Comment by system16 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by system16 | Hacker News Reader

After many unpleasant dealings with US Customs, I avoid flying to or through the US completely even if it costs me more.

The last time I flew from Canada to Singapore through the US, the US Customs officer - on Canadian soil - was hostile, asked me numerous questions about my travel, itinerary, who I was intending to meet, and my personal finances.

When I questioned if all this was necessary as I'm not even traveling to the US, he became agitated and threatened "You know I could stop your trip right here? I might not be convinced you'll actually transfer on your next flight or leave the US."

After scowling at his screen for a while, he finally scoffed, slammed my passport on the counter and said "Go." I guess he felt he had shown his power enough.

It was extremely stressful and humiliating, and I vowed never to subject myself to it again. FWIW, I'm a caucasian, middle-class Canadian IT nerd. I can only imagine what others who meet their "profile" go through.

This is part of the problem, not the questions but the attitude. I can understand them asking questions, they have a short time to figure out if the traveler might be "up to no good". That is no reason to ask questions in way that attacks a person. Ask all the questions you want just don't be terrorizing jerk about it.

Now one instance can be chalked up to a bad apple but over and over again I have heard stories like this and experienced on multiple occasions.

Canadian customs officers may ask questions but they are generally not in a abusive tone.

Apparently they do it intentionally to throw people off, supposedly making it easier to spot if they're hiding something. It doesn't really hold water with me, but that's the rationalization I've heard fwiw.

I was on a school trip flying out of IAD and the TSA guy standing near security looks at me and asks me if I'm feeling ok because I look nervous. I've flown probably over a dozen times in my life at that point and everything up until that question had been a very routine day at the airport so I wouldn't have had any reason to be so. I just looked at him and said no, and he replies back that he was just checking. I think he had just recently sat through a powerpoint on detecting suspicious people by confronting them. I'm guessing the thinking is if they ask someone if they are nervous, the less experienced smugglers and terrorists are going to react even more nervously to that kind of question. But you are at an airport. There are plenty of people flying for the first time and those that are just always apprehensive about flying. Little questions like that can surely help when trying to determine the mood or emotional state of someone (like the Israelis do) but it was a dumb question. Expecting your average, uneducated TSA officer to be able to pull off those sly interrogation techniques is asking a bit much from them.

Probably part of the "behavior detection" program that costs $200M per year and has exactly zero effectiveness: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/michael-w-chapman/tsa-sp...

Isn't the point of the giant world wide surveillance apparatus run by the NSA, etc. meant to let them know this sort of thing before they even buy a ticket for a plane trip?

I know I'm being purposefully naive in saying this, but why pay for something that's not working?

You can't really find out in advance if someone intends to overstay their visa by surveillance. Surveillance is not magic, and mass surveillance has a problem of collecting huge mass of junk, and no agency, even NSA, would have resources to sift through this junk enough to find trivial matters like intent to overstay visa, even if that information actually was there. Surveillance may be useful to detect highly anomalous behavior, or to detect connections between people (e.g. is Mr. X connected to known terrorist Mr. Z?) but I don't see how it can be useful in trivial matters like immigration enforcement.

> but why pay for something that's not working?

Because it's The American Way! We spend so much money on programs that are proven not to work, it's embarrassing.

> Canadian customs officers may ask questions but they are generally not in a abusive tone.

Brit here, anecdata. I once entered Canada for business reasons and (long story short) my employer hadn't given me the correct visa paperwork. The Canadian border guys let me leave the airport and gave me 24 hours to come back with the correct paperwork (and threatened arrest if I didn't return). It was stressful but the guards were professional and relatively courteous. The guy I spoke to the next day basically said "we get this all the time, we know it's your company and not you".

One time I was going to Canada for a Hackathon, and I had to explain for a bus full of people what that means. Their only reply was "you do that for fun?"

Canadian customs officers may ask questions but they are generally not in a abusive tone.

Going to disagree with this statement. I've had 3 instances where Canadian border police were very aggressive and basically accused me of breaking the law without any evidence.

The US? 1 instance.

I went through Canadian Border Patrol and I had to deal with possibly the most aggressive power hungry person I ever have. I am a US citizen and was just going there with my boyfriend for a weekend trip.

As a New Zealander, it amazes me that the US and Canada do not have closer relations with regards to customs and so forth. I understand that both countries are large, but this situation seems a little ludicrous.

I recently travelled to Australia on business - which, I suppose, is the larger neighbour in the same way the US is to Canada.

Through immigration and customs at both airports, I was never obliged to actually interact with a real person: only check-in machines, face scanners, and a quick walk past sniffer dogs.

It used to be much more relaxed. After 9/11 things changed and the US started paying more attention to border crossings.

I remember those days. You didn't need a passport to cross and half the time you got waved through because you knew the border guard by name.

This has more to do with Australia than the Aus/NZ relationship. They also have this process with other "low risk" citizenships such as that of the US.

>asked me numerous questions about my travel, itinerary, who I was intending to meet, and my personal finances.

Well to be fair when I was visiting Canada from EU I got asked exactly same questions from Canadian customs.

Exactly. When you travel from EU to Canada or US there is no significant difference. Measery on both borders.

I think the main difference (speaking from the biased perspective of a Canadian) is that US border guards seem to want to get angry. Whilst Canadian guards have a "what we're doing is necessary, but we want to be nice" attitude.

Unfortunately Canada's awful security policy comes because we need to be "up to US standards", or else we risk huge barriers being put in the middle of our trade relationship due to US paranoia. And economically, Canada is totally dependent on trade with the US.

As an American who has made three land crossings in to Canada, I can say that Canadian Border Agents treat Americans in the same way that American Border Agents treat Canadians.

My first crossing in to Canada was riding with my girlfriend and her parents, all Canadian citizens. It was maybe 10 PM, crossing from Maine to New Brunswick. The Canadian agent was very friendly to my three companions with Canadian passports, but immediately become agitated when she saw my US passport. It struck me as quite odd how rude she was to me given how she had no suspicion of the other three people in the car with me. I wasn't driving the car, I was in the back seat listening to music on an MP3 player.

I've decided it isn't so much that Canadians feel the need to be "up to US standards," as much as it is they feel the need to treat US citizens with the same contempt that the US treats Canadian citizens.

The experience crossing into Canada seems to vary quite a lot.

The two times I crossed (~5 and 15 years ago) the Canadian border agents were polite and brief. I guess that first one was in the days where US citizens didn't need a passport to travel to Canada.

Yeah. I think I'm pretty reasonable when it comes to complying with laws of other countries. Whatever they want from me, I'm happy to help. I just want to be treated with respect.

US and Canadian border guards will search your stuff without telling you why, seem disappointed not finding anything, curtly dismiss you leaving you to repack. And it's like they're disappointed when it turns out you've committed no offense.

Were you a young male travelling by yourself?

I believe that automatically flags them to see if you are working in the US illegally. I always have this problem when I travel for work to SF. I was secondary screened when I said I was paid via PayPal and he didn't know what PayPal was. The girl in secondary screening had to google it to make sure I wasn't getting paid by American company but in fact was paid for a contract.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com