I expect this will be a recurring segment. It will cover things that people of a libertarian bent get outraged about every day that finally bubble up into the public consciousness. Suddenly, much outrage is spouted because a particular person, possessing some special trait, attractive to media outlets and their audiences, has been treated badly by the government.

The first in this series is NASA engineer Sidd Bikkannaver, US born citizen who was ordered to unlock his phone at Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.

It was January 31. Bikkannavar had just arrived at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport after a nine-hour flight from Santiago, Chile, where he’d competed in a two-week race from the southern tip of the country to its capital in a solar-powered car. In a few hours, he would board a connecting flight back home to California, where he’s worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena for over a decade.

Be still, my beating heart. So smart, so hip. And his phone was property of the JPL! How dare the agent not believe the “it’s not even mine” story! Who does this agent think our hero is? Some scruffy-looking dope mule? This is an outrage!

Actually, the outrage is that ICE agents can hold people indefinitely, or at least long enough to cause them signifcant loss of money and time, to get around 4th Amendment protections that apply to everyone on US soil, citizen, resident, visitor, or illegal. The broad police powers, rather than how or to whom such powers are applied, are the outrage. This example is, sadly, a result of a well-designed program in that it occasionally assigns a random check (probably, I don’t have special knowledge) to even people who ICE has good evidence are solid citizens. Bikkannaver “[is] a part of the Customs and Border Protection Global Entry program, whose members are waved through the line after just scanning their passport and fingerprints. That would lead me to believe that this is not the result of some Border Patrol agent from flyover country picking the guy with the funny name.

So welcome to the party, pal! You’ve done everything right and felt the State’s boot.