Corey Posted March 18, 2012 Report Share Posted March 18, 2012 I'm crossing from the US into Canada with a used Donek board in my car, I have to go into the Customs office to pay taxes on the board. The border guard asks me where the board was made, I say USA. That's where things go downhill. Border guard: "You think it's made in the US?" Me: "I know it is, made in Colorado." Border guard: "You think it's made in Colorado?" Me: "No, I know it is." Border guard: "I don't think so, there are no US snowboard manufacturers." Me, stunned at this response: "Donek is, they're based in Colorado. You can check their website." Border guard gives me the stink eye and a 30-second pause/staredown: "Assuming that's true, how much did you pay for it?" Me: "$500. Here is my half of a bank draft." Border guard: "I see that, how much did YOU pay for it?" Me: "$500." Border guard: "That's how much he paid, how much did YOU pay for it?" Me: "$500. There's my name on the 'from' line, and his name on the 'pay to' line." Border guard: "So, how much did YOU pay for it?" This went on much too long, before he 'let me away with it this time.' Sigh, I hate uptight border guys... I've had way more negative experiences with the US side, this was one of the worst on the Canadian side. Airport crossings are way less stressful than land crossings. I assume it's because the airport guards have 10x the practice? Keep in mind that you're in a rights-free zone at the border, your normal rights are somewhat suspended while in that no-man's land between countries. They can tear your car to pieces if they want and leave you to reassemble it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Surf Quebec Posted March 18, 2012 Report Share Posted March 18, 2012 Hum... The border guy is half right :rolleyes: At ECES Sean Martin told us that he was born in Canada and making jokes about all north american race boards makers were canadian : Bruce, Jasey-Jay and him. Going thru customs gan be such a pain sometimes... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael.a Posted March 18, 2012 Report Share Posted March 18, 2012 Let me get just one thing right, you bought a board in the US and took it personally with you across the border and you... voluntarily declared and paid tax on it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lafcadio Posted March 18, 2012 Report Share Posted March 18, 2012 Let me get just one thing right, you bought a board in the US and took it personally with you across the border and you... voluntarily declared and paid tax on it? And a USED board on top of it. Maybe that's why the boarder official was suspicious...he's figuring that if someone's going to voluntarily claim duty/taxes on a snowboard purchased for $500, it's probably because they paid a lot more. Out of curiosity, where was the crossing? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Corey Posted March 18, 2012 Author Report Share Posted March 18, 2012 I debated for a second mentioning that Sean was actually a Canadian, but I think this guys zest for life was long gone. Yeah, I declared it. Better to pay $60 in taxes than risking a car seizure and not being able to travel internationally any more. It was at Gretna, MB, a thriving hub of cross-boarder snowboard smuggling: http://g.co/maps/w6r4h Actually, there's a little parcel service in Neche, ND that hundreds of Canadians go to every week. That border sees a TON of people carrying misc. stuff across in their cars for the two guys working there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ExcelsiorTheFathead Posted March 18, 2012 Report Share Posted March 18, 2012 A little OT, but here's my recent experience at Canadian crossings: Some 18 months ago I crossed into BC at Aldergrove where my laptop and a USB stick had an electronic rectal exam by Canadian Customs. The laptop had the hard drive's hardware password turned on, so they didn't get in and ignored it. My USB stick was unfortunately unencrypted and they found some internet bookmarks to manufacturers of firearms and accessories. I was directed to a back room where they started grilling me about guns. They wanted to know about every gun I own. I asked "What does this matter? I know and respect Canadian laws and would not be so foolish to bring a gun across the border. Go ahead and tear my car apart." This pointlessness went on for 20 minutes. Then they wanted to know how I could be unemployed and claiming to be vacationing at a condo in downtown Vancouver. How much cash did I have? USD $60. How much money could I get quickly in an emergency? "Well, I could get $10,000 out of cash machines and credit cards if necessary... Is that enough?" He says no, he needs to know how much money I have total in banks, investments and real estate. "So I need to basically tell you the value of my entire net worth, in all forms of assets, everywhere in the world?" He says: "Yes." "Can I say that it is none of your business?" "It's only necessary if you want to enter Canada today" was the reply. Moron. The big downside was that my USB stick had a spreadsheet contact list of a bunch of my friends who are now likely to be associated with me, the suspicious money launderer and gun runner in some huge database. All electronic data is up for grabs at a border crossing. Leave it all at home. All the data on your smartphone can be taken for forensic analysis and you have no recourse. Trying to re-enter the US by car as a single male is also perilous. I get directed to questioning all the time, especially when I had a passport full of stamps to every which place. Now that I have a new "clean" passport it attracts much less attention. About a year ago I went to BC for a training camp, but returned to the US with a woman who had a fight with her idiot drunken skier boyfriend. Never was getting through the border easier. Once I was detained trying to leave Turkey because they suspected me of having a forged US passport. The immigration guy was certain that I was a Japanese national who was masquerading as an American. Why would anyone do that? I would forge a Canadian passport and put the maple leaf on my backpack. Maybe it's just me? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dingbat Posted March 19, 2012 Report Share Posted March 19, 2012 Let's all give a big round of applause for Security Theater! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jack M Posted March 20, 2012 Report Share Posted March 20, 2012 there is a special place in hell for power clerks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kieran Posted March 20, 2012 Report Share Posted March 20, 2012 jobsworth: A jobsworth is a person who uses their job description in a deliberately uncooperative way, or who seemingly delights in acting in an obstructive or unhelpful manner. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snowboardworm Posted March 20, 2012 Report Share Posted March 20, 2012 Corey, Ive never had a smooth crossing. Border guards are trained to be obnoxious as far as I'm concerned. I say this knowing that they train at our same facility here in the west. Try crossing down in Vancouver cause you want to go visit a skiing buddy and have quesadillas for supper. It would be actually comical if the potential outcome weren't so bad. Ooops. forgot about my border crossing into Montana with the ex wife. All they did was got through the trailer which had about 40K in bicycles tons of beer which they ignored, and took all my oranges so they could roll them downhill at our canadian guards. greg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Corey Posted March 20, 2012 Author Report Share Posted March 20, 2012 I love "jobsworth"! That's hilarious in a pathetic way. Honestly, I've had many hundreds of positive border-crossing experiences. Most would qualify as easy and non-stressful. The average US border guard is trying to make sure you don't steal Americans jobs or bring bad stuff into the country. The average Canadian guard wants to make sure you don't bring anything bad in and that you pay all the appropriate taxes/duties. The exceptions really stand out though. I've been questioned for 30 minutes on the US side, standing with my palms down on a stainless steel table with my pants unzipped and unbuttoned, but still up. I thought I was actually going to get the much-joked-about rubber glove treatment. Someone entered the room and asked a question from behind me. I turned my head to address that person (palms still on the table as instructed previously) and all of a sudden I had four people with hands on sidearms real quick and lots of screaming. Yikes. I never did figure out what they thought was going on, but they were highly interested in verifying my birthplace and birth date over and over and over and ... My dad sold used cars and farm equipment. He had a potential cross-border deal 25-ish years ago, so he called the border to make sure all the paperwork was in order. Then all parties met in the border zone, passing paperwork back and forth. Then the guy handed him the cash and my dad handed over the keys. The US guard then grabbed my dad's hands and handcuffed them behind his back. It turns out either they didn't mention or he forgot a form, so he technically smuggled a vehicle across the border. Rather than pointing out the mistake when it could be easily fixed, they waited until he actually completed the sale. He spent a day in a cell before the lawyers cleared it up. He lost quite a bit of money on that sale after the lawyers' fees! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neil Gendzwill Posted March 20, 2012 Report Share Posted March 20, 2012 You guys really need to cross over in a mini-van with a couple of kids. The worst that ever happened was they asked us to wait in some room while they looked in our camper, and ended up confiscating some eggs due to their idiotic idea that importing eggs can result in a bird flu epidemic. Mostly it's just "where you from, where you going, how long you staying, any booze, cigarettes or citrus fruit?" and then a wave through. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snowboardworm Posted March 20, 2012 Report Share Posted March 20, 2012 Neil, I must look like a criminal greg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Corey Posted March 20, 2012 Author Report Share Posted March 20, 2012 Maybe it's just my frequency of border crossings? The vast majority of crossings go just like you mentioned, Neil. But every now and then things take a sour turn. One time I got a bit of phlegm in my throat just as they asked if I was bringing any weapons into the US. I cleared my throat, they just pointed to the inspection garage. That was a fun day! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ExcelsiorTheFathead Posted March 20, 2012 Report Share Posted March 20, 2012 Someone asked me for more details about my laptop incident via PM. I thought that my reply would be generally useful, so I thought I'd post it up. The Canadian border guy didn't specifically ask me about my laptop. I was simply directed to park my car and go inside the office. They asked me there if they could search and inspect my car. The car was out of my sight, so I can only assume what happened. 1. They ran a mirror underneath it to check for contraband. I saw other cars being inspected this way. 2. They put a dog in it to sniff for drugs, explosives, ammunition, and guns. 3. They searched my stuff by hand. They went into my luggage and found my laptop and a USB stick. The laptop had the hardware password on the hard drive turned on. This is enabled via the BIOS, but is not the simple BIOS-based startup password. The hard drive password is communicated to the hard drive via the BIOS and prevents any access to data unless the password is correct. This type of protection will stop simple attempts to access the data, and is non-trivial to bypass, although by no means truly secure. I'm very confident that they were not able to boot my laptop or access the data in the short time that they had control of the device. But the USB stick was another story. It was unencrypted at the time, a complacent oversight. I use a utility program to store my various website logons and internet bookmarks, and a copy of my bookmarks was on the stick. I organize my bookmarks into categories, one of which was "Guns," and inside this directory were little bookmark files with titles ranging from "Ruger" to "Concealment Holsters." My guess is that the USB stick was plugged into one of their laptops equipped with specialized forensic software that just goes searching for anything suspicious and sounds an alarm. But in the process, I bet that they copied off all of the data, including the contact list of my friends. When the guy came back and directed me to the "private room," He said that they had found this incriminating gun stuff on my laptop. I knew he was lying, because that data wasn't on the laptop, but only on the USB stick. He wanted me to believe that they had bypassed my hard drive password, but I knew he was full of it. They quizzed me about every gun I own, with me repeating each time that it is in a safe at home, and not in my car or on my person. By this time they had become the thought police, and I was being harassed for thinking about guns. It didn't help that I also had a copy of "American Rifleman" in the car. So again, when you take any unencrypted electronic data across an international frontier, all of it is up for grabs. If you say it is ok to search your car and you have electronic data anywhere in it, you have given them permission to take all of the data. They can check your car's engine computer for whatever information it has. They can take your GPS waypoints, every point of interest you searched on, and any position tracks. They can look at all of your music. If your laptop or smartphone are in there, they can take all of your photos and your entire email archive. They can take your internet browsing history. They know any unencrypted passwords in various cache files. They can get files you thought you deleted. They know your contact list, calling history, and all of the text messages they can find. And you have no recourse. If your device is on your person, I don't know how easily they can search it, but I'll bet you can't prevent it from happening. The best way to prevent these intrusions is to simply leave the data at home, to the largest extent possible, and encrypt everything else. I like to leave important information "in the cloud" so that I can access it after I get to wherever I'm going, as long as there is internet available and an encrypted connection. I will only cross a border with a little netbook that has the hardware hard drive password turned on, and treat it only as an internet access device without any locally stored personal information. Before I leave home, I remove any local email caches and contact lists, and use common privacy utilities to scrub out all cookies, browsing histories, etc. Then I defrag the file system and wipe the free space so that deleted files are really deleted. While out of the country, I only check email via webmail access over an encrypted connection, storing nothing on the netbook. I have used TrueCrypt in the past to encrypt the entire hard drive, but I think this is overkill if I don't have any important information stored on the device in the first place. If I absolutely must take "real data" across a border, it will be encrypted with something like TrueCrypt, put onto a micro-SD card and stuck into a tube of Preparation-H. I don't think that you can be forced to decrypt something under duress, although there have been recent court cases calling this into question. I know a guy who works for one of the national research labs who has everything on his laptop encrypted. He says he won't give up the data to anybody in any country for any reason. For my purposes, it is much simpler to put the data up on Dropbox or similar, and download it after I get to where I'm going. Anything is better than physically carrying the data across a checkpoint. This all seems totally paranoid, but once you have been electronically raped by Canadian Customs, everything starts to look a little bit different. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davekempmeister Posted March 21, 2012 Report Share Posted March 21, 2012 (edited) Excelsior, next time you travel take note of whether or not your Preparation-H gets special scrutiny and report back. edit: jokes aside, i should say thanks to Excelsior for the helpful insight. as more of an analog type guy, i can use all the help i can get with the complexities and nuances of the digital pitfalls. his post may be the longest on bomber that i actually read start to finish. Edited March 21, 2012 by davekempmeister Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BobD Posted March 21, 2012 Report Share Posted March 21, 2012 jobsworth: To give a bit more context... You "do me a favor and let me park here for five minutes." Parking attendant "it's more than my job's worth governor" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leeho730 Posted March 21, 2012 Report Share Posted March 21, 2012 Sounds especially funny that US is the birthplace of modern snowboarding and there are plenty of manufacturers like Mervin (used to say things like "handmade near Canada", sounds like it ain't for nothing), Burton Vermont factory, Neversummer, Unity, Status etc still in the states. And it is also interesting that being single makes you more suspicious... I came back from Japan to Perth and at my turn the customs and boarder protection agent stopped me and said are you travelling by yourself so I said yes and then he asked me what was in the bag and I said it's the snowboard and boots and the guy then asked me if I packed the bag myself and I said yes and then he pointed the exit door to me and said go through the exit and funny I was wondering how come I don't get acanned then I looked at my friends who were couples and they were getting their bags scanned and I thought being a single isn't necessarily bad! Anyway it sounds like you guys are having way too much fun.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kieran Posted March 21, 2012 Report Share Posted March 21, 2012 To give a bit more context... You "do me a favor and let me park here for five minutes." Parking attendant "it's more than my job's worth governor" you should come back to the seat of the commonwealth sometime Bob, you might be shocked at the changes. ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Allee Posted March 21, 2012 Report Share Posted March 21, 2012 You guys really need to cross over in a mini-van with a couple of kids. The worst that ever happened was they asked us to wait in some room while they looked in our camper, and ended up confiscating some eggs due to their idiotic idea that importing eggs can result in a bird flu epidemic. Mostly it's just "where you from, where you going, how long you staying, any booze, cigarettes or citrus fruit?" and then a wave through. I've never had any trouble either. In fact, they love me ... travelling on a NZ passport must have its upsides. The Canadian border guys always smirk when they say "any alcohol?" and I say "nope, drank it all ..." I travelled to Whitefish once with three boards, and they opened the roof box and came back in while I was doing my visa waiver. The guy asked why I had three boards, I explained they were for different conditions, and I had another four at home I could bring next time. He just rolled his eyes and threw me out the door ... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lowrider Posted March 21, 2012 Report Share Posted March 21, 2012 Did you check to see if the eggs were stuck to the back of the camper after passing through customs? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neil Gendzwill Posted March 21, 2012 Report Share Posted March 21, 2012 Well, I did have one incident years ago. I was working in Fort MacMurray, and some friends of mine asked me to join them in Denver for a weekend of skiing in late October, hoping some hill would have enough snow. They grabbed my skis for me and planned to pick me up at the airport and then drive me home. We were staying at some guys house I'd never met. So there I was at the airport, single guy supposedly going on a ski trip in October but with a one-way ticket to Denver, no skis and no idea where I was staying. An hour and a half later... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
C5 Golfer Posted March 21, 2012 Report Share Posted March 21, 2012 Where is Dan Aykroyd when you need him? <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/gPKSw1OeK2w" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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