NET DANGER

Online Searches Are New, And Problematic, Tools For Border Guards

There is nothing more perilous at a border crossing than a
Google-happy border guard. Over the past year, two Canadians reported
they were denied entry into the U.S. after a border guard Googled
their names and decided, based on the search results, that they were
undesirables.

Substances and abuse

Andrew Feldmar, a B.C. psychotherapist, was prevented from crossing to
the U.S. when a border guard Googled his name and hit upon an article
he'd written that described an Aldous-Huxley-like experiment involving
hallucinogens he took 40 years ago.

"It was humiliating," says Feldmar, who has a clean criminal record.
He says he has visited the U.S. hundreds of times, and two of his
children live there. Last summer, he was stopped randomly at the
border, and the madness began when an agent Googled his name. "He
turned the monitor toward me and asked if I wrote that article," he
says. "I just wanted to get on my way, I told him I wrote it. He said
I used an illegal substance and therefore I was an undesirable." The
guard took Feldmar's fingerprints and sent him back from the border.

"I was turned back at the whim of a border guard. There was no due
process, it was an abuse of power," he says. Back in Vancouver,
Feldmar contacted the U.S. consulate. "I got robotic e-mails from
them," he says. In one terse e-mail, a consulate worker told him:
"Waiver is the only way." To get a waiver, Feldmar was told he would
need proof that he was rehabilitated. "What can I be rehabilitated
from?" he says.

The same happened to Hossein Derakhshan, a prominent Iranian-Canadian
blogger, who was stopped at a Buffalo border crossing. After telling
border guards that he was on his way to a bloggers' conference, the
guards searched his name and came across his blog. "One of them, a
very sharp guy in fact, started to read every single post on my blog,"
he wrote in a blog posting. "And it didn't take long until he shocked
me: 'So you live in New York, right?'" Derakhshan, who is based in
Toronto, once mentioned in his blog that he worked out of New York
because New York was "sexier," he wrote. That entry was enough for
border guards to turn him back, accusing him of residing illegally in
the States.

Open source, closed doors

Although there are no reports of Americans turned away from Canada
because of search engine results, U.S.-based Turkish historian Taner
Akcam says he was detained for hours at Pierre Trudeau airport last
February because of an entry on Wikipedia, the open-source online
encyclopedia that any user can alter. Akcam, a bete noire of Turkish
nationalists because of his research on the Armenian genocide, was on
his way to a conference at McGill when he was held for several hours
by a flummoxed agent who at one point asked Akcam to help him figure
out why he was detaining him. "I told him that was weird," says Akcam,
who regularly travels to Canada to lecture. After some time, the agent
showed Akcam the information that he had received, which was lifted
from Wikipedia.

Akcam's lawyers later filed an Access to Information request on the
incident, and it emerged that an intelligence agent with the Canadian
Border Services Agency (CBSA) had supplied the airport guard with an
e-mail detailing some impressive sounding open-source information on
Akcam, along with a picture. The information, which mentioned that
Akcam was a member of a militant Turkish opposition group, had been
copied and pasted from a Wikipedia posting on Akcam, and the
intelligence official wrote: "I would recommend that you contact RIO
[Regional Intelligence Officer] and local CSIS if they are interested
in joining the examination," promising to send along classified
intelligence from the U.S. on Akcam.

"There is no classified information that they can get," says Akcam. "I
applied for the green card and American authorities have all sorts of
documents related to my past." In his youth, Akcam was jailed in
Turkey for his leftist activism. The information from the U.S., if it
indeed arrived, seemed to have been exonerating, and Akcam was released.

The CBSA says it performs such "secondary examinations" on visitors to
Canada every day. Spokesman Derek Mellon says he cannot discuss
specific cases because of the Privacy Act, but he says CBSA agents
consider several sources of information in deciding whether to deny
someone entry. The agent "gives the appropriate weight to the
information, given the reliability of the sources," he writes in an
e-mail.