'Give Us Your Passwords'

What happens if border agents are allowed to demand access to your phone and online accounts—and turn you away if you don’t comply?

Kaveh Waddell
Feb 10, 2017

“What sites do you visit? And give us your passwords.”

That’s what U.S. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly wants foreign visitors to hear before they’re allowed to enter the United States. “If they don’t want to give us that information, then they don’t come,” he said, while testifying in front of the House Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday.

The suggestion was met with horror among privacy advocates. “With that kind of access, they can not only see what you’ve publicly posted, but things you haven't posted yet, private messages, private lists, they can impersonate you, and even do these things on accident,” wrote Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, on his website. “This kind of access is profoundly invasive.”

Kelly’s proposal goes beyond most interpretations of the law—but that doesn’t mean it’s not already followed, occasionally and informally, by American border agents. And the U.S. isn’t the only country with unclear standards for border searches.

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Continua qui: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/give-us-your-passwords/516315/