Highs, Lows
by Chris on Feb.10, 2008, under Rants
In contrast to my last post, this one is a bit less perky.
The fact that this happens at all is nearly enough to make me physically ill. The fact that I’m probably never going to encounter it, simply because I’m not brown-skinned…
2 comments for this entry:
February 10th, 2008 on 1:29 pm
When I was moving to Dublin, I had a connecting flight through Chicago. At the Edmonton airport, once I was through US customs the US border agents took me and Christine aside for half an hour in a separate security screening room and asked to look at our laptops.
Finding that highly invasive, I refused, and asked what my rights were. The guard explained I could deny the request and turn around and go back to Canada, or give them my password and let them snoop on my laptop. I really didn’t want to fuck up my move, and so allowed supervised snooping. They looked through my bookmarks and browser history and photo collections mainly. I guess they were looking for either kiddie-porn or terrorist stuff.
This was certainly the scariest big-brother moments I’ve ever witnessed in fortress America. I no longer take connecting flights through the USA because of this.
February 10th, 2008 on 4:30 pm
That’s pretty creepy. I’ve already resolved not to fly through the US if I can at all avoid it, either. My privacy is precious to me. I’m looking for ways to change the way my laptop boots to conceal the existence of my real data, but I’m not really sure how to do that in the OSX world
And at least you knocked off one of the aspects of this I mislike; it’s only an anti-humanity philosophy, and not an anti-(insert race or creed here) one. I don’t know why, but I feel better knowing that.