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A Vancouver man was denied entry into the United States after a US Customs and Border Patrol officer read his profiles on the gay hookup app Scruff and the website BBRT.
[...] André, a 30-year-old Vancouver set decorator who declined to give his full name for fear of retaliation from US Customs, describes the experience as "humiliating."[He] says he was planning to visit his boyfriend, who was working in New Orleans. But when he was going through Customs preclearance at Vancouver airport last October, he was selected for secondary inspection, where an officer took his phone, computer and other possessions, and demanded the passwords for his devices.
"I didn't know what to do. I was scared, so I gave them the password and then I sat there for at least an hour or two. I missed my flight," André says. "He came back and just started grilling me. 'Is this your email?' and it was an email attached to a Craigslist account for sex ads. He asked me, 'Is this your account on Scruff? Is this you on BBRT?' I was like, 'Yes, this is me.'"
[...] "I could tell just by his nature that he had no intentions of letting me through. They were just going to keep asking me questions looking for something," he says. "So I asked for the interrogation to stop. I asked if I go back to Canada am I barred for life? He said no, so I accepted that offer."
A month later, André attempted to fly to New Orleans again. This time, he brought what he thought was ample proof that he was not a sex worker: letters from his employer, pay stubs, bank statements, a lease agreement and phone contracts to prove he intended to return to Canada.
When he went through secondary inspection at Vancouver airport, US Customs officers didn't even need to ask for his passwords — they were saved in their own system. But André had wiped his phone of sex apps, browser history and messages, thinking that would dispel any suggestion he was looking for sex work. Instead, the border officers took that as suspicious.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Monday February 27 2017, @12:18PM (1 child)
No, I mean wealth redistribution
The problem with the term 'wealth redistribution' is that we only use it when we mean wealth moving from people who have accumulated wealth to people who have not. We don't talk about wealth redistribution when we mean someone who inherited a few million getting more in rent from the properties that he bought with that money than most people earn working a full-time job. We don't talk about wealth redistribution when we're talking about the owners of a monopoly taking a cut of all of the income from working people. We only talk about wealth redistribution when we're talking about taking some money from people who have benefitted the most from the infrastructure of a modern society and using it to improve the lives of the people that have benefitted the least.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 4, Insightful) by art guerrilla on Monday February 27 2017, @01:52PM
no, what we don't talk about when we talk about 'wealth distribution' in any meaningful way, is that it is the 99% who are getting fleeced at every turn in this society/gummint, with the .01-1% taking virtually ALL the gains...
in reality, 'wealth distribution' effectively has a diode built into the system, where it only travels one way: UP, there is no 'trickle down', kampers...
production goes up, hours go up, efficiency goes up, automation goes up, AND virtually ALL the wealth goes up; up to the .01%, NOT -i would say obviously, but some people (the 25% who are authoritarians, mostly) defend a system which screws them- to the people who ACTUALLY did the work, ACTUALLY made the widgets, ACTUALLY performed the services, no, it goes to the rentier klass who have a stranglehold on the finances/capital...
regardless, we have a world run by the 1% for the benefit and convenience of the 1%...
will the sheeple wake before the technological means of total authoritarian control is completed ? ? ?
actually, i don't think so, too fat, too lazy, too stupid...
welcome to dystopia...