Ioerror's tweets after yet another detention (this time in Texas)

http://www.exquisitetweets.com/tweets?eids=eqt3bK9L1E.equdE5Igj8.equjFUYMxM.equunSrA96.equCze0DXU.equKkjGTC1.equM9wJJv2.equQJD8Dcb.equZBWohCT.equ7xm9arQ.eqvwgwlvIO.eqvMBtk8s0.eqvQUsu0Zx.eqvT74Lriu.eqvXEyMNzg.eqwgPKYFRl.eqwnDO4580.eqwrITBTY4.eqwFo79nem.eqwKW5rqhg.eqwM5rUpOu.eqwX9Hr7GS.eqxbeyCo1s

by neilk • 15 years ago

164 59 15 years ago

exquisitetweets.com

jwn• 15 years ago

Can someone give us some context here?

psawaya• 15 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430090

Construct• 15 years ago

The US Government Keeps Harassing a UW Researcher Who Speaks for WikiLeaks:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430090

Basically, a University of Washington researcher associated with WikiLeaks is detained for several hours without reason every time he goes through a US airport. He goes by 'ioerror' here and on Twitter, among other places.

jdp23• 15 years ago

Here's yesterday's thread on "The US Government Keeps Harassing a UW Researcher Who Speaks for WikiLeaks" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430090

pixdamix• 15 years ago

See previous discussions: "The US Government Keeps Harassing a UW Researcher Who Speaks for WikiLeaks" this guy "Jacob Appelbaum" is ioerror.

   - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430090
   - http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/obsessed-with-jacob/Content?oid=7560624

RyanMcGreal• 15 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Appelbaum

See, for example, the section titled, "Investigation and Detainment".

dotBen3• 15 years ago

...context needs to come beyond the previous hacker news threads and what has already been said.

CBP can be pretty terrible (I'm a foreigner living in the US and I've personally been on the end of their interrogation myself) but really we need FULL context of Jake's detainment before we jump to too many conclusions.

We still don't know:

1) Whether he has committed/suspected of committing/claimed to have committed any further or specific acts that would give CBP reason and justification for detainment.

2) Whether during detention Jake has been particularly provocative/inflammatory to CBP officers - which is only going to cause more delay and less expectation to fair treatment.

His tweets regarding him conversing with CBP officers who have personally served in Iraq seemed insensitive and inflammatory.

Regardless of your position on USA in Iraq, being disrespectful to people who have served in the Iraq seems counter-productive. I'm not a US citizen, I'm not pro-war in Iraq but one could empathize they probably feel betrayed by wikileaks and concerned for the security of their colleagues still in the warzone. My point is if the task at hand is to get out of that room and into freedom, some tact and decency in such a situation wouldn't go amiss rather than making personally inflammatory remarks about their serving of their (and his) country.

jbooth9• 15 years ago

Seriously, how is this legal?

Like, can't somebody be sued here? This guy apparently lost some basic rights for saying stuff?

_delirium• 15 years ago

Unfortunately, courts are willing to give pretty broad authority to the government to detain/search/etc. people reentering the country (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception). There are some sort of outer limits to the authority, but not much in the way of real enforcement from the courts so far. I would guess that they'd punt on this one as being national security + borders = defer to the executive.

jbooth9• 15 years ago

Well, maybe it needs to be re-tested in court with a nice egregious example. From your wiki link:

Although border-searches are exempted from the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement, they are still subject to the amendment's reasonableness requirement.[3] Whether a border search is reasonable depends on a judicial analysis that balances the intrusion into an individual’s legitimate privacy and dignity interests against the government’s legitimate interest in the subject of the search.[4]

If Mr. Ioerror's reading and can figure out who to sue, I'm good for a few hundred bucks on the legal fund.

tedunangst8• 15 years ago

You would have to prove he lost his rights for saying stuff. The govt would probably respond that he lost his rights for associating with and participating in a movement with the purpose of undermining the government.

jbooth9• 15 years ago

All the movement in question does is publish stuff. See my Pentagon Papers supreme court cite above/below.

As far as associating with a movement.. it's legal to be a Nazi if you want. There's a supreme court case for that, too.

baltcode• 15 years ago

Does any bill or article of the constitution talk about undermining the govt., and what it means?

gcb• 15 years ago

> Seriously, how is this legal?

9/11!

... remember the good times when the excuse was "communist! Go back to your 'papers please' country"

chwahoo• 15 years ago

I wonder if there is some kind of official annotation that can be added to a person's record indicating that they should be inconvenienced and harassed? If so, are officials "officially trained" to perform this function?

Or else, is this a case of local officials seeing that someone notorious is passing through and abusing their discretion to harass them and cause them to miss flights?

jbooth9• 15 years ago

Presumably, there's a memo box that says wikileaks, since I doubt these guys knew him by name.

I was ok with wikileaks when I first heard of them. After seeing the type and character of their opposition? I'm now a rabid supporter. What they do is legal, this has been upheld in the supreme court, and these people are being fundamentally unamerican in the 1st amendment sense by trying to extrajudicially harrass people.

EDIT: See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_St...

tedunangst8• 15 years ago

That court case may not be a slam dunk defense. For a different perspective, I found this article interesting.

http://www.slate.com/id/2276592/

_b8r03• 15 years ago

You have two ways of doing this, the No Fly List and the Secondary Security Screening Selectee (SSSS) list. I imagine that there may be a cross-check with the FBI on either list (although I don't know) but there's enough heat on him to trigger whatever it is that they want with him.

tedunangst8• 15 years ago

More the latter, I suspect. Your file is flagged "up to no good". Nobody wants to be the official that let the terrorist get away, so they all do sufficient screening that if anything happens later they can say, "There was nothing I could do to prevent that. We questioned him for a few hours, but without a warrant we needed to respect his rights and let him go."

The officials are thinking less about how this process inconveniences the traveler and a lot more about the shit storm that will ensue should they let another underwear bomber on a plane.

pyre• 15 years ago

Though the 'underwear bomber' didn't board a plane in the US.

hsmyers• 15 years ago

CPB agents much to young to know what 'Jack Boots' are, who wore them and what 'Papers Please' really means.

raganwald• 15 years ago

You don't need to go back to 1936 to find examples of this behaviour. Try talking to an African American who was involved in the struggle for civil liberties in the 1960s.

patio112• 15 years ago

Might want to FOIA / Privacy Act request them for the information in your file. It should make for interesting reading. The person who'd be authorized to say "no" to that has very, very different motivations in life than a ground-level security screener. For example, they're paid to avoid bad PR, and "The Privacy Act, which was established to prevent government abuses of power like the secret files the FBI kept on folks, does not prevent us from keeping secret files on you" is the definition of bad PR. They would also have to commit to that position in writing. Every bureaucrat learns very quickly that things which are not written down never happened. The events described by those tweets? Never happened. Get a signed logbook entry, though, and you have instant chain of evidence going back to God Almighty.

This is, generally, one of those "letters on paper can be used to hack bureaucracies to one's advantage" kind of things.

c.f. http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/admin/fl/foia/reference_guide.xml

The above is mostly motivated by an enduring interest in the inner mechanics of complex systems, not by any particular feeling with regards to Wikileaks.

_b8r03• 15 years ago

I suspect that homeland security does not fall under FoI but I could be wrong

patio112• 15 years ago

1 + 1 != 3, Customs and Border Protection is indeed subject to federal law. They publish a list of requests (with details elided) on the Internet:

http://foia.cbp.gov/index.asp?ps=1&search=&category=...

Again, you could imagine them asserting one of the exemptions to the Act, but that would require them committing to a damaging position in paper. That is a major purpose of the exercise. The existence of that piece of paper would be a news story. (Man Claims Feds Out To Get Him On The Internet is not a news story.)

djcapelis2• 15 years ago

IIRC, he has done both. They refuse to release the contents or even tell him the name of the right file to ask for.

The EFF and ACLU have both tried to get something to happen here...

avigesaa• 15 years ago

Also, check out the DHS TRIP program: http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/customer/redress/index.shtm. It's intended for this sort of thing. If nothing else, it may force someone to commit something to paper.

pieceofpeace• 15 years ago

http://www.exquisitetweets.com/tweets?eids=eqt3bK9L1E.equdE5...

"I would really love to know the contents of the CBP file on me. It's too bad that they refuse to disclose it via TRIPS or any other system."

tedunangst8• 15 years ago

TRIP is primarily for cases of mistaken identity. DHS has identified the person they intended to identify in this case.

jrockway• 15 years ago

Is there a legal defense fund I can donate to? If anything, it's time to start FOIA-ing the files.

metabrew• 15 years ago

Don't know if it's legal or not, but would be fascinating if he snagged an audio recording of the entire process next time.

jws• 15 years ago

The use of recording and communication devices is forbidden in the customs and immigration areas of US airports.

I don't know if it has the force of law. It does have the force of "lots of official looking signs".

donohoe• 15 years ago

Only by airport policy I believe... Not 100% sure

flipbrad• 15 years ago

Can he not get a restraining order against CBP? I say this, obviously, in jest, but one wonders: how exactly does the rule of law protect against this?

rbanffy3• 15 years ago

Well... His harassment is obviously systematic.

Cushman• 15 years ago

Yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430465

ioerror: I'm flying back through Texas in a few hours from Serbia. I wonder if this article or any of the others will change the way that Customs and the rest of the Federal Government treat me? I'm guessing "no" - care to take any bets?

Oof.

patrickgzill• 15 years ago

Sorry for being dense: is he being detained going into/out of the country (that is, international flight) ; or is this a domestic flight?

EDIT: per another comment, seems he is flying from Serbia to USA.

papercrane• 15 years ago

Off topic, but I really appreciate the layout of this site. Reordering the tweets to read from top-to-bottom makes it much easier for me to parse.

humbledrone• 15 years ago

As much as I appreciate the content, it feels like maybe Twitter is not the right format for a post like that.

rbanffy3• 15 years ago

http://twitter.com/ioerror/status/57713368735289344

Truth is, you can never be sure your screening wasn't random

http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2001-10-25/

djcapelis2• 15 years ago

Usually when they meet you at the gate instead of at the customs checkpoint the random screening isn't so random.

rbanffy3• 15 years ago

Let's imagine they randomly meet people at the gate ;-)

Anyway, this is so wrong on so many levels I am astonished it's happening.

dools• 15 years ago

I have to wonder why one would continue to return to the U.S under these conditions. Then again I wonder the same thing about TSA screenings, health care and gun control.

phlux• 15 years ago

>Q:It sounds like a CBP joke in the making, right? What's do you call being stopped, harassed, insulted, delayed, unable to call a lawyer, etc?

A: FREEDOM!

thyrsus• 15 years ago

Joseph N. Welch and Edward R. Murrow managed to shame the red-baiters into some semblance of quiescence. I fear that American authorities and those they serve are now immune to shame.

Cheer me up; please adduce some evidence to the contrary.

Ioerror's tweets after yet another detention (this time in Texas)

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