"At the borders though, it seems that the law may be pushed back in favor of national security" - No Fucking Duh!
It's what reasonable people tolerate for the safety of the community. Would you be alive today if your body's immune system just let anything pass by without checking out the oddities? Now that this guy is standing up to make a news story about his plight, he should show us all how clean his phone is so that we can all recognize that he really is an upstanding person who happened to get wrongly profiled because maybe he was fidgety about time constraints or something.
Who cares if he has some granny porn or is considering,a sex change or whatever other embarassing crap he may be worried about. The fringe rights campaigns have made everything normal and tolerable, so pull the curtain open and then we'll see that he isn't involved in anything outright illegal.
The article needs to be seen by a qualified editor too. It is rife with unprofessional sentence structures.
This whole thing is more and more about enforcing complete obfuscation of every aspect about a person's life. I will admit that the guy was probably scared about the unknown results, and so fell back on the right to keep things locked up. But what are they gonna do? They're going to browse through your texts, your gallery, and maybe your email for the most obvious signs of crime. If you're a halfway intelligent criminal, you wouldn't have to fall back on a belief that you have some magical right to live and die as a sealed box.
Now yell at me some, but fuck that guy. I don't know him apart from bin laden, and niether do you. If the men and women in charge of keeping everyone safe have a concern, he should be cooperative and if he gets caught on some minor thing, then boo hoo. He can cry some and pay a fine and go to jail for a bit and maybe get out early, but that's how the "cops and robbers" game works. If he is doing something much worse and gets caught, we need him to be gone.
Those border agents would regret letting him go if he turned out to be a piece of the next big american-killing event, and his resistance only sends up more red flags.
Why do we have less respect for the human beings who keep us all safe by filtering the influx of unknowable variables than we have for one idiot who's squawking about keeping his phone locked up? They might already know what's in there, and this is their chance to keep people from getting killed by his efforts. Now he has a support group among the obfuscators who really are striving to enable their own pleasures and plots to be carried around with them in little sealed boxes.