The New Weapon in the Border Guard Arsenal

[YuAndDan 153]

By Ziya Tong

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.

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/mag...15-10/st_google Edited September 26, 2007 by YuAndDan

[Jasman0717 9]

Shoulda bought the stock

[almaty 19]

wow, google is the new tool on the war on terrorism