Exactly. I don't care about selfishness...that's a red herring in my mind that people use to divert the argument. He left the country. When that happens, they can no longer make the same,assumptions that are made about people within this country. It's a pretty obvious fact. It's bad enough that he could lie about disease contact or contaminated produce, but they can't even be sure he is really himself in some cases. Not going into the details on how to do that one.
You agree also that each of those people on the ground is just another human being who is trying to handle their responsibilities well. My assertion that those people are not being respected is based on the claim that they likely had no legitimate underlying cause for detaining and investigating this man. Why would they behave in such a way when there are thousands of potential dangers to sort through daily? Why would they waste their own time on it? Maybe they have some evidence to back their efforts, but they aren't gonna throw that out for us to see because it belongs in court, and revealing their methods automatically serves to undermine their effectiveness.
Refusing to grant your guardians some level of assumed merit is equal to disrespecting them as people and as effective guards. And to do it over a random moron who couldn't have thought ahead about what he does and doesn't want to carry with him through customs is stupider than that guy. He earned everything he got.
It is also flawed to assume that what he hides is inherently insignificant. We might say to ourselves "Well, I would like for my insignificant stuff to stay hidden, because I wear women's underwear to work", or some other odd thing, but those people don't care about that crap, and only the worst of them would ever take a minute out of their life to reveal a minor behavioral glitch like that to anyone aside from an anonymous story about a guy they came across a week ago.
And why does it have to be expressed in such fear-inspiring terms as "siezing my property, exposing my private life, assuming I'm a criminal", and with such extremist terms as "completely unjustifiable"? If he were yelling that his phone was a bomb, would it be justifiable then? I suppose it's not quite "completely unjustifiable". If they are sworn to secrecy except in the case that a real,law is being broken and they adhere to that,vow, are they "exposing your private life"?
I say such rhetoric reveals who the true terrorists are, because the very words you use inspire terror within the minds of those who recieve them. Your foundation is fear of the people who are there to help us.
I find this disgusting, and the least I can do is protest in the forum which you all use to spread fearful propaganda. So yes. Fuck him. He will be saved by his own captors if he is open and honest and accepts the punishment for whatever crimes I am sure he has stored on his phone, because none of the good people I have ever met would spend a second protesting this. They have better things to do and places to go,and are in a hurry to move things along, and trust that nobody is out to get them because they are good people.