The way modern day totalitarianism (at all levels of it) works is operating through existing legal and bureaucratic systems to make your authoritarianism seem "legal and within reason."
It's so much easier to enrage people if you do something _completely randomly_, but if you put "oh this is legal" behind it, people calm down quite a bit.
Not to drag you in this, but your comment is an example of that. And ignoring the ego for a second here, I've definitely seen myself care "less" when something is legal if I wasn't paying attention to it.
Remember that this isn't really new. Sham courts, sham procedures, sham justice has been the cornerstone of every fascist, dictator, authoritarian in the past.
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The rest of the comment isn't really relevant here, but I'm going to type it out just because someone might find it interesting.
We can see this type of "sham procedure" in social media moderation, in workplace behavior moderation, etc. Any person in power can, very easily, use rules, codes of conduct, policies, etc to control and set the tone of any interaction. Funnily enough, that power is usually reported as designed to protect the people with less power, but it's nearly always used to exert authority on people with less power.
Right.
Who thinks it is reasonable and appropriate to voluntarily consent to TSA full body scans? And now TSA facial recognition. It creeps up on us until a few people politely saying "no thank you" appear to be extreme.
The alternatives to codification are bad.
If your issue is with the codification and what is codified, you fix that through the process of updating that codification.
Disobeying or being angry at the process because it doesn't match your preconceived notions isn't a reasonable response.
In all societies, there are legal ways to subpeona someone at a border. That is not irregular or incorrect. "You are legally required to show up and talk to a grand jury" is not authoritarian rule.
You can't just call every legal code you don't like "sham justice".
TSA has no authority to detain anyone. You can literally walk away.
Immigration also has detainment authority. According to BleepingComputer it was actually CBP (Border Patrol, not ICE).
Curry didn't actually do anything wrong - he was acting as a security researcher. However it was sufficient for him to be legally Subpeona'd before a New York Grand Jury and TSA used that Subpeona as part of the detainment criteria.
I don't love the grounds of the electronic device search here but this was not random or arbitrary.