There's no need for a he said she said. Techcrunch got the report, in which the border guards focussed heavily on the image.

Techcrunch looked into the image:

>It was an image from 2009 of a child, who had been murdered and mutilated. Despite the graphic nature of the image, TechCrunch confirmed the photo was widely distributed on the internet and easily searchable using the name of the child’s murderer.

The border guards did not do any examination of the image, and appear clueless as to how Whatsapp works. Anyone who's used it knows that it autodownloada images by default.

Further, anyone familiar with whatsapp usage in south asia knows that viral whatsapp forwarding is common there.

Nothing there relies at all upon the story of the man turned away. It's all in the border report + techcrunch's search of the image.

This is relevant for travellers who use whatsapp. Any meme forwarded to you could be grounds for visa revocation, even by a loose connection.

Whether or not it was the sole reason, the CBP document certainly made significant note of the "possible terroristic images" on his phone.

This seems to be a rather significant story for our age - border agents can search your private email and messaging history, then judge you based (at least partly) on content that you might not even know is there.

Do you know for certain that every image you've ever received in every messenger is "safe" in every context? I sure as hell wouldn't let anyone dig through my phone. They can steal ("confiscate") it first.

This issue is very much on-topic for HN.

> I flagged it for the reason that the headline purports to know something tech crunch can’t possibly know:

That's a reason to suggest modifying the HN headline from the source headline to something more accurate for the factual content; flagging is for a story that is out-of-bounds for the site, not for suboptimal (including clickbait, editorializing, or outright misleading) headline on an otherwise appropriate story.

True, but I'd argue the non-clickbait version of the story is out of bounds for the site. "Some guy says CBP lied about why they denied him" doesn't exactly lead to deep discussion.

HackerNews covers far more benign examples of someone's privacy or rights being violated. I'm not sure how this is somehow out of bounds on the site compared to discussions about YouTube deleting [x] videos and so forth.

> True, but I'd argue the non-clickbait version of the story is out of bounds for the site.

That's fine; I wouldn't argue that it is improper to flag this as off-topic (I may or may not agree, but it's a reasonable opinion in any case, and an appropriate reason for flagging.)

The article demonstrates clearly and objectively that the person was denied entry after an image was found on his phone. That’s of interest to anyone with a phone who travels to the US.

I’m personally horrified that dubiously educated, low-wage bureaucrat thugs can cancel granted visas based on dubious evidence and personal bias. Even if you can’t “prove” that the image was the reason for the denial here, it’s repulsive that it’s a possibility.

I mean, it's pretty much par for the course with US and global media these days. Stir up outrage for the clicks...