Censorship at the Border Threatens Free Speech Everywhere

[Sunlei]

By Jameel Jaffer, Jameel Jaffer is founding director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. He previously served as Deputy Legal Director at the American Civil Liberties Union and Director of the ACLU’s Center for Democracy.


Censorship at the Border Threatens Free Speech Everywhere


Defending one’s political and religious beliefs to government officials is an obligation we associate with life in authoritarian regimes, not open societies. It’s becoming common, though, for foreign citizens who visit the United States—and even for Americans returning home after travel abroad—to be interrogated about their beliefs by customs and border personnel. These days, those seeking admission to the United States may also be required to surrender their cellphones and laptops, which can supply border agents with a wealth of information about travelers’ associations, communications, and activities online. Border agents use that information to draw conclusions, sound or not, about travelers’ ideological commitments.

Now the Trump administration, under the rubric of “extreme vetting,” is considering taking a further step by mandating that non-citizens disclose their social media handles and passwords and answer questions about ideology as a condition of admission to the country. The aim is to empower consular and border officials to ensure that would-be visitors to the United States embrace American values, a concept that the Trump administration has not defined. Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly defended the idea in congressional testimony last week. “If they don’t cooperate,” he said of aspiring visitors, “they can go back.”

These new forms of vetting take advantage of travelers’ reliance on laptops, cellphones, and social media accounts, and in this sense they are products of the digital age. But this is not the first time that the U.S. government has experimented with ideological screening at the border. This practice has an ignominious history, and we can be confident that this new experiment with it will end badly.

The McCarran-Walter Act, which Congress enacted in 1952, barred from the United States foreign citizens who had advocated anarchism or communism. President Harry Truman vetoed the law—“seldom has a bill exhibited the distrust evidenced here for citizens and aliens alike,” he observed when he returned the bill to the House of Representatives unsigned—but Congress passed the legislation over his veto. Opponents of the law feared it would be used to exclude and stigmatize critics of U.S. foreign policy and to manipulate debate inside the United States, and these fears were justified. Successive administrations used the law as a tool of censorship, refusing visas to, among many others, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, South African novelist Doris Lessing, and British novelist Graham Greene.

.......... continued at https://www.justsecurity.org/39986/censorship-border-extreme-vetting-free-speech/

[Igel]

1. Yup. That's the thing.

If I wanted to go to Russia, though, it's worse. I have to have a sponsor. I have to say where I'm staying. Visa, the whole 9 yards.

In this, it's exactly like the USSR was. For the same reasons: You expect subversion you take steps to keep "subverts" from sneaking in unsupervised. It was, after all, how the Bolsheviks did things under the tsars, so it's hard to say that there's not a point to be had there. I'm not sure that all that many common rank-and-file people wanted to go to the USSR to engage in subversion, and most spies would wrangle their own way in.

Similarly, though, it's hard to argue that the Russians, before the USSR, during the USSR's existence, and after the USSR's demise didn't engage in subversion. If you do, you need to reexamine the history of Bolshevik agents, the USSR's activities during the Cold War, and recent history involving Russia's meddling in the US.

Same for the occasional attack by others in the US. This kind of vetting is bad. At the same time, the argument's made that banning Muslim refugees and travel is bad--yes, there are problems in Europe, but that's because of all the refugees (etc.) that underwent no vetting. That last bit, the explanation for why banning travel to the US would be bad, crucially relies on the vetting procedures that are in place. It's unclear that much has changed in 1/17; the review of vetting procedures in the EO was, along with the rest of the EO, barred from implementation by court order. Having cell phones and laptops inspected was being done last summer and the summer before.

Heck, in 1993 and 1994 in the Czech Republic I had to turn over my passport briefly to the school to justify my presence there. The police needed to record information from them and I had to register. I was there for a 4-week summer program. Not entirely sure who would want to subvert the Czech Republic. It needs no subverting.