"What happens if border agents are allowed to demand access to your phone and online accounts—and turn you away if you don’t comply?" (Waddell) Kaveh Waddell asks in his article, 'Give Us Your Passwords.' In this article, the concept of digital privacy invasion for the sake of border safety is explored and strongly objected to. The author uses mostly formal diction, given a few exceptions in the way "That's," (Waddell) is used. Despite this, it is easy to see that Waddell puts plenty of emotional attachment into the article, using loaded words such as "demanded," (Waddell) and "rifling," (Waddell) to describe the extreme lengths border agents may go to in order to obtain personal information. This leads to the resulting overall tone, which is upset and accusatory as it describes detainment: "a young American woman wrote about being detained at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport and, after a long ordeal, being denied entry, based in part on emails and chat transcripts from an account she was forced to log into. 'Not only do we Google you, we read your emails, too!' a border agent told her" (Waddell). Unfortunately, aside from this, Waddell does not seem to use much of any other rhetorical device aside from a brief counterargument: "Kelly said the administration is considering requiring residents of the seven countries to provide lists of the websites they’ve visited and their passwords, to enable officials 'to get on those websites to see what they're looking at'" (Waddell). It seems that Waddell aims to provide information and support for the intrinsic belief that privacy should be respected. It is somewhat of a shame--the comments section of this article seems to raise better points against this practice than the article itself. The article does, however, make a call to action and reasons why, saying that "If the U.S. goes through with its proposal, experts say, the practice might quickly spread" (Waddell). This is stated at the very end of the article, as it is explained that asking for passwords at borders "could help countries spy on their own citizens" (Waddell). It is unknown why the lack of necessity for the searches and reasoning against them is not mentioned much, but this at least serves to make an argument. The end goal here thus seems to be simply to inform, though it is clear through all aforementioned evidence that Waddell is strongly against the invasion of privacy and could potentially argue against it. Nonetheless, its purpose has value in that it provides information to a large audience of readers who can learn of the details of the situation and form their own opinions. Waddell does at least appeal to ethos by citing multiple firsthand accounts, including the one mentioned before and one in which the director of the Cybersecurity Law Initiative, Orin Kerr, speaks out: "Ordinarily there are no Fourth Amendment rights at the border, but a search of an online account isn’t occurring at the border: It's occurring wherever the server is located" (Waddell). Overall, the argument has plenty of weaknesses, as it does not clearly argue much but shows a clear stance on the matter, and could use more varied use of rhetorical devices to provide a more persuasive point. However, in a way, this is understandable, given that this article's intention may simply be more informative than argumentative.
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