Same.

This has nothing to do with who is leading our country. The only thing new here is that it's easy to point the finger at one person for everything you don't like; it's been in place for awhile now.

Is that so? Here's the article's take!

> The so-called border search exemption means that the 4th Amendment’s requirement of probable cause does not apply to customs officials, and the practice of “detaining” cellphones began under the George W. Bush administration. But cellphone searches by the Department of Homeland Security have exploded in 2017 — DHS officials searched more phones in February of this year than in all of 2015. (Four members of Congress introduced a bill this week that would require agents to obtain a warrant before searching a U.S. citizen’s electronic device.)

It is odd that they compared to 2015 instead of 2016.

There could be a good reason, but it feels manipulative.

I don't think there's anything odd about this at all. It will just be the case that someone looked at the figures, said "Oh, it's interesting that there were more searches in February 2017 than in 2015 overall" and ran with that figure. It's a more interesting comparison than "There was an increase of 142% year-on-year" or whatever the actual figures are.

Full Quote: "But cellphone searches by the Department of Homeland Security have exploded in 2017 — DHS officials searched more phones in February of this year than in all of 2015. (Four members of Congress introduced a bill this week that would require agents to obtain a warrant before searching a U.S. citizen’s electronic device.)

President Trump’s new security regime wastes yet more of our time and our taxpayer money and shows outright scorn for the spirit of the 4th Amendment."

The article is making it look like this is due to Trump, but if there was an ongoing increase for 2 years under Obama that would be manipulative.

It also needs to be normalized with how many people are crossing the border. Did international travel "explode" as well? I have no idea. Absolute numbers don't really mean anything here. The rate is what matters.

If you're going to throw out all these unlikely theories why don't you look up the data and see if there is any reason to believe them? I'd bet dollars to doughnuts there were not more foreign visitors to the United States in February than there were throughout the entirety of 2015.

Rates and statistics matter. News organizations tend to pick out whatever statistic meets their narrative (just look up all the analysis of the pay gap but that's a whole nother can of worms). Are more phones entering the country? Are more phones entering from countries that should have additional screening? Just saying it's absolutely gone up doesn't reflect the true situation.

Uh huh. Maybe that's it. Everyone started carrying ten phones.

Perhaps the data was more readily available. Perhaps it made a stronger case for the comparison. Is there some drastic change between 2015 and 2016 I don't know about?

I don't know. It is possible, but it is strange that we would have this monthly number, but not have it available for the last year, but then have the previous year.

It means that while Feb 2017 had a lot of searches, it didn't have as many as 2016 as a whole. It did have more than 2015 as a whole.

Oh, well, if some other country does it it can't be bad.

To do its job the border patrol must invade the privacy of people entering the country. Terrorists, drug couriers, and fugitives lie and hide things.

It's incredibly frustrating. I hate the experience every time I go through it. But I understand why it's necessary.

Is it really necessary though? Is the reason bombs aren't blowing up all over the US because of the swell job border security is doing, or might there be another reason? Perhaps the same reason bombs haven't been blowing up for centuries.

Certainly there are people who want to blow up bombs all over the US.

What's stopping them, if not our security services?

> Certainly there are people who want to blow up bombs all over the US.

Is there? How do you know this?

Would you say the number of such attacks has drastically fallen since 2000?

The number of people trying to attack us has drastically risen.

I think that is quite unlikely. Based on what evidence do you believe that?

Just based on my own experience having lived through the nineties. We didn't have any where near the number of attacks against the US and Europe then.

Excluding attacks on US military forces engaged in post-invasion occupations, I'm pretty sure there were more terrorist attacks (total and foreign-origin) targeting the US in the Nineties than the 2000s, or, on a year-for-year basis, the portion of the 2010s that we've seen so far.

The embassy bombings, the attack on the USS Cole, the WTC bomb attack, and the Oklahoma City bombing were all notable terror attacks on the US in the 1990s.

Only two of those in that decade were attacks on US soil, compared to the Boston Marathon; Fort Hood; Garland, Texas; Chattanooga, Tenn; the Orlando nightclub; the "underwear bomber"; the failed Times Square car bombing; and many more attacks overseas.

It's not clear how interrogations by border police could possibly have helped with any of the ones you mentioned.

Of course not, those are the attacks that none of the existing security measures prevented.

More domestic terrorists (and rattling off examples doesn't really constitute proof of that theory) don't show the necessity of draconian border control.

I lived through the 90s too. I think if you want to make this claim you need some actual evidence.

Do you find this claim hard to believe?

What terrorist organization wanted to attack us in the eighties?

What organization wanted to attack us in the nineties, other than the failed WTC bombing?

If that had succeeded, history might be very different. Success breeds success and the second WTC attacks on 9/11 inspired other terrorists.

> What terrorist organization wanted to attack us in the eighties?

Hezbollah (usually as "Islamic Jihad"), the Italian Red Brigades, the Red Army Faction, the Abu Nidal Organization, and the Japanese Red Army are among the foreign groups that not merely wanted to, but actually succeeded in carrying out attacks targeting Americans in the 1980s

The Armed Resistance Unit, The Order, and the Jewish Defense League are among the domestic groups doing the same.

> What organization wanted to attack us in the nineties, other than the failed WTC bombing?

This little group called al-Qaeda that you may have heard of carried out several attacks targeting the US in the 1990s, including the WTC bombing which killed 6 and injured 1,042.

Saudi Hezbollah also conducted a major attack targeting Americans, and there were several by Islamists for which no organization took credit or has been ascribed blame. This, of course, doesn't cover everyone who wanted to attack Americans, just those who actually carried out attacks that actually did.

There were also notable domestic terrorist attacks in the 1990s.

Yes, I find it hard to believe. You might have gotten that from when I described it as "quite unlikely."

I notice you haven't named the terrorists you believe wanted to attack us then.

The number of such people that make it through the visa approval process has not drastically risen.

I'd rather not treat this as a forgone conclusion and would like to see some data on how often these invasive measures actually yield results.

>Terrorists, drug couriers, and fugitives

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-risk_bias

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-risk_bias

Who is claiming any measure will reduce risk to zero?

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp....

Mocking reality is not an argument, even if it can create a popular TV show.

>Who is claiming any measure will reduce risk to zero?

No one. But some claim that the current risk must decrease, while it is much smaller than almost everything else.

The current risk is measured while the border patrol and other agencies do their job.

How many terrorist attacks would there be if no one was trying to stop them?

Perhaps there would be (almost) the same number of attacks. If you disagree you have to provide evidence in order to break into privacy of others.

BTW, NSA never prevented any terrorist attack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance#Purposes

Upd: Also, if the risk is already small, why we need even more privacy invasions?

Unfortunately the tools available to terrorists continue to change and so must the measures used to fight them.

> NSA never prevented any terrorist attack:

> The director of the National Security Administration today told Congress that more than 50 potential terrorist attacks have been thwarted by two controversial programs tracking more than a billion phone calls and vast swaths of Internet data each day.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/nsa-director-50-potential-ter...

Thank you for the link. But I wish I could believe that after so many unpunished lies from them...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/25/nsa-re...

> Unfortunately the tools available to terrorists continue to change and so must the measures used to fight them.

From what I know, the current problem is not the lack of information, but how well it is targeted. For example, we knew about the terrorists in France in 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_2017_%C3%8Ele-de-France_...

Also, many think that the war on terror made more harm to the humanity then what we would have otherwise. At least such invasive war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_War_on_Terror

Not exactly a disinterested party, is he?

Can't help but notice this is an entirely different argument.

How thoroughly? What did they do?

me too