Recently traveled abroad and was shocked at how dystopian moving through borders is anymore. Scans after scans of passports, fingerprinting, face scans, questions about intentions for visiting, paperwork, cameras throughout airports that are surely doing untold amounts of biometric analysis with some bullshit AI…in some of these places you get laughed at if you ask about opting out. It almost isn’t worth it.
Fifteen years ago I was traveling to the US. I had a stop in Germany and Chicago before I reached my destination. Every time I was on a ground I was questioned, I had to fill several documents, I had a full body scan and I had to power on all my devices and perform some basic tasks, e.g. I had to take a photo with my camera and show it to the agent.
The showing that devices work seems to be the weirdest thing. Like somebody couldn’t put a large enough amount of explosive into a cell phone simply by shrinking the battery down to give it like 5 minutes of run time.
My old Note 4 had a zero lemon battery pack. It made the phone an inch thick.