While I consume no news, I have heard that it is now possible to be arrested at the border or turned away due to social media activity.

Last year I had a social media growth service help to promote my content.

Do I know that out of all the comments that they left to drive people to my account, they did not do anything that would be marked as questionable?

Nope.

I guess I will find out.

Less than 48 hours after arriving in the states, I will fly to Mexico with my partner for a Yoga Teacher Training.

Again, I do not read any news, but my partner informs me that things may be more difficult for people from the states trying to go into Mexico.

Do I expect problems at either border crossing?

No.

This is the first time I have ever felt uncomfortable about flying back into my own home.

Not a great feeling.

It reminds me of when I first went to Mexico alone.

People warned me to be careful. To be safe. To keep an eye out.

This feeling of danger has now crept into my mind as I go home to see my family for the first time in months.

To face fear when going home is a challenge.

My security mind makes these potential obstacles seem more real to me.

At my first gig as a professional programmer, I built border control software.

This taught me more than I would like to know.

Now I can see how that experience ties into the future of the world.

In ways that can seem quite dismal.

Only by looking at and quantifying these potential realities, can I work to avoid this.

For almost two years I have been studying AI Safety, a domain that attempts to understand the current and potential future rough edges we may run into as AI systems deploy throughout the world.

This has brought me into contact with some of the most brilliant people I have ever met.

They have led me to some of the scariest problems and fail states that the world could come into.

Let me share one I thought of today.

Imagine there was a popular website you liked to use. Let us say Google.

Then, let there be some social media platform you use on the phone or laptop.

As your popular website deploys bleeding edge AI systems underneath the hood (because do you care about the technical details?), the access boundaries between it and other software platforms become blurred.

What are the potential consequences?

A bad actor silently posting under your name on your social media platforms.

Not so interesting.

Make that hacker's post something that is against your country's president.

Just before you fly into the country.

Or maybe just after you land.

Whatever has the highest probability of having you flagged or detained.

Seems a little bit extreme, right?

For an individual bad actor, this is over the top.

What about an adversarial country that wants to cause trouble for your country?

Think about all the ways nation states stir the pot.

This is just another lever that can be pulled.

It is necessary to admit that security is an arms race.

Hackers will build these offensive systems.

The poor entry level programmer (hello past Evan) will try to not flag the people crossing the border into their home country where it seems like the anti-government social media presence was generated by bad actors.

As I skip the Global Entry line to make sure that I can enter the United States at the same time as my partner, I will remember to smile and see the human on the other side of the customs booth barrier.

Because that person is doing their best.

Which is all we can truly do every single day.