Wired is lost. If you dont offer up credible social media accounts or if you have a wiped phone, they probably wont let you in. These people still believe that the rules apply but they simply dont. There are no guarantees.
You can tell that to
Ryan Lackey has traveled to countries like Russia or China[;] he has taken certain precautions: Instead of his usual gear, the Seattle-based security researcher and chief security officer of a cryptocurrency insurance firm brings a locked-down Chromebook and an iPhone that’s set up to sync with a separate, nonsensitive Apple account. He wipes both before every trip and loads only the minimum data he’ll need. Lackey has gone so far as to keep separate travel sets for each country, so that he can forensically analyze the devices when he gets home to check for signs of each country’s tampering.
Now, Lackey says, the countries that warrant that paranoid approach to travel might include not just Russia and China but also the United States
Thats what he wrote right after your quote, implying that he hasnt tested it. Also this level of paranoia was always justified for US travel and he surely knows that. The thing is that the US is now probably worse than Russia or China when it comes to the chance for random people to be arrested. For political activists its probably equally likely but the survival chance in the US is still higher.
Last time I travelled to the US, I brought my old phone. It had plenty of text messages, a few photos of family and nature, and nothing else. They didn’t check it, but I guessed it would pass the “not a burner” vibe. Now I’m wondering, though, how people would react to me having no social media presence (other than Reddit at that time, which I accessed via browser). Not that I’m planning to travel to the US ever again, but I wonder whether there’s a market for perfectly inoffensive fake social media accounts.
I’ll actively try to avoid that. There’s been a time in which I thought it could have been interesting to visit that country, but the time has passed.
Got to be really deranged to vote for a candidate that ran on a platform of revenge and hate, and there’s at the minimum 70 million of those types of Americans which outnumbers many individual countries. Americans suck and don’t seem nice. Too many bad apples.
If you listen to the conservative messages closely, most of them are crafted in a way that sounds positive, not evil. Then what’s evil and can’t be shown any other way gets framed as the necessary evil to make those positive messages come to be.
The left goes very similar route, speaking of equality, freedom, love, and then coming up with something like “the world would be a better place if rich feared for their lives”. Might be true, but it’s the necessary evil/angry pushback again.
So, it’s not that people on the right chose to be evil, they just grew with one set of convictions that portrays left as unwilling to see the truth or to accept the sacrifices necessary to make the place better overall (in their eyes). And, similarly, far left that wants to overthrow or radically change the system is seen by the right as a massive evil force willing to destroy the country that took centuries to build a system that led people to where they are now - in relative prosperity and peace.
That is not to say they are correct in their thinking - there are massive flaws in their logic - but when you’re committed to a certain worldview, it’s easy to ignore inconsistencies, blinded by the fear of other side destroying it all. This, unfortunately, is what left resorts to as well, while being objectively more true (as in scientifically backed), because in the crazy world of politics emotions go first and reason goes second. Most people never get to cautiously verify and scrutinize the talking points presented to them, after all.
At this point, I just feel bad for them. Our education system failed them. These “deranged” people you are talking about are our friends, coworkers, and family who have been misled by a system that was built based on slavery. Keep your masses uneducated, and you can do what you want with them.
Some of them woke up before the election (a friend of mine from Arkansas), some were killed by Covid (my coworker from Texas), and some will learn what the unintended consequences are of voting against their best interest (my aunt that used to work for the federal government in Ohio).
But deranged, they are not. However, I do think Hillary was right. Some of them are deplorable, but I don’t know any deplorables.
Step 1: don’t
It appears that these countries now have some form of warning associated with travelling to the USA:
- Australia
- Belgium
- Canada
- Denmark
- Finland
- France
- Germany
- Ireland
- Mexico
- Netherlands
- New Zealand
- Norway
- Portugal
- United Kingdom
Sure are a lot of 5eyes countries in that list. I’m pretty sure we don’t have closer allies than that. Well aside from Russia now
I wish it were so easy. I’ll be going there later this year because family. Ugh
Unless you’re a blonde head blue eyed Caucasian with no tattoos, I wouldn’t personally risk it. ICE used to be at least microscopically reasonable, they wouldn’t detain people who demonstradedly weren’t illegals. Not now though.
You have to wonder what the hell their end game is.
ship it to your hotel and travel with a burner til you reach your destination.
Don’t visit unless it is a life or death situation. I wouldn’t want to go into country that wants to finger print me, hand over social media, and copy my devices.
