People are quick to blame this on Trump, but reading through the comments on a previous article for this incident (http://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-advice/travellers-stori...), it looks like it’s par for the course to test someone’s knowledge on their claimed profession. Here’s a comment from one of the users:
> Had the same experience 12 years ago: admitted I am developing linux device drivers, and had to explain differences between kernel 2.4 and 2.6 APIs. The guy actually understood it.
Testing occupational expertise is not a bad way to find people who are lying. To be able to explain the difference between kernel 2.4 and 2.6 APIs or how to balance a binary search tree are questions one could not possibly answer without actually being in that profession.
Let’s say you’re a hitman traveling to Malaysia to take out the estranged brother of a dictator. Before you go, you’re given a fake passport and character sheet telling you your profession, your family situation, etc. It’s pretty easy to answer questions like “how long have you been working as a photographer?” or “how did you meet your wife?” but a lot more difficult to prepare for questions like “What is the best lense for close ups?”
There's plenty of professions a con can claim without this problem: an uber/taxi driver, hotel receptionist, child tutor, retail worker, farmers market vendor, stay at home parent, a convenience store, valet, or gas station attendant, a mall cop or bouncer at a bar...
This is classic security theater. Inconveniencing legitimate people while leaving gaping holes for any actual crook to exploit.
In politics and bureaucracies, orchestrating a perception is more important than instrumenting a reality.
Yes, but then that helps down in narrowing down the focus in border control. If you are arriving in US and declare "I plan to work as a taxi driver" or "I'm coming as a hotel receptionist", but you lack the appropriate work permit, it's a flag.
That's not what this is. First, this guy is in the US on a layover between Europe and Australia [1]. And second, these questions are being asked of tourists.
And before you say things are not affordable to people in those professions, flights are under $200 right now. A person of modest means could feasibly save up for an overseas vacation.
My theory is they have KPIs to hit and found denying entry based on challenging field-related puzzles is a decent way to do it. An indicator of how many actual thwarted espionage or terror events is likely harder to quantify (and for most, it's probably zero).
This may have been par for the course in the past, but the threat has moved on some time ago. Most of the 9/11 hijackers, we're talking 2001, were professionals with advanced technical degrees. Several of them had PhDs. Asking these questions may help with an imagined problem, but I suspect the value is limited in practice.
And it being par for the course does not excuse Trump from blame for having his departments use it in an arena where it has been proved ineffective.
I've been asked my profession a number of times on entering the US (as a visitor - not on a work permit). I'm an electrical engineer, but my response is usually just "engineer". Electrical engineering is such an incredibly broad profession, including everything from chip designers to radio engineers to power systems. Just how many quizzes is CBP going to have design to cover every branch of my profession and not deny an antenna designer entry because he doesn't know anything about power transformers?
I was entering the country with a friend of mine I'd been visiting in Jena, Germany (he's American as well) and when he was asked we both got to see the reaction to, "Numerical simulations of the n-body problem."
Wrong. I've been asked to explain details of autonomous underwater vehicles in an Italian airport. They don't care what your answer is. They care how you answer.
What is ohm's law? What's the difference between AC and DC?
Not very hard. It won't deter someone willing to learn EE 101 but will deter the guy who plans to overstay his visa and work as a dishwasher in his cousin's restaurant.
That assumes the border agents are familiar with all professions to come up with smart questions, or to understand answers that say the same thing with different terminology.
At best they will google "<profession> interview questions" and ask the first one, and do word-by-word matching on the answer.
For Electrical Engineering, the first one that comes up for me is "Why star delta starter is preferred with induction motor?".
>Let’s say you’re a hitman traveling to Malaysia to take out the estranged brother of a dictator. Before you go, you’re given a fake passport and character sheet telling you your profession, your family situation, etc. It’s pretty easy to answer questions like “how long have you been working as a photographer?” or “how did you meet your wife?” but a lot more difficult to prepare for questions like “What is the best lense for close ups?”
Hopefully for the estranged brother, Mr. Hitman doesn't happen to enjoy a photography hobby in his spare time. :)
Then again, high-end assassins are probably adept at photography anyways. Part of their job is planning, and that involves surveilling targets prior.
> Testing occupational expertise is not a bad way to find people who are lying.
> To be able to explain the difference between kernel 2.4 and 2.6 APIs or how
> to balance a binary search tree are questions one could not possibly answer
> without actually being in that profession.
Whether it's "par for the course" or not, this requires us to trust that every immigration officer in service is enough of an expert in every field of endeavor to A) come up with relevant questions and B) judge quality of answers.
The likelihood of that being true is incredibly low. What's worse, we know that typically people specialize within fields; a kernel hacker probably knows nothing whatsoever about using Ruby on Rails, but that might be the question the border agent googles up (or the web dev might get asked about kernel APIs).
Plus: making excuses for this makes you complicit in whatever evil it begets, so maybe you should stop making excuses for it.
It's not terribly hard to come up with bad consequences from people being detained/turned away/deported because they didn't pass the uninformed pop quiz of the border agent.
I understand what you're saying, but there are a few issues with this:
1. There are many accounts exactly to the opposite, non-US citizens having traveled to and from the US for decades without this level of questioning. If there is a policy change, then it should be clear to travelers; such a change doesn't just affect non-citizens, citizens working to bring in employees, guest lecturers, business associates, etc, are made to look foolish as well when they can't arrange the meeting. They don't have to publish the questions at all, but there should be some guarantee that the CBP is actually qualified to judge the answers.
2. Most of this should be done by the consular at the embassy when you apply for the visa, well before you even get to the border. CBP guards see dozens of persons each day with a wide breadth of employment backgrounds - is it really required by these guards to be that knowledgable in so many subjects to perform their duties? Or is it arbitrary checks based on what the guard themselves knows? The contention with this is that no one knows what the actual policy is, so it's hard to say whether or not the guards are doing checks they're supposed to be doing or if the guard even has the requisite knowledge themselves to judge a yes/no of an answer. A questionnaire for professions is equally troubling since, as many can recount with recruiters marking perfectly sound answer as "wrong" because the answers weren't what was written on the sheet, or the recruiter didn't understand the answer.
3. Some of the criteria are really strange for using to judge whether or not someone is telling the truth - the qualifier mentioned elsewhere in the discussion about asking someone's wife what her husband worked on seems pretty asinine; how many people from the DC area tell their spouses by requirement they work for the DoD and nothing more? How many contractors that land a government contract are 100% open with their spouses about what they work on? Certainly other governments have similar restrictions and NDAs for their employees/contractors. Or even once you start to get into specialized topics, how much can your spouse really understand about what you're doing if they're not in the same field? For a simple example, I work in just IT support, and my partner is fairly computer illiterate. If pressed, she probably could tell someone I work with databases, but not much beyond that, even though I've explained what I do at her request multiple times. I get there can be levels of validation here (does she at least confirm he's a programmer), but the validity of such a test question really depends on a lot of variables, and the value judgement of "how much should they know" will change drastically depending on very common circumstances.
People are quick to pin this on the Trump Administration because it is taking a very hard stance towards immigration and not addressing the issue at hand. While it may be individual guards being emboldened into getting this aggressive, the question becomes why is the administration not making a statement on it? Why has the CBP not made a statement one way or another on whether these are legitimate actions? With the EU planning to end free-travel for US citizens and the Trump Administration trying to play hardball with the deal, it's pretty easy to wonder why the current administration isn't dealing with something that a lot of people find to be ridiculous and wrong. With a president that is willing to tweet and comment about celebrity impersonations and individual news stories, it seems strange that they'd turn a blind eye to something that has a major impact on US relations with the entire rest of the world, especially since there are numbers to show that interest in US travel is declining.
As a final aside, international flights, especially trans-atlantic, can be pretty rough on sleep schedules and just in general. I just went from St. Petersburg Russia to Seoul, and I'm not sure that I'd be able to answer difficult questions about my profession on the spot without some time or resources. It's pretty bizarre too since entering Korea took about 30 seconds at the passport control. I'm a US citizen and I haven't even been able to enter the US that quickly in all my travels.
Except that this thing happens many times long before Trump and not limited to US.
comments in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13741746 tells lots such story happens years ago.
True for travel, but I was more thinking work visa and other visas. I understand the article is about someone who was able to utilize the Visa Waiver Program, but this has pretty broad reaching consequences period if it's a unilateral policy.
Hey y'all, I'm the person they mentioned in the article.
Because this is a fairly technical forum (and some people were asking about language specifics or runtime characteristics) I'll let you in on the question even though I left it out of the journalist interviews - hopefully this information will help you make sense of the article/interaction for yourself:
Write a Python program to take two numbers as input and if the sun is bigger than 100, output "this is a large number" but if it is less than 100 output the sum of the numbers.
One cannot but wonder what happens if you answer the question in a different manner than that suggested by Wikipedia or whichever resource the CBP draws their questions from.
I think the basic idea - questioning people about things they ought to know, given who they claim to be - is a good one.
However, it only makes sense if the one doing the questioning is able to judge the quality of the answer - or, for that matter, determine whether your inability to answer satisfactorily is because you bluffed - or if you're just a bit outside your professional comfort zone.
(I would probably have to answer 'software engineer', as that is what my business card says - however, I am much more of a hardware/systems guy in practice, only our HR department is completely unable to change my title to something a bit more descriptive. If speaking to another engineer, I wouldn't have any problems convincing him of my bona fides - however, if a CBP officer just looks up question #13 in the 'SW engineer' quiz - I may be in trouble.
I am the subject of the article and to my knowledge I wasn't 'assessed' in any formal capacity (certainly not at the level of cross-referencing anything with Wikipedia)
I am thoroughly convinced that just getting down and putting code on paper in a confident way got me across that border!
So, if I had any advice for others it would be to do what you normally do in a software interview: act really convincing - even if you're a bit flustered!
I think it's common, and that's part of the tactic, to see if you're lying. Not based on your answer, but based on your reaction.
In 2004, I wanted to drive to Canada with a friend. She was from out of town and hadn't brought her passport. I wanted to go anyway, so I just left my passport at home as well and drove up there anyway. (I remember the pre-9/11 days and figured, no big deal, even though they CLAIM you can't get back into the US without one).
The border agent coming back into the US asked us each a rapidfire series of questions meant to throw you off.
"Where were you born? How long did you live there? What's the major industry in that town?" All quickly, before you even really had a chance to finish your answer.
After asking us each a few questions he just smiled and thanked us and waved us through.
> One cannot but wonder what happens if you answer the question in a different manner than that suggested by Wikipedia or whichever resource the CBP draws their questions from.
They're looking at your overall attitude, not checking your knowledge of trivia. Answering the question about inverting a binary tree wrongly still means you understand what "binary tree" is and can at least come up with a couple of sentences with that term that sound coherent and resemble what is written in Wikipedia in broadest terms. For comparison, ask your non-engineering friends to answer the same question, even to try to fake an answer as best as they can.
I strongly suspect that they actually look at how you react and behave when presented with the problem rather than what the solution actually is.
I know it's popular to view border guards as complete dolts interfering with everyone's day, but they certainly deserve a bit more credit for what they do.
As to the last part, if people are sufficiently determined, you're in for a hard time, anyway. A 30-second screening at the border is pretty good at sorting out the Epsilon minus semi-morons, though. (Whose numbers, one would suspect, vastly outdoes the really determined ones.)
As for false negatives, I wouldn't be too concerned as long as you got to talk to someone reasonably well versed in your field. Also, as suggested by golergka and rconti - they probably use the questions as a way to elicit a response from you and judge that, more than your actual answers. That makes a lot of sense to me, now that I pause to think of it for a second.
I think lots of people on this thread are missing the point. This won't necessarily detect a determined spy who's done their homework. It's not meant to. It's a quick and effective sanity check to make sure that a person hasn't fudged their visa credentials and they're well in their rights to ask and exercise their discretion. They've been doing it for years.
I doubt a perfect answer to their trivia question is required. If it's in your field you'll be able to say something halfway intelligent in response, if you've lied on your visa it will become obvious pretty quickly.
Outrage about confiscating phones and demanding passwords is justified. This, on the other hand, seems pretty reasonable.
It's actually fairly typical. When you enter on a H1B visa they ask you questions to see if your occupation (the one you got the visa for) is not made up.
I work in Finance, and when I was on a H1B visa (back in 2010), the immigration officer asked me some bond-related questions, just to see if I had any clue.
They also asked my wife what I was working on.
It's pretty annoying to feel that you're not being trusted, but yes, they don't trust you.
Also the fact that he's Australian is a reassuring proof they don't base these question on color of skin...
The last convict ship to Australia sailed 10 years before the US Civil War, and even then it'd been tailing off for decades. White Americans are closer to being slavers than white Australians are to being convicts.
Besides, if you want to see who is more criminal-ey in the modern era, the US wins there with a 5x rate of incarceration...
MarkMc is talking about the modern era, but if you want to talk about the past - are you that ignorant that you're going to ignore what happened to the American Indians?
Given that Aborigines were slowly getting the vote between the 1920s and the last vestige in 1967, the idea that voting citizens were being scalped for money is supremely bizarre.
I definitely want to see a source for that. While I'm not heavily into fighting for native rights myself, I hang around a few people that are, and I think that this little nugget of information would have made its way into discussion amongst all the other horrible things that have happened to Aborigines over the years.
Key piece of missing information that is not in the article but is linked to it: he was entering as a tourist, not on a work permit. The guy just wanted to tour around New York for a week, not work under a specialized visa.
Is this true ? I have entered the US at least 30 times on H1 and never been asked anything like this and have never heard anything like this from my friends either
Likewise. This thread is the first time I've even heard of it and I've traveled on my H1B fairly often. None of my friends have ever had this happen either.
When I enter the US, it's always hand over passport, put fingers on scanner, accept passport and walk on.
His name is David Thornton (mentioned in the article, if you bothered to read it before commenting). Not 100% conclusive, but pretty strong evidence of being white, as Thornton is an English/Scottish name.
FWIW, as a nonwhite person myself, I think that accusing someone of racism for assuming David Thornton from Australia is white is beyond idiocy.
eh. racism is an umbrella term for being prejudicial and discriminatory based on a persons race. while definitely being prejudicial it certainly wasn't discriminating.
also - article has a big photo of this guy's gormless white mug ;)
also - he's from Sydney, so probably a wanker as well.
I have never been in the US, but I always thought it's the personnel in embassies who are educated/qualified to check and (in)validate my visa documentation. Once on a border, they will only check that I'm not carrying anything illegal, and that's it.
But the idea that my education/knowledge/experience will be checked again, that's weird to me.
For argument's sake, suppose it is fair to ask such questions.
What happens if you code the problem out in Java but it doesn't match the official answer written in Python? Fail?
What happens if you design an algo with O(N-LogN) but the official answer is O(N^2) -- do you get bonus points or fail?
> For argument's sake, suppose it is fair to ask such questions. What happens if you code the problem out in Java but it doesn't match the official answer written in Python?
I doubt the question would be framed like that. They probably hired real engineers to write the questions and then tested if those work properly on other real engineers.
Why would the airport managers [edit: I mean immigration officers] be able to find engineers who can devise good tests? Why would they be able to find the right people to verify the tests on?
IMO companies have a hard time finding talented software developers. I'd expect the airport managers [edit: immigration officers] to find not-very-competent people who come up with the very wrong tests.
Internet connectivity means they only need one person on duty at the central office. If this weren't immigration law enforcement, they could even outsource it. :-)
I suppose they could hand out iPads while we're on line and have us complete HackerRank exams. So if someone is a plumber, would they provide a set of pipes to connect? What about a heart surgeon? That might get messy...
That's a good point. They could have an office with people on duty that remote-interviews everyone about all different kinds of jobs. Not saying it'd work well (no idea if it would), but I do think it'd work (a lot?) better than the scenario I first imagined.
One of the recent stories indicated border agents were literally comparing answers against a Wikipedia article; if you didn't have the answer in the Wikipedia article, you were wrong.
This would be in line with, for example, how Google does early-stage screening -- non-technical people are given a sheet of questions, and if you give an answer that's not verbatim what's on the sheet you're "wrong" and "not qualified" (see http://www.gwan.com/blog/20160405.html).
I always found the cold, hard manner of border agents in the US quite off putting in general.
Last year I was fortunate enough to attend AWS Re:Invent, standing in the queue at McCarran airport, I saw the guard laughing and joking with the people in front of me so I thought ah, maybe they're all not like this!
As soon as it came to me the guy completely changed, he went cold, he spent the most amount of time asking why I'd ticked "business" on my customs form, as I didn't know what to tick, then proceeded to ask me what conference I was going to and what it was about and why I was attending. I know that's his job and he's just making sure everything lines up, but it just felt unwelcoming.
I've read somewhere that, if border controls were abolished, about a billion people from all across the world would move to the US. I'm guessing that, since people already want to come to US pretty badly, being welcoming is not a high priority for border personnel.
I've had the same experience for the most part with a few exceptions. It's unfortunate and I'm not sure about the root cause but you are right. Of course I've met a lot of immigration/customs officials from around the world who are also pretty intimidating. I wonder if the job attracts people who enjoy having this kind of power over people. Or if maybe after getting the job, they are changed by knowing that they can very easily, on a whim, make life very hard for someone.
What bothers me more than the US immigration and customs people are the security employees - TSA. I've seen many more of them be well past cold. They are often rude. I've seen them yelling at visitors to the US who are just trying to get through security and obviously don't speak English well. The kicker is when the TSA person doesn't speak proper English themselves and are obviously not very well educated.
TSA agents are on par with retail store employees in terms of hiring standards. The Customs and Border Patrol agents are armed law enforcement officers and are held to far greater hiring standards.
I guess they do that to not get a "connection" with the person in question. On the opposite, a technique to win someone over fast is to be nice and open about yourself from the beginning although you don't know him at all. If you like someone you might let slip something through (without even realizing it).
I base this opinion on my experience with grading students. Some people can get really good at it. I do it aswell so I know what to look for and try to avoid being "too nice".
I think he was asked to write a function that will return true if the tree is balanced, not to actually balances it, which in my opinion is an exponentially easier question.
Don't blame this on Trump; it goes on all over the world.
If the border police officer for any reason decides that you are suspicious then they will toy with you as they please. That includes asking arbitrary questions under the threat they can send you back to home country for any or no reason. Plus they can fingerprint you and go thru all your travel goods including phone and laptop.
As foreigner you have no rights standing at the border of the country you are entering.
And the border police operates without the checks that a normal police force operates under.
If you are a frequent traveller you better get used to being interrogated; answer short and precise without using any trigger words.
One of my math professor (Canadian) once told us a story (~10 years ago) that the US border control asked him to "state and prove Rolle's theorem" after he had told them he was traveling to a math conference. Apparently he answered "it's something to do with the mean value theorem, right?" and that was good enough.
I don't like the nervous atmosphere they make at the US border. It's the only country apart from Cuba where you get the feeling they might deny me entry for no reason. And it's the only country that I personally know people have been denied entry for no reason.
It's the way the questions come out, like a movie. The words come out slowly while the guy looks for something in my eyes.
I haven't been grilled on professional questions, but I wonder what I should say I do. Programmer or Trader are both legit. If I say programmer, I might get a technical question. If I say trader, maybe I just have give him a random stock tip.
This reminds me of a George Gamow's story (which can be an urban legend attributed to him) in Soviet Russia, I think when he was trying to flee. Allegedly, he was detained by some local warrior group in Caucasus(?). The local chieftain didn't believe he was a theoretical physicist, so he asked him to derive the n-th error term of the Taylor expansion. Fortunately, he was able to do that and save his life!
I take it as one of those lessons of usefulness of mathematics in daily life. :-)
I've also been asked for my occupation, and then my business card, and then my website – which they actually started browsing as I was standing there in the passport control. This was back in 2009.
I'm in the US right now. Upon arriving in SFO (from Sydney) on a holiday (ESTA), I was asked the following non-standard questions:
"So you're a software engineer? What is your most proficient language?"
Response: "Javascript"
"What does the atob function do?"
I was quite taken back and asked to repeat, and the CBP agent spelled out "a t o b". I answered something to do with base64 decoding and was let through
Haha! Shit! The only time I've used atob in 20 years of doing JS was to read the ProtectionHeader of a SmoothStreaming manifest file recently. I'll bet little to none JS programmers know specifically what it does or if it even exists.
The fact that this has started happenning in parallel with H-1B crackdown is not a coincedence. Someone somewhere issued a note that too many fake programmers are slipping in, so that's the result.
I just don't believe this. It's fake news. This line made it clear to me:
"He said the officer appeared to be mid to senior level, and there’s no chance the conversation would have been overheard by anyone else in line."
So basically there is no one who can corroborate with his story. This trash should not be allowed into any publication which calls itself 'news'.
I'm surprised that people actually believe that stuff by default. In this new world, the default should be to distrust the media and that line I quoted above gives a very good reason to distrust it.
So it shouldn't be news unless hundreds of other engineers also report it. You can't take a couple of isolated instances of attention-seeking hearsay and call it facts.
I agree your comment was unduly downvoted—the article mentions Trump, so I don't think your mention was unreasonble given the context. It's an otherwise interesting comment.
That said, any time people complain about downvotes, it simply begets more downvotes. Best to just wait it out in the future; downvoted comments which are substantive—especially in a new thread—have a very high probability of being upvoted again. It's usually a non-issue.
I'm getting the impression that your comment implicitly endorses airport personnel [edit: immigration officers] attempting to find out if people "fake" their occupation. I don't think that wasn't your intention, but that's how the comment looks like, to me.
And people reading it might not like that, because airport personnel in general are (I think) likely to do lots of mistakes, if they start trying to verify people's occupations. So traveling somewhere, wold become like rolling a dice — bad luck dice roll = go home again (you happened to meet the wrong & incompetent personnel at the airport). (I didn't downvote.)
They aren't airport personnel. They are immigration officers.
What I read in the last thread about an incident like this was that they are less interested in the actual answer and more in how you respond. I guess mannerisms can give away things.
I know the last time I was pulled aside in US customs and had them go through all my stuff at one point I said, "Sorry, I'm just a little out of it." And one of the agents immediately said, "Why?" I said, "Because I've been traveling for over 24 hours now." Apparently that was good enough but I think they are trying to look for things in people's behavior that may be off.
And it's not like this is just a US thing. My last visit to the UK I was asked quite a few questions about why I was there, where I would be, what I'd do, etc. I've got a Hungarian residence permit and if I'm entering Schengen in Hungary they never ask me anything but if I come in through different place - Schipol most often, it's not unusual for them to ask me stuff about myself, what I do, etc.
My last visit to Ukraine a few weeks ago, when I check into my hotel they made a copy of my passport information page and then had me find the stamp I'd gotten at the airport and they copied that. I know that's not the government guys but that was a new one for me. I'm used to giving passport info. for checking into a hotel but I've never seen them do that. Each place is different and to me it's all just a matter of degrees.
Interesting to hear about this :-) I haven't been travelling that much — good to know what might happen, else I might have gotten quite nervous. + Thanks for the "immigration officers" clarification.
There's no one in this thread blaming Trump. Your points stand well enough without needing to invoke what 'people' are saying - perhaps that is why the downvotes?
> Had the same experience 12 years ago: admitted I am developing linux device drivers, and had to explain differences between kernel 2.4 and 2.6 APIs. The guy actually understood it.
Testing occupational expertise is not a bad way to find people who are lying. To be able to explain the difference between kernel 2.4 and 2.6 APIs or how to balance a binary search tree are questions one could not possibly answer without actually being in that profession.
Let’s say you’re a hitman traveling to Malaysia to take out the estranged brother of a dictator. Before you go, you’re given a fake passport and character sheet telling you your profession, your family situation, etc. It’s pretty easy to answer questions like “how long have you been working as a photographer?” or “how did you meet your wife?” but a lot more difficult to prepare for questions like “What is the best lense for close ups?”