Which is only marginally better than slug-fisted and ham-brained.
I love the “reasonable amount of time”. What I think is reasonable is not, I know, what US Customs thinks is reasonable.
Case in point: I was coming back from a trip to Toronto, taking a Greyhound across the border to fly out of Buffalo. We had perhaps six people on the bus. I’d allowed maybe an hour to get from the bus stop to the airport twenty minutes away. From there, I’d have a good forty-five minutes to get onto the plane.
Of course, we were held up at customs for two hours. I’m not exactly lily-white, but I’m an American citizen and the daughter of retired military. The fellow from Libya, however, who’d never been to the States before, was very apologetic to us all when he got back onto the bus.
What, is information illegal now? Kiddie porn I can almost understand, but we don’t have police walking up to our doors demanding to check our computers out. At least, not yet. I can just imagine it now: bring your hard drives to the local PD for their yearly inspection! Please allow 6-8 weeks for handling. Enjoy a free 64-oz Coke for FREE when you bring it in!
I’m pretty sure I’d get detained along with my computer. Not because it’s got anything particularly weird on it (the Finnish survival game is a little weird, and Pandemic 2 might be a little hard to explain beyond ‘I’m just morbid’), but because I would start verbally abusing the owners of the grabby hands that confiscated it for a “reasonable time”.
Oddly enough… Neil Young’s “Keep on rockin’ in the free world” is playing on the radio…
I am a Canadian, and I have yet to travel internationally. but SHIT!
Have any of you phoned or better yet WRITTEN your local congressperson? For all the outrage you have collectively expressed here, how many of you have actually taken the few internet clicks to express your outrage to your local representitive of congress?
When you think your vote no longer counts… guess what… It doesn’t!
I do not mean to offend, but SHIT!
FML
This new policy is disgusting and I would hope it will get challenged to the Supreme Court at some point and slapped down, but really, comparisons to the USSR are silly, unless you see people being machine-gunned at the border for trying to leave the country.
There should be a form of Godwin’s law for ridiculous comparisons between the U.S. and a totalitarian state like the Soviet Union. They killed 20-60 million of their own people, for God’s sake.
FML, many of us have been harping on this, and related issues, since 9/11/01. And during the various legislative and administrative changes enacted after the Oklahoma City Bombing, and again after TWA Flight 800.
And have mentioned that, here in this thread.
Unfortunately no one with a national voice seems willing to make the explicit point that complete safety is impossible, so liberties should not be sacrificed for the illusion of safety.
And my record for getting responses from my senior Senator’s office is pretty poor. His web page had had some stupid errors on it that annoyed me all out of proportion to the real effort. However fixing the error would have taken all of 30 minute by the lowest level office drone and maybe five more minutes from someone with HTML experience.
It took me four goddamned years of constant harping on this stupid error to get it fixed. And it only got fixed because I stopped writing and made a verbal threat to the press about the stupid error.
And it was not something that would cost the Senator any public support, nor cause any troubles with various lobbying groups. Reining in HSA is going to piss off CSCE, as well as the other usual suspects, because if they can’t justify their hours through shit like this, it’s going to cose civil service jobs.
I will continue to be a voice in the wilderness, but the only comfort I take from it is the belief that I am right. Not any expectation to change a damned thing.
Yeah, i’ve been back and forth between the US and Europe around 20 times since 9/11 and it’s horrible. The worst part is that they give me a bunch of shit when I come “home” to America. When I would travel to Europe I was treated with much more respect. I very rarely get hassled on the way in, in fact most of the time I just walk past customs. Immigration is usually just a quick look at the passport and rarely a stamp.
Someone must have had a boring college experience. 
As for the OP, they used a crappy MSNBC link which is now gone and did a near-Brain Glutton ‘my cite is my post’, so I’m not sure what all was in the story.
Point of Order: We cannot credit Brain Glutton with “my cite is my post.” That honor goes to dear Aldebaran. Did I spell his name right? It’s been a while.
Do you have any more rights entering other foriegn nations?
English posters have aready said their nation is worse. You don’t even have the right to the Internet in some nations.
I am not saying I approve of this,in fact I don’t. But I do call bullshit that the USA is even close to being on the list of the worst.
First they began confiscating laptops, and I said nothing because I had no laptop . . .
Until I met a man who had no lap…
Hmm, all I can say is that there is a certain amount of hyperbole from said English posters.
Immigrants, asylum seekers, illegals still have, upon entering our country, the right to legal assistance which is paid for, but not selected by, the state.
Seizure of property without cause would be an offence in the UK, no matter who did it, unless there was a specific reason, and a non-judicial fishing excercise would not fulfil that requirement.
Under the Data Protection Act, no digital storage media can be seized for analysis without an explanation of why and how that data may be further processed, and a reason for doing so - a warrant. This includes not only corporations and individuals but also the state.
I believe that in the US a person entering the country can be held in limbo for some time, not so in the UK -( though no doubt errant officials have abused this from time to to time)
In the UK, people who are unjustly detained or incarcerated can, and regularly do, claim compensation and are often assisted by legal aid provided by the state to do so.
I read from time to time of people in the US being impirsoned following conviction who are then cleared of the crime and so released, they then have to prove that the judiciary acted in some form of bad faith to gain compensation - manifestly unjust, whereas in the UK you make your claim and the matter is settled in a tribunal - there is no onus to lay blame though it can help secure a larger amount if you can.
The UK is not some paragon of liberty, but, the US is slipping behind at a rate, we are not required to disclose our credit card numbers upon entering our country, nor our bank account numbers, and yet the US requires this of all foreign national entering its borders.
I don’t see any English posters saying that 
Sure, but I read in an editorial in my local paper that the liberals are using fear of terrorism to get votes and advance their extremist adgenda, so it’s probably all their fault.
-Joe
Since when did this happen? Fierra has traveled in and out of the US innumerable times and has never had to do this. Nor has her mother. And none of my clients has ever mentioned being quizzed about this upon entering this country. So is this brand new, optional, or what?
Well Una that’s probably becuase travellers are not asked directly.
US agencies require that travellers have 34 pieces of information disclosed by the carrier, and one of those is means of payment - credit card details.
In addition to this, the US is trying to gain access to our Passport Biometric database, but is also making moves to to access our national identity card database if it ever comes to pass.
Now having access by contacting our authorities with a reason for disclosure is one thing, and you’d expect law enforcment agencies to cooperate across borders, but this is not quite what the US is after.
Also, you’ll note the legal extradition rules, where UK citizens can be extradited for trial in the US, without an inditement, when there is no reciprocol agreement, and there are quite a few individuals in the US that the UK has interest in - although there could be political embarrassments along the way such as harbouring known terrorists within US territories.
Here is an overview of why the US authorities check your credit scores against what they have already gathered.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/andrewkantor/2004-06-10-kantor_x.htm
By checking things such as credit scores, it can be used as a form of verification of your identity.
You will be well aware that many people pay for travel tickets using credits cards to ensure they have their journey insured.
One serious problem with this, is that if you do not know what information has been collected, you cannot challenge it or have it corrected - which is one of the requirements of the UK Data Protection Act.
You don’t even have to go to the US for it to happen,
Don’t imagine you are too safe as a US citizen, and it has to be said that the rate of error of such records is certainly enough to be concerned about.
Nah, Aldebaran was “my post is my cite.”
Here’s a CBC story about the issue. Notice how, in the explanation for the new policy, copyright and trademark infringement are put up there with child pornography, narcotics smuggling, and terrorism. Makes me wonder what the real motives for going through everyone’s laptop is…
At least Americans have the Constitution. As an Englishman (and officially not even a citizen, but a subject of Her Majesty the Queen) all I have between me and arbitrary government is the European Constitution, a piece of bureaucratic flimflammery that I wouldn’t even wipe my arse with.
Sure, freedoms are being eroded on both sides of the Atlantic but you guys over there have the ultimate protection of the greatest constitution ever written. (And the fact that much of it is based on ancient English liberties makes it even harder to bear!)