October 10, 2007
Concert-going creating potential border security problem? ::
legal — tagged civil liberties, legal, music and travel
9:29 am
Brian over at False 45th has a nice review of The National’s recent show up in Montreal. I’m sorry I missed it, and having seen The National at last year’s Pitchfork festival, I understand, at least partially, what I was missing out on. But, unrelated to the show itself is Brian’s increasingly tense and interrogatory interactions with the border guards:
One last note, I think the border agents are becoming increasingly suspicious of my brief three-hour trips to Montreal. The questions are getting more and more detailed and are being asked with an increasingly surly tone. On the way in, I was asked what I did for a living, what company I work for and where they were located. Then the agent quickly mixed in, “Do you have $10,000 in the car?” On the way back, the border agent asked me where the concert was, what street the club was located on, what were the cross streets and what roads I took to get to and from the club.
Brian’s story implies that US Immigration maintains a database of each citizen’s border crossing activities. It’s probably keyed by the the car’s license plate. The government’s doing this is probably not a problem on its own, though it does raise a civil libertarian flag—mostly because it suggests that although border guards are able to collect extensive information on when and how often a person crosses the US border, that by itself isn’t enough to warrant increased suspicion, and potentially raises a lot of false positives. To my mind, making brief trips to Canada every month or so does seem a little out of the ordinary, but on its own I’m not the sort of behavior that suggests nefarious activity. Yet the increased suspicion of the border guard, implied by his pressing questions, seem to suggest that such border-crossing jaunts are treated like that. Yet, Brian’s activity is really very ambiguous, and has a completely innocent explanation. If the guards had a little more information, they’d know that.
