alt Hacker NewsUK is crazy for this. Border police can detain anyone they like for literally no reason and if they do you have no right to lawyer or no right to silence. Your devices can also be taken and you must hand over any passwords.
I know the UK is an authoritarian state and not really comparable to the US, but as a Brit it's kinda weird hearing Americans complain about flock cameras and arbitrary border searches – these are common place things in the UK and no one cares (well, apart from me and maybe one or two others).
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That is not true. The specific powers of arrest and detention by UK border force were set out in this freedom of information response here https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/uk_border_force_power...
Summary is they can’t detain people for no reason, they can detain people for specific offences relating to immigration and citizenship, customs and excise and also the normal stuff any regular police officer can arrest people for.
I’m no apologist for how much state authority they have, but it’s not as bad as you’re making out.
> these are common place things in the UK and no one cares
That seems like a YP not an MP. Just because you and your fellow countrymen gave up long ago is not the problem of those fighting to not lose those rights now. Except maybe you guys make it easier as an example of for the government to show as an example of other countries are already doing it. Thanks for that.
The fight might be a losing cause, but at least it is being fought as long as it can be fought instead of just laying down and accepting it like the UK seems to have done.
Welcome to the "democratic" regimes of US, UK, Russia and Turkey. Arbitrary border searches, interrogations and imprisonment, if you are on the wrong end of the political spectrum.
All the shady stuff the UK does, it does at the behest of the US.
> Americans complain about flock cameras and arbitrary border searches – these are common place things in the UK
We complain about those things because we can clearly see that "the UK is an authoritarian state" because they are common place in the UK.
> no one cares
More like people pretend to not care for fear of being locked up for seemly arbitrary reasons, which seems to happen quite a lot over there based on the news reports, because "the UK is an authoritarian state".