but that it’s not useful. Right now there’s no pattern of bits I can carry with me to blow up a plane and in any event I could easily bypass the search. I’m not thrilled by the social contract, but it’s a good deal more convenient than driving across country.
- scrollaway 8y ago
- grkvlt 8y agoLets not get too excited. There were about 40 million passengers transiting NZ airports last year, according to Wikipedia.[0] The article says roughly 540 devices were searched in the same time period. That's 0.00135% or basically a dozen people per million being searched. That hardly seems like totalitarian overreach. In fact it seems quite restrained and pretty reasonable - and presumably must be intelligence led, since I rather doubt they are doing this at random...! 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_busiest_airports_in_New_Zealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_busiest_airports_i...
- jsilence 8y ago"At first I did not say anything because they were only after ...."
- nemo44x 8y agoWait until they get more efficient at it. This kind of thing can be highly automated with software that only has to within a tuned degree of certainty determine who else needs additional screening. You can tune this precisely on how many humans you have around at a given time and can facilitate the "Enhanced search" of the devices.
- dumbfounder 8y agoHas anyone taken a steganographic approach to this? Just have a bunch of pictures of cats (or something more believable, like porn) in a partition, then you overlay sensitive data (encrypted). So you don't have a mysterious partition that is easily found. Obviously you can't store a ton of data that way though. You could even take the same approach with the program itself, hide it inside something else. (I imagine it would still be detectable by someone sophisticated enough, but might make it more difficult)
- nemo44x 8y agoRight but there will be just be a law that specifies anyone trying to purposely circumvent the search will be accused of a felony. Of course the vast majority will agree because of "safety" and "if you have nothing to hide...".
- WaylonKenning 8y agoRiddle 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.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- debacle 8y ago> 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.
- jsilence 8y agoWhat about "probable cause" or "innocent until proven guilty"? Why would I have to accept being strip searched without a warrant?
- clarkmoody 8y agoAt a border, you have no rights.
- komali2 8y agoThat's not true in many countries.
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- udfalkso 8y agohttps://i.imgur.com/gnejoIm.jpg https://i.imgur.com/gnejoIm.jpg
- clarkmoody 8y agoFor others saying something to the effect of "we let them search our X already, so the phone is a logical step and not a big deal," you've already given up your expectation of privacy, so you can't understand why others would want to keep it. This is the slow creep of the state with concomitant erosion of liberty. In a few short years, you are the ones who will be justifying any of the following on grounds that "they already do the less-invasive thing, why not one step more?" - Mandatory fingerprinting (USA does this for foreigners in some airports) - Declare all cash, declare all crypto (with addresses / xpubs) - Bank account logins - Register electronic devices / install software trackers - Hair sample for drug testing - Cheek swab for DNA - Blood draw to check for diseases / drugs / DNA
- mywittyname 8y agoThe Feds will already have most of this information now. They've long had your bank account information (thanks to the PATRIOT Act). They probably have trackers installed on the chipsets of devices, but ignoring that, we know they are capable of intercepting most internet traffic. Most people have their fingerprints taken, either as the result of a run-in with the law, legitimate or otherwise (clerical error). Or because they were incentivized in some manner (TSA Precheck). Federal IDs are rolling out now too.
- tootahe45 8y agoIn the UK and NZ they're already looking to stop people from buying burner phones with cash.
- ttty 8y agoCome on... 2nd hand phone you can buy from gumtree for cash.
- brokenmachine 8y agoBut you still need a connection. They practically want a blood sample when you try to register a SIM.
- yayana 8y agoBringing a blank phone with you isn't really a problem, but getting a local SIM can be.
- bacon_waffle 8y ago> getting a local SIM can be. I just picked up a new one for a work project at the local supermarket yesterday - $1NZD.
- voltagex_ 8y agoWhich provider? I noticed (too late) that the airport SIMs have special overpriced plans. I'm used to paying ~$10/GB for data in Australia, it seems to be about double that in NZ without going on a plan.
- brokenmachine 8y agoI went to NZ fairly recently and I went with Skinny Mobile. It was 10G for $46 - 28days (Ultra Combo). No idea if it's still available or not. It automatically renews though, so I had to remember to cancel it when I left.
- 8y ago