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Old October 2nd, 2007, 03:59 AM   #1
c3blue
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Thumbs down Border Patrol Using Google

Here is the article, reproduced from Wired Magazine Issue 15.10. Link at bottom of page.

The New Weapon in the Border Guard Arsenal: the Dreaded Google Search

A Canadian psychotherapist named Andrew Feldmár was barred from the US last year after a border guard discovered he'd written an article about his experience taking LSD in the 1960s. In February, University of Minnesota historian Taner Akçam was detained for hours at the same border — by the Canadians — because Wikipedia described him (inaccurately) as a terrorist. The US government has at least four standard databases to check out wannabe visitors, but none of them contained the derogatory intel on Feldmár. He was damned by Google. It turns out that border officers are allowed to use what they call "open source information" — meaning any and all traces of you online, from Facebook and Flickr to flame wars. Although search engines aren't the first line of border defense (most computers in those little booths don't have Net connections), it's another story at "secondary processing": Get pulled out of line, and you might get Googled. Used to be, the scariest thing you could hear in an interrogation room was the sound of a guard putting on a rubber glove; now it's the quiet click of a mouse on the I'm Feeling Lucky button.

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So, what I understand this to mean is that, theoretically speaking of course, I could be crossing the border from USA to Canada or wherever and the border guy thinks I look suspicious with my Blue and Purple hair and one carryon and what not. He searches me on Google/MySpace/Wherever and sees my name in "rave" culture websites and my MySpace and something maybe Erowid/Lycium and whatever other "illicit/counter-culture" websites I may have posted or been connected to. The authorities could them decide to detain me and give me a hard time or just deny entry into a country or god only knows what else.

Now, I'm sure they say it's to fight terrorism and what not. Bullshit. A professor that posted an article in the 60's is not a terrorist.

What they're beginning to do is an attempt to destroy the various "sidicious (sp?) underground mostly young, mostly liberal groups/movements" that can span nations and even continents and originated within or now depend upon the Internet. They're making it dangerous to have any electronic affiliation with them and thus disband them and scatter them to the wind.
(Maybe that last paragraph was a little much)

Big Brother is watching.

Link to article on Wired.Com:
http://www.wired.com/politics/secur...15-10/st_google
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