Should you take your cellphone across the U.S. border? Should you even take yourself across the U.S. border?
Previously unthought-of-questions keep popping up. If you are in a Canadian airport but talking to U.S. border guards in pre-clearance, are you still on Canadian soil? Can you give up on a conversation headed in a bad direction — my euphemism for interrogation — and just go home?
Can you be strip-searched on a whim? By a Canadian border guard? An American? Prove it was a whim. Watch your dignity, your unconquerable soul, fly away like an African swallow carrying a coconut.
The answers are complicated and some of the more obscure have not been made clear. For some questions there are no answers. Laws passed in the 1970s about orange vinyl luggage are being applied to digital devices. The effect is unreal. The U.S. Homeland Security guidelines are clear — basically they can do anything they want — but were written in 2009 and don’t seem to refer to passwords as such.
Problems that seem minor at home become massively important when a traveller is alone with U.S. border guards, intimidated and unsure.
Being right may not protect you. An airport is not a great place to argue. It is the land of “at the discretion of an officer,” as the CBC reports, and what are you going to do, call a cop?
A new bill, C-23, may make Canadian travellers’ lives even more miserable. The 2015 Canada-U.S. agreement it enshrines was made during the relatively balmy Obama years and passed both houses of Congress in December. But the bill seems more sinister under the administration of President Trump, as does everything really.
Legal experts say the bill gives more power to U.S. border guards in Canada, the CBC reports. No, you can’t abandon your journey without explanation. You’re still in Canada but not really.
This is assuming you have already handed over your cellphone and laptop to U.S. customs officials, along with passwords. I use a fingerprint to open my phone. Suggestions that I foil the guards by innocently using another finger are not helpful. They’ve thought of that. Naturally you balk at giving anyone the key to your entire life but you have little option.
It is not clear whether you have to do the same for a Canadian border guard. At best, they have copied all your data. At worst, they will keep it forever. This is one reason it was so damaging for Trump to have criticized an American circuit court for defying him. American law seems shakier in its performance than it used to be. U.S. customs agents do not tremble for their jobs.
There’s a way to cope: Wired magazine recommends “a locked-down Chromebook and an iPhone SE that’s set up to sync with a separate, nonsensitive Apple account” wiped before the trip and loaded with minimum data.
But Wired’s typical traveller is a stealth security expert. What about you? Even if you left the phone behind and managed — though I cannot see how — without a laptop on a work trip, your use of social media is up for grabs. Google has that. As Wired points out, this “doesn’t just affect individual travellers, but everyone they’ve communicated with.” That includes on social media.
What is worrying is the privacy of anyone who has ever emailed me. There are years of emails about legal matters, private stories from readers, conversations with editors, with family. The best portrait of me is a paper trail of a decade of book purchases on Amazon.
Readers, I give you my word that I will transfer these emails and delete the initial version of all content. But I don’t envision being allowed into the U.S. at this point. I’m not sure I want to go.
I am being told this is nonsense. But Friday was the first day I was unable to watch Trump doing his crazy because I had work to do. I could no longer fit his latest plan — it’s like children’s pasta art — into a highly flexible work schedule.
Covering Trump’s border security plans is like overfilling sandbags. You ran out of bags long ago but the sand keeps flowing, stupid Trump sand. Soon there will be too much data for border guards to hunt down and master, and they will stop looking for it. Their cup overfloweth.
hmallick@thestar.ca
hmallick@thestar.ca
The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
