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A Canadian woman was issued a lifetime ban from entering the U.S. after officials searched her unlocked smartphone, found an email to her doctor about a fentanyl overdose she survived, and asked her questions about her past drug use:
A British Columbia woman was issued a lifetime ban at the US border after officials found an email with her doctor about a fentanyl overdose she survived a year ago.
Chelsea, 28, whose last name is being withheld due to fears that it could affect future employment, answered a series of questions about drug use while attempting to cross the Washington-British Columbia border. She said her phone, which didn't have a password, was searched for about two hours. During questioning after her phone was searched, she admitted to using illegal drugs before, including cocaine.
At the US border, the searching of electronic devices, including smartphones, is allowed as part of inspection. Warrantless searches on phones are also allowed at the Canadian border—a practice defense lawyers are trying to end.
"It was super violating—I couldn't believe they went into my sent emails folder and found something from a year ago that was addressed to my doctor," Chelsea said. "It was really humiliating, and it felt terrible having to bring that up."
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security recently released a one-page security assessment of the U.S.-Canadian border that identified drug smuggling (including cocaine and fentanyl) as well as "unidentified [Canadian] homegrown violent extremists" as security challenges:
The drugs that are commonly transported into Canada from the United States are cocaine and methamphetamine. Ecstasy, fentanyl and marijuana are smuggled into the U.S. from Canada.
[...] "This report identifies several areas where we can improve border security — especially in combating drug trafficking and preventing potential acts of terrorism," Katko, R-Camillus, said. "Stopping the influx of drugs coming into our country through the northern border is of particular concern, given the heroin and opioid epidemic plaguing central New York."
(Score: 2) by goodie on Thursday August 17 2017, @06:18PM (18 children)
Yep, for any felony or crime for which you were charged. All countries do that and happily exchange those records. In this situation, we are talking about somebody's emails to her doctor. This is not after looking up some government database. The next step could be to have government agencies have real time access to your online medical record when you cross the border, now that would be neat and not violate people's liberties!
(Score: 3, Informative) by EvilSS on Thursday August 17 2017, @06:30PM (14 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @06:39PM (2 children)
Or, how about use a fucking lock screen...
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday August 18 2017, @12:07AM
Or, how about not keeping e-mails to your doctor about using blow in ANY e-mail account, for ANY reason?
Sure, the mail provider may never forget, but to discuss such things in e-mail rather than in person is pure idiocy. Also,
Why, 'O', why?!
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday August 18 2017, @09:03AM
US requires you to hand over passwords for phones/etc.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday August 17 2017, @06:52PM (10 children)
Because the government powns her medical records, email service, phone manufacturer, phone OS devs, and app devs, that "We, uh, looked at your email app" is just polite conversation version of they looked in fifteen databases that they'd prefer not to discuss in public. This is why I'm not very concerned about border cops and my phone. They pown everything about it top to bottom, so getting pissed off only about it being out of my hands for a moment misses kinda the bigger point about your phone being an extension of big brother ALL THE TIME.
Secondly border cops are above the law, literally, and it might be yet another polite conversation version of "we saw pictures in your gallery of you burning crosses in some black dudes front yard, but to be polite and somewhat less controversial we're gonna say merely that you overdosed some years back". You can die on hill A, or die on hill B, may as well pick the easier one.
You have to realistic about possible setups. I mean seriously, I F-d my back up once, long story, why would I have an email conversation about it with my doctor, why the hell would I keep that email conversation for over a year... What would an email conversation even be about "Nancy Reagan says just say no to drugs!". I mean seriously? Something is VERY fishy here. Even F-d up american medical billing doesn't usually take a year to process and the bill wouldn't say "heroin analog overdose treatment" anyway, at least not directly, and she's Canadian so supposedly their medical system kicks our medical system's butt. My guess is polite conversation problem #3 is the email conversation is some ongoing thing about how the doc is an american citizen she's going to illegally marry in one of those immigration scams, but just to be polite we'll talk about your overdose. Or she knows she's been banned for attempted smuggling or bending some visa rule right to the point of breaking, so knowing she's gonna get banned anyway for whatever historical reasons, she plants a medical email in there to make ourguys look bad. Sometimes its the little details that are super sketchy that are skipped over real fast so people don't notice, that change the whole tone of the discussion when its pointed out. I donno who planted or planned this, or why, but that is likely to be a hell of a lot more interesting story than "cops harass opiate addict".
This does have the symptoms of having passed thru the politeness filter. You can have awkward arguments about if she really loves the guy she's going to attempt a suspected marriage of convenience with to obtain citizenship. You can argue endlessly about if her blood opiate levels are so high right now that transporting her blood means smuggling opiates. You can argue forever about maybe she's a steaming jackass and she's pissed off so many agents and supervisors on some BS or another that they're just sick of her, some people are just too antisocial to be part of society. But its pretty concrete and unarguable that they can have a management style bad news discussion about her documented heroin overdose so bye bye. Very much "put Al Capone in jail for IRS reasons" when you know darn well he's a leader of killers but its too much work to do it the right way.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Thursday August 17 2017, @08:18PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 17 2017, @11:08PM (1 child)
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday August 18 2017, @12:08AM
As retarded and worthless as this post is, I can always appreciate new ways to express things like convincing echoes using simple text tools. It evokes a feeling of not only reverb, but delay.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Thursday August 17 2017, @08:35PM (1 child)
Sheer unadulterated fiction, spun from nothing, with what passes around here for a 'straight face.'
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday August 19 2017, @02:45PM
What the original agitprop or my sorta-conspiratorial counterspin on it? I think mine, beat theirs, WRT creativity, style, and believability. I simply posted a better story than a "professional" journalist. Of course outwriting a modern journalist is kind of like being the best midget basketball player, but hey I still kicked some butt, even if it was lame butt.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 18 2017, @05:09AM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday August 19 2017, @02:59PM (3 children)
Given the circumstances behind the agitprop are incredibly suspicious, I'd agree with you that a "she had it coming" is not the only possible strategy. She could, for example, be over the top stupid, told the agent she's trying to smuggle farm produce past the border AND she's a druggie, and the agitprop is only focusing on the drugs because drugs should be legal, and ignoring she's an idiot. But its more fun to contemplate she had it coming for reasons of her own volition rather than being born with a lack of brain power. Or there's other spins too, of course.
None the less I think my greatest contribution is identifying the agitprop as mere agitprop and WTFing about the strange glossed over details, and my theories about WHY the details are glossed over are weaker and fundamentally not required to make the main point of its not news but merely agitprop with some really weird semi-hidden back story.
Another weird part of the agitprop is normalizing the idea that our country should be a dumping ground for druggies. Why should we shit were we sleep? Seems a very strange concept to try and normalize. Lets say instead of a druggie chick it was a male child rapist. Keeping a child rapist out of the country would reduce the overall quality of the USA ... how exactly? I mean, what did we REALLY lose here by keeping her out? Or maybe the agitprop message is actions should not have consequences, again, I'm just not feeling it. Maybe the funniest part of the story is they kept her name secret because her drug history would make her unemployable, so its vitally important we import as many unemployable people into the USA as possible because... um... why is that a worthy goal again? I mean if this chick isn't good for anything but at absolute best becoming a lot lizard at a truck stop, why do we need to shame American immigration policy into letting people like her in? Is there a shortage of lot lizards I don't know about? I mean Canadian women are generally hotter than USA women, but still...
The more you think about it, the weirder the agitprop story sounds.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 20 2017, @11:02AM (2 children)
Second, we don't need to come up with this weird agitprop story to explain potential dishonesty on the part of the traveler. They'll have natural behavioral tendencies to exaggerate their side of the story. Similarly, this story is coming from a source (Vice.com) that tends to exaggerate such things as well. I suppose that's what agitprop is, but I don't think we need to get all mystical about it.
It remains that we have not established that this would-be visitor or immigrant would cause problems for the US. That remains a completely unfounded fantasy you've spun.
Finally, what's with the hate for druggies? There's a huge number of people who take such mind-altering drugs in the US, most who are hard working and productive, contrary to the stereotype. In addition to the relatively light weight drugs like caffeine and nicotine, we have alcohol, a variety of prescription anti-depressants and minor tranquilizers (like Xanax or Valium), and of course, the illegal recreational drugs. I believe you'll find that a very high percentage of the US population is a druggie of some sort, often by necessity to treat a medical condition. And yet we're at a pretty high level of employment these days.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 21 2017, @01:50PM (1 child)
Drugs are or are not good can't be resolved in the context of the story, but it does seem that if they're good then she's no problem and if drugs are not good then she's problematic.
There's a spectrum and there's not much worse than overdosing heroin addicts. There's worse, but not much. Hopefully the agents are also keeping the "even worse" out of the country.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday August 21 2017, @10:07PM
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday August 17 2017, @08:48PM (2 children)
I'm not defending the actions here, but what you said there is SIGNIFICANTLY different from established policy in the U.S. for borders since the first customs statute of 1789. "Online medical record" implies remote access to a service, retrieving private records that are not physically present at the border. I know there have been reports of officials requesting passwords to Facebook and the like too, which is just as deplorable.
But there is at least a critical distinction to be drawn here, which is that if I read this story correctly, the email was physically in her "sent mail" folder stored on her phone. It was an actual record she was carrying on her person. Since the dawn of the U.S., if you tried to carry something across the border, it can be searched -- no matter if it's a sealed letter, a sealed Christmas present... or a darn filing cabinet on your shoulder. The fact that most people now carry around tiny devices that are the equivalent of thousands of filing cabinets doesn't change the fact that physical records on your person have always been subject to search.
I'm not saying such a search was justified here, and maybe we do need to think about modifying policy in light of the electronic era. But if all these guys did was to open an email that was physically present on her phone, it's not that different from what border officials have done for generations. What you suggest about getting access to online records or remote materials -- that's a lot different, almost as if the immigration folks took your filing cabinet keys, drove to your office a hundred miles away, and started searching that before letting you through the border.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday August 17 2017, @09:03PM
Oh, and what I find most offensive about this whole scenario is that we apparently have border officials who waste 2 hours on a "fishing expedition" on someone's phone for no apparent reason. (Yes, I know this happens all the time. No, it doesn't make me feel any safer. Don't we have something better to pay them to do? Who's monitoring the nudie scanners?)
Actual suspicion of serious crime? Suspicion of carrying illegal substances? Etc. That's different.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by vux984 on Thursday August 17 2017, @11:36PM
You've made this point a couple times. And you are right... but also wrong. In 1850 if you crossed the border with a filing cabinet on your shoulder it was because you actively wanted those files to come across the border with you. You would not be 'incidentally lugging around a filing cabinet'. And it was reasonable to argue that if you didn't want every file in your filing cabinet searched, why were you carrying it; but that argument no longer applies.
First -- The fact that most people carry around tiny devices that are the equivalent of thousands of filing cabinets SHOULD change everything. Its reasonable to search the documents someone carried over the border in a filing cabinet. Its not reasonable if the filing cabinet is the size of a human hair and everyone carries thousands of them, without thinking about, as a matter of course. If everyone is carrying piles of personal information everywhere due to changes in technology the correct response is changes in the law, NOT for people to have to buy burner phones and do other weird data purging rituals when about to cross a border. The law should support the society we want to live in; never the other way around.
Second -- the contents of my phone are not a threat to the united states. No email crossing the border whether via the internet or carried over physically on a phone is a significant threat. So border services really have no real business looking at it. The scope of their role is securing the border, it really shouldn't go beyond that. It shouldn't be carte blanche to scrutinize every tourist, every professional, every conference goer, and every RETURNING CITIZEN beyond verifying they are who they say they are, verifying that they aren't bringing in anything dangerous / prohibited / quarantined, and verifying there is no preexisting reason to prevent them entrance (outstanding warrants, expired visa, previous convictions, terrorist watch lists... etc). THAT is their job. Their job isn't to catch previously undetected office supply pilfering by reading your email as the cross the border. If there is no pre-existing reason to stop you at the border, then the search should amount to ensuring you aren't moving contraband. That's it. And if there is a pre-existing reason to stop you at the border, but it falls short of an outstanding warrant for arrest (such as previous conviction, expired visa, whatever...) then they should simply turn you away. Citizens of course should always be allowed back in.
Finally, you wrote: "which is that if I read this story correctly, the email was physically in her "sent mail" folder stored on her phone. "
Was it though? Or was it received on the fly from the server at the request of the snooping guards? Is my sent mail from a year+ ago on my phone? Nope. In my case its just sync the last couple months months. But if I search, it'll pull matches on demand from the server. So if I'd written a note to my doctor in 2003 about drugs, and then searched for drugs in 2017, it'll still find it "on my phone". But until i searched for it, and selected the result, it wasn't on my phone. Selecting the result is what PUTS it on my phone. So now... not only everything in the filing cabinet actually carried over the border is being searched, but potentially all the filing cabinets still at the office are being searched too, thanks to this filing cabinets capability of pulling files from remote cabinets on demand.
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