U.S. Customs now reads your blog entries?
November 29, 2005 7:40 PM PST
http://news.com.com/2061-10796_3-5976066.html

An Iranian trying to enter the U.S. says border guards barred him  
from entering because his blog said he was based in New York.

Hossein Derakhshan, who writes a blog on Hoder.com, said in a post  
last week that he's "homeless" because he was prevented from re- 
entering the country. Derakhshan says he was born in Tehran and then  
moved to Toronto, Canada in December 2000.

The United States, of course, requires a visa for foreign citizens  
who want to live here permanently.

So when the border guards found a Newsweek magazine labeled with his  
name and a New York City address, coupled with the I-live-in-the-Big- 
Apple contents of his blog, they were suspicious and denied him entry  
for six months, Derakhshan says.

Reading blog entries while at the border may be new, but border  
guards have enjoyed Internet access for a while. (When I was  
traveling to Ottawa to speak at an academic conference, the guards  
verified my claim by checking the university's Web site.)

In addition, border guards have been known to investigate the  
contents of a computer.

One report this year from a U.S.-based marijuana activist says U.S.  
border guards looked through her digital camera snapshots and likely  
browsed through her laptop's contents.

Kenneth Cukier, now a London-based correspondent for The Economist  
magazine, once reported similar first-hand experiences, and a 1998  
article in the New York Times describes how British customs scan  
laptops for sexual material.

Posted by Declan McCullagh