I too wondered about this, but conversely you have to question how serious they could be given that US authorities just shipped the guy back to France without detaining him for days or filing any charges. It's a little hard to square the quoted suggestion that his comments could amount to terrorism with the actual response.

Not sure how it works in the US but many countries can choose to deny entry for any reason and my understanding is they don't even need to provide a reason.

If that is the case here then I really doubt the researcher was told that they have been denied entry due to their personal opinions on the Trump administration. This really just leaves us to speculate.

It wasn't clear to me that the issue here is a lack of legal authority for this to have occurred.

If legal authority or lack thereof is not the issue then the details matter if we're going to make an issue of this. I suspect that the researcher's private communications should not have caused them to be denied entry, though to be certain we'd have to see them.

Would a researcher who said something like "J6 should have gone all the way" have been denied entry in 2021? I suspect they would have, and that many would have cheered that refusal.

>Would a researcher who said something like "J6 should have gone all the way" have been denied entry in 2021? I suspect they would have, and that many would have cheered that refusal.

On what basis do you have for this belief? Frankly, I think that's facially ridiculous.

Because lots of foreigners have been denied entry to the U.S. for lots of reasons like this in the past.

Sorry I have not heard of a single instance where a foreigner was denied entry into the US because of their beliefs about January 6, I think you're going to need to support an assertion like that when you say it has happened "lots"

Weird, you’d think the researcher would be all over drawing the attention of vigilantes to them and their friends. I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t want Musk tweeting about them for weeks and trying to blackball them in the industry.

It seems like these comments could be released by a third party, the media, or the French government, without revealing the identity of the researcher.

You realise its possible to black out everyones names? And if its a tweet, it can be deleted. Its important to see the facts here.

Let's take a step back.

If I'm not in front of a tribunal, formerly accused of committing/attempting to commit a crime, who are you to check my private chats?

This is not a problem with some messages' content. It's a privacy problem.

Would people here be happy if the USA (or any other country, for that matter) had the authority to record all your private conversations with friends at the bar and use them against you?

One advantage of being a US citizen. If I'm entering the country and they want to see my phone, I can tell them to get lost. Worst they can do to me is hold me briefly and confiscate my phone for a while. That would be annoying and costly but not a particularly big deal.

I can't do that when entering any other country, of course, but they seem to be much less likely to try it.

> hold me briefly

You might want to consider whether your definition and the government's definition of "briefly" agrees.

For example Carlos Rios, a naturalized U.S. citizen was held for a week before being released. Peter Sean Brown, another U.S. citizen born in Philadelphia was detained for three weeks. Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/more-americans-will-be-ca...

Neither of those are even related to border control, let alone one's ability to refuse to unlock one's phone while going through it.

I don't know what to say about the naivety here. I guess I should say good luck, because you'll need it to hope that your illegal detention is brief.

You are assuming that they follow the rules. Have you been reading the news lately? Rules are for losers.

So far they are, for citizens. The worst case I've heard of was a citizen who was held by ICE for a few hours because they didn't believe him. Which, don't get me wrong, is bad given the racist underpinnings of it, but not something that worries me in and of itself. And yeah, they've gone so far as to deport US citizens from time to time over the years, but it's not anything like systematic.

They're not refusing entry or holding citizens indefinitely for refusing to unlock their phones at the border. Maybe they will, but until it starts, what I said holds.

When I say “they”, I’m referring to the people ICE reports to. Precedent and rules don’t constrain them, so what happened in past years seems irrelevant.

> If I'm not in front of a tribunal, formerly accused of committing/attempting to commit a crime, who are you to check my private chats?

CBP in the U.S. and equivalents pretty much everywhere deny foreigners the right to privacy. Heck, even in the U.S. the Fourth Amendment is taken to not apply at the border and ports of entry (and within 100 miles of any such, including the coasts!!). I too think that's quite a stretch, but that's how it is, and not just in the U.S.

I think there have been cases of CBP refusing entry to people who didn't even have smartphones with them.

So I agree that it is a privacy problem.

However given that we all have very little privacy when entering a country (even our own) the contents of this researcher's messages is relevant to deciding whether CBP acted reasonably even though we might say (I do) that CBP should never ask to see your communications without probable cause that you've committed or intend to commit a crime.