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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, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday August 17 2017, @10:09PM (5 children)
I hate these sort of comparisons. Nobody was "raped" here. A woman was requesting entry to a foreign nation. I know that seems so routine that most of us don't think about it, but border officials for centuries have been combing through stuff people carry on them at borders. And let's also be frank that most countries deny entry for all sorts of random minor reasons (particularly past offenses).
And said woman was carrying, on her person, records of an illegal act she had committed.
Do I think the search was unnecessary and gratuitous? From her account of it, it sounds like it was done without any suspicion whatsoever, so yeah, I think it was unnecessary. But did the border officials have absolutely every right to examine records she was carrying on her person? Well, they've been empowered to do such things (as they are at most international borders at most nations) for a very long time. Maybe laws need to change in the era of electronic devices about such things, but this is in no way akin to "rape" and she was not a "victim" because someone searched her phone at a border where she was requesting entry. (Reading further into TFA, it seems some of the interrogation about her personal relationships may have crossed the line... if you want to complain about that, I might at least agree it sounds inappropriate -- though again, we have one side of the story.)
Hence, making a statement like, "If you want to avoid such a scenario, do X," is just giving realistic advice. If a businessman was carrying a giant filing cabinet on his shoulder across an international border, and they searched it and found records of embezzlement and illicit transactions, would advice like "uh, don't carry a giant filing cabinet of your potentially damning records across an international border" be "blaming the victim"??
For future reference, let's also differentiate between "blaming victims" in a shaming fashion or whatever vs. offering realistic advice. Events can have multiple contributing factors for causality. (I'm always amazed I need to explain this to people.) Just because the border guards may have been unnecessarily thorough doesn't mean that "don't carry tons of your personal records with you that you don't want people combing through as you go across borders" is bad advice or "victim blaming."
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Friday August 18 2017, @05:22AM (4 children)
No. Governments don't have rights, they have powers. Rights are restrictions on the power of governments.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday August 19 2017, @12:33AM (3 children)
Semantic quibbling. "She had every right to be mad" doesn't mean she had some restriction on the power of government that allowed her to be mad. I didn't say the government had "rights" -- I said border officials "HAD THE RIGHT" to do something. Any dictionary will tell you that the noun right can mean a general authority to do something, particularly in an idiom like that, not merely your circumscribed definition.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 19 2017, @02:50AM (2 children)
Not the Oxford Dictionary [oxforddictionaries.com]:
Earlier, you wrote:
Why should they have the "right" to do that? Those records of embezzlement and whatnot are irrelevant to anything the border guard should be searching for. As it turns out, apparently, they can't just do that. They need [wikipedia.org] legal justification before they can go beyond the routine.
In particular, the claimed basis of rejection, indirect evidence of illegal activity within a year, is not within the purview of the border officer or customs agent. It'll be interesting to see who actually made that judgment to bar her from entering. It shouldn't have been a flunky in the field.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday August 19 2017, @10:19PM (1 child)
I think you need to go back and read what you just quoted. The border officials had a "legal entitlement" (in your definition) under their "general authority" (as I put it) to search in this manner. Whether or not they SHOULD have such authority/entitlement is a separate question. Regardless, your sense of "right" is a subset of that definition you quoted, which was my point.
As for the rest, you do realize you were quoting a Supreme Court decision dealing with body cavity searches, right? That's a bit different from going through your papers -- which customs officials DO have the right to request to do, as they can with anything you're carrying with you and transporting into the country. What they can't do is do personally "invasive" searches (like body cavity searches, strip searches, etc.) without "reasonable suspicion, nor can they do "destructive" searches (though they can do non-destructive searches, even including disassembling parts of your car, with no suspicion whatsoever). And they can't REPEATEDLY detain you at the border without some justification, though a single extended detention as happened here is pretty common even without suspicion.
So yeah, they could definitely spend some time leafing through your filing cabinet. As to whether they could take any action based on information of illegal activities they might find there.. well, that depends a lot on the particular situation. As you say, they're mostly tasked with stuff related to what comes into the country, so obviously they can't themselves arrest you for embezzlement or whatever in my scenario. They could in most cases report you to the authorities, and if you weren't a citizen, they could likely definitely deny you entry if such evidence appeared to point to a serious crime.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 20 2017, @10:49AM
If you need to use "quotes" when discussing definitions, then you probably are doing semantics quibbling.
The thing that gets me here is in a story about a potential violation of a visiting foreigner's rights to due process (and to a lesser extent, privacy), you're choosing to conflate the word "right" in a different and incorrect context? The border guard or whatever has some authority, power, or duty to search people at the border. But it is not an entitlement.
It sounds a lot like claiming that allowing people to pass through the US's borders without arbitrarily intrusive searches of their property at the whim of the searchers is somehow a violation of the rights of the border guards? What do you think?