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[travel] Welcome to Canada
Jun. 10th, 2009 08:22 amSo far the most intrusive security I've had to endure of all the places I've visited, including Israel, was coming into Canada yesterday.
It started with a shitty 8-hour flight from London that put me in bad mood. Air Transat / Thomas Cook, while cheap, has airline seats that are incredibly uncomfortable. For some bizarre reason, they are shaped with a giant depression in the middle into which your butt sinks. I had to fill in this depression with my jacket to make it at all comfortable. By the time I got out, I was grouchy, starving, and extremely tired.
My story involving a dead company and 4 1/2 months of sightseeing just for the hell of it was apparently unusual enough to raise suspicion, but it got worse when he asked the name of the hotel I stayed at in London: The Clink. (It's a former prison that was converted into a youth hostel. You can even stay in old jail cells)
Anyway, he went through all my stuff in minute detail, trying to figure out whether I was a drug dealer, money launderer, child pornographer, or something else entirely. My unusual habits (eg taking pictures of all my important bits of information, keeping a long list of login and half-completed passwords to various sites for reference, staying with people I barely know, going to Thailand and *not* visiting any beaches, carrying a small bag of mysterious white powder (laundry detergent), staying in hostels when I could afford better accommodation) kept him suspicious for a long time. I was there with him for close to an hour.
Unfortunately, I think that more of this sort of thing will happen to me and other less conventional people in the future because automated systems are being trained to spot any unusual behavior, whether it's the path that you walk through a mall, the series of countries you visit, the places you use your credit card, or the websites you browse. There's a limit to how many people can be spotted via manual labor, but automated systems can more or less watch all the time. One antidote (aside from straight-out restricting surveillance) could be some kind of reputation system whereby security officials can quickly determine that other high-reputation people can vouch for you. This of course could have many problems and abuses as well if it's constructed poorly, but it's a start.
It started with a shitty 8-hour flight from London that put me in bad mood. Air Transat / Thomas Cook, while cheap, has airline seats that are incredibly uncomfortable. For some bizarre reason, they are shaped with a giant depression in the middle into which your butt sinks. I had to fill in this depression with my jacket to make it at all comfortable. By the time I got out, I was grouchy, starving, and extremely tired.
My story involving a dead company and 4 1/2 months of sightseeing just for the hell of it was apparently unusual enough to raise suspicion, but it got worse when he asked the name of the hotel I stayed at in London: The Clink. (It's a former prison that was converted into a youth hostel. You can even stay in old jail cells)
Anyway, he went through all my stuff in minute detail, trying to figure out whether I was a drug dealer, money launderer, child pornographer, or something else entirely. My unusual habits (eg taking pictures of all my important bits of information, keeping a long list of login and half-completed passwords to various sites for reference, staying with people I barely know, going to Thailand and *not* visiting any beaches, carrying a small bag of mysterious white powder (laundry detergent), staying in hostels when I could afford better accommodation) kept him suspicious for a long time. I was there with him for close to an hour.
Unfortunately, I think that more of this sort of thing will happen to me and other less conventional people in the future because automated systems are being trained to spot any unusual behavior, whether it's the path that you walk through a mall, the series of countries you visit, the places you use your credit card, or the websites you browse. There's a limit to how many people can be spotted via manual labor, but automated systems can more or less watch all the time. One antidote (aside from straight-out restricting surveillance) could be some kind of reputation system whereby security officials can quickly determine that other high-reputation people can vouch for you. This of course could have many problems and abuses as well if it's constructed poorly, but it's a start.
