When I returned from Iraq with the U.S. Army in 2010, I walked through the airport into a scene of clapping, waving flags, and family reunions. I smiled. It was good to see—even if my own family couldn’t make it, even if I slipped back into civilian life without a hug or a handshake.
Years later, when I came home from Afghanistan as a private military contractor, the first words from a Department of Homeland Security agent were: “What were you doing abroad?” I tossed my CAC card in his direction and answered, “Serving my country—same as you.” That ended the conversation. I walked out free.
But this summer, when I returned from Ukraine, the reception was different. DHS agents pulled me aside, seized my phone, ordered me to surrender my password, and questioned me for four hours. I had no lawyer, no right to walk away, no option to turn back; at an airport port of entry, the Constitution feels suspended. They combed through my digital life, telling me it was about “intelligence.” Maybe. Or maybe it was because I’ve published critical pieces on Donald Trump, the intelligence community, and Tulsi Gabbard. More likely, it was tied to my direct involvement on the front lines in Ukraine, where operating in a war zone inevitably meant contact with criminals, extremists, and war criminals alike.
I expected something like this to happen. But I assumed DHS would scroll through my phone, hand it back, and recognize me as what I am: an American who has fought for his country and would do so again—under any condition, in any theater, if it were truly a war of survival. My loyalty doesn’t shift with party politics. After years abroad, I’ve seen the darkness in the world and the light that the United States still represents.
What unsettled me was the depth of the intrusion. I’ve spent years passing information to my own government about far-right actors, extremists, and bad-faith operators undermining America. Yet I was the one forced to surrender my phone and passwords, subjected to hours of interrogation. Some will argue: if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear. But that is a dangerous illusion.
American law is filled with statutes that lie dormant until they aren’t. The Neutrality Act, first passed in the 1790s, makes it a crime for U.S. citizens to wage war against nations at peace with America. On paper, that could apply to any American who joins a foreign conflict, even one aligned with U.S. interests. Other provisions, like the Weapons of Mass Destruction statutes, are so broadly written that a shoulder-fired RPG—or even a military drone—could theoretically qualify. In short: there are plenty of hooks a prosecutor could seize if the government decided to make an example out of someone like me.
So how am I to know my government is acting in good faith—or that it always will?
The precedent for border searches dates back to 18th- and 19th-century case law. At the time, it made sense. People carried muskets, not smartphones. Their papers were written on parchment and ink, folded into satchels. The sum of a man’s private world could be leafed through in minutes. Most ordinary Americans didn’t even have bank accounts; their wealth was in land, livestock, or a handful of coins kept at home. There were no ledgers of personal vice waiting to be subpoenaed.
Today, a single phone contains more than a lifetime’s worth of letters. If you printed the data from just six months of my device, you’d be looking at thousands of pages: financial records, medical histories, contacts, personal messages, even the digital trail of my thoughts, curiosities, and eccentricities. The border-search doctrine was built for ships docking in port, not for the total digitization of a person’s life.
Technology has evolved, and so has the interpretation of the Fourth Amendment. Courts have generally allowed that search powers expand with the times. But consider the contradiction: the Second Amendment has been frozen in amber. In the 1790s, it covered muskets—slow, clumsy weapons fired with cloth and powder. Today, it shields semi-automatic rifles with hundred-round drum magazines and binary triggers, functionally legalizing automatic fire. One right is treated as sacred, fixed beyond time; the other is elastic, bent to whatever new technology the state wants to inspect. Meanwhile, global travel has become the norm for the middle class. Every single day, more than 160,000 international passengers arrive in the United States by air. Each of them, in theory, is subject to the same scrutiny.
I will say this: the DHS agents I dealt with were professional. They were respectful not only to me but also to the foreign-born arrivals I watched pass through. They asked questions calmly, never rudely. Some were combat veterans themselves. I don’t think the United States is sliding into fascism. But the keys are already in the ignition of that car; if we ever decide to turn them, Big Brother has every tool needed to make daily life here an authoritarian hellscape.
Imagine four more years of political deterioration. Blame the right, blame the left, pick your devil—the premise remains the same. Neither political party acts in good faith toward the other. Every national problem is politicized. Disaster response, once a unifying moment, became partisan theater after Hurricane Katrina. That was the watershed when Americans stopped responding as one people and started treating every crisis as a blame game. Today, families are split by politics. People vote out of spite, not duty. COVID nearly broke us. Imagine something worse. Our nation is deteriorating in real time while our adversaries grow more unified.
Some of you are probably thinking: why didn’t you just sanitize your phone before reentering the country? Fair question. The truth is, I didn’t. Partly because I have nothing to hide. I don’t believe I’ve done anything worthy of a cage in some concrete block cell. And partly because scrubbing my devices would only make me look more suspicious.
In an age when the very act of protecting your privacy can be interpreted as guilt, the safest choice felt like honesty.
And because of that choice, there is now a database somewhere holding my so-called “private life”—which, if you believe my sarcasm here, consists of midnight prayers in Medellín, secret charity work on Thai streets, and my glorious career as a Polish disco champion before church bells ruined my encore.
But that’s the point—we live in a society where “liberty” has become a slogan, not a guarantee. Stack it against the altar of national security, and liberty crumbles every time. Security is now the supreme value. That isn’t what the founders intended; we all know the words they left us. Yet here we are.
So the question is: what now? What should we, as Americans, do in the face of this tradeoff—when our own government treats digital privacy not as a right but as a privilege it can strip away at the border, and when the situation only seems to grow worse while no one in power is truly trying to change it?