Comment by ericmay
2 hours ago
Your day to day is still pretty much normal. If you turned off the news and never read about Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data [1] you'd just in your head remember there are tens of millions of folks flying, going through customs and border security and all that with 0 issues. What you wrote I think regarding the decade of silliness precisely supports the point, in my opinion.
[1] I'm not defending the behavior of border control here, but I also don't think we need to overreact to this one example which is exactly what is happening.
You have no real rights when police can kill, maim, or otherwise fuck you up with impunity even when you have done nothing wrong. Philando Castile and others demonstrate this. You may win in court but your life can be fucked up if the police decide to inflict non judicial punishment.
This is precisely the time to “overreact”. The government is clearly targeting dissidents and if we don’t “overreact” shit will get much worse.
We have kids sent to concentration camps. We have illegally deported U.S. citizens. The President has canceled monies allocated by Congress and signed into law. He is waging war against Iran without Congressional approval. He is openly selling pardons. The list goes on.
This isn’t enough to get you to “overreact”?
> Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data
Yeah, that's awful. As far as federal overreach of power goes, that's pretty inexcusable. I'd probably posit that COINTELPRO in the 60s was more insidious, but that doesn't discount this story individually being terrible.
I still maintain that America is not in the midst of its own demise and a comparison to East Germany is inaccurate.
> As far as federal overreach of power goes, that's pretty inexcusable.
Selectively detaining this guy, likely overreach.
Trying to get his phone's unlock code to go on a fishing expedition for whatever they can find, absolutely overreach.
But this guy catching felony charges for giving federal border police a duress PIN to wipe his phone when they asked for an unlock PIN? Not actually overreach.
You have the right to remain silent, not to lie to the police when detained (18 USC § 1001, and many state-level laws to the same effect also exist). Our justice system could not function if people had a right to lie to the police. Once you are detained, whether or not that detention is eventually determined to be lawful, destroying or disposing of your possessions to prevent police from accessing them is also generally a crime.
You fight abuses later, in court. Or, if you're going to use a duress PIN in the moment, you accept the legal consequences.
And yes, giving a duress PIN to wipe a phone when asked for an unlock PIN is a lie which may result in destruction of evidence. And no, the law does not care about "I'm not touching you"-level rationalizations of whether something is a lie or whether it was technically the police who entered the code to wipe the phone. Proximate cause is a longstanding legal concept.
> But this guy catching felony charges for giving federal border police a duress PIN to wipe his phone when they asked for an unlock PIN? Not actually overreach.
I think it's an interesting case that will get litigated in the courts. It seems they'll have to prove that the phone contained "evidence"; it could have just had embarrassing personal photos that he didn't want shared. When a house is raided and someone flushes a toilet, can courts assume they flushed drugs, or does that have to be proven?
I hope he's found not guilty, but either way this definitely is not the "sky is falling", "we're almost a police state" case that folks here are making it out to be. It's a very narrow and novel line.
1 reply →
"Our justice system could not function if people had a right to lie to the police" Yes - and, of course, every criminal does follow the rules! It's only "good guy" who gets completely destroyed and steamrolled over. Bad guy? Not even deported. "Cultural differences". Fuck the US.
I find it interesting that you can’t lie to the police but the police can (and do) lie to you. Why?
I disagree. Back then it was all a big secret. Officially the US was pretending.
Now? It is all out in the open. They're BOASTING about it. The baddies do whatever they want and noone is going to do anything about it besides write a blog. There will be no 1970s backlash with progressive Supreme Court judges and a senate committee investigating Hover.
Despite the normalization of masked federal gunmen kidnapping people based on the color of their skin and the language they speak.... Not even breaking a law in the process, the supreme court legalized racial profiling.
One can just argue about the normalization of people breaking the law by overstaying visas or hopping the border or whatever being the Supreme Court (or whoever you feel like blaming) legalized some other concept that most Americans also find disagreeable.
We don't have to have brown shirts pulling people off the street, and we also don't need to have this stupid fight over simply enforcing our borders like every other country on the planet. Extremists on both sides are as always, simply incorrect. Reject MAGA, reject DSA.
In context to my OP, none of this stuff or policy really affects most people's day to day lives. If you turned the news off you'd probably have no clue people were jumping the border en masse and you'd likely have no clue that those very same people were being arrested and deported.
Normal day of a normal person living in dictatorship ... is normal. There are sometimes periods where a lot of people are at risk at the same time, but they pass.
Many people lived their normal lives through communism with no issue. They ignored bad stuff and abuses just like your tv turning off person.
And yet, they were living in dictatorship. And found out if they tried to do something different.