We want your data. Or else

This has been a law a long time: Border Control has a right to search any and all electronic device you bring into the USA, 4th Amendment be damned. Obviously the Founding Fathers felt that laptops don't fall into the same category as sealed letters. Obviously. And it happens in Canada, too.


So this happens, and then the whole of Western world applauds US politicians expressing concern about data privacy laws in China and Russia without any obvious discomfort from cognitive dissonance. Where is this concern when it comes to the USA?

The latest furore in certain parts of the media when it actually happened to a real person (meaning: American) is quite loud nevertheless.

Let's stop for a second and think about this, shall we? Aside from the strange legal twisting of the Constitution so that you can claim that it is legal to essentially seize anyone's most private information at the border, there are things to consider here. One thing particularly.

The US is claiming it can do legally what even the Stazi, the KGB and the Gestapo could not really hope to achieve: get everything, every single piece of data you own. You have to give them access to all your files, all your information, otherwise you are either denied entry and/or arrested. It claims powers that the only the most autocratic regimes have ever claimed: an absolute right to every single piece of your private life. (The US also claims it has an absolute right over your life -namely it can end it without any legal processes, but it's also something we should not discuss at this present junction.)

Because let's face it: nothing can be hidden, unless you are content living in the Virginia mountains along with the rest of the nutjobs who are stockpiling canned food and ammunition before the inevitable FEMA crackdown on freedom (sorry, Freedom) comes. We all have our lives encoded in bits and bytes; it's a fact of life. Regardless how it's stored, you should still should have right to privacy. The US can just force anyone to give it up (the parts they have not already captured through the NSA) and -aside from some "fringe" lefties, like Chomsky- nobody is raising an eyebrow.

So where was the furore from these very same media outlets over these years? A couple of feeble articles on how to deal with the situation were all I could find from the "mainstream"; some reports on the CIA's capacity to hack into anything, and use cars to kill people; it's hardly the angry media response on an unprecedented infringement on personal privacy by the torch-bearer of freedom.

Despite of this we still claim the US is a liberal democracy. All this after the NSA, illegal wars and torture. Weird, isn't it?