how effed up is this?

(AND it make things worse, it actually involves a craft too! crocheting)

US Customs: Sketching an SUV makes you a copyright infringer

Posted by Cory Doctorow,
Vidiot sez, "A woman stopped by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at the border, over a drawing of an SUV in her notebook. They thought the artist and college professor was an industrial spy and copyright infringer." ..............
....................

Her release came only after she persuaded border guards she was an artist doing a project that involved a crocheted SUV as a statement against America's dependence on oil and love for big vehicles.

And these are the rocket-scientists we want to give clones of our hard-drives to? As Cardinal Richelieu said, "If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him."

Keene artist had hard time getting back into US (Thanks, Vidiot)...................

more from whip up

america?

this would be funny if it wasn't scary. asylum from ITALY? home of vino and pasta? the ONLY thing i can think people would seek asylum from is roman traffic

Italian’s Detention Illustrates Dangers Foreign Visitors Face

By NINA BERNSTEIN
He was a carefree Italian with a recent law degree from a Roman university. She was “a totally Virginia girl,” as she puts it, raised across the road from George Washington’s home. Their romance, sparked by a 2006 meeting in a supermarket in Rome, soon brought the Italian, Domenico Salerno, on frequent visits to Alexandria, Va., where he was welcomed like a favorite son by the parents and neighbors of his girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper. But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum........
(shout out to boing boing)

i don't like this

i don't like it AT ALL. if i brought my laptop to the airport and they demanded i log in so they could see the websites i visited, i'd be LIVID. it's NONE OF THEIR F**KING BUSINESS. of course i know they're tracking me right now (i'm not naive) but i sure as shite am NOT going to bend over for them. they'll have to work for it. same goes for my cell phone. who i call, when i call and how often is NO ONE'S BUSINESS (yet i also know they're tracking that as well. especially since i have at&t to begin with). then again, i have less to worry about than someone whose skin is not my color. someone who may have a different set of religious beliefs than i do. (this IS america, right?)
Clarity Sought on Electronics Searches
Travelers' Devices Seized at Border

By Ellen Nakashima Washington Post Staff Writer
Nabila Mango, a therapist and a U.S. citizen who has lived in the country since 1965, had just flown in from Jordan last December when, she said, she was detained at customs and her cellphone was taken from her purse. Her daughter, waiting outside San Francisco International Airport, tried repeatedly to call her during the hour and a half she was questioned. But after her phone was returned, Mango saw that records of her daughter's calls had been erased.
A few months earlier in the same airport, a tech engineer returning from a business trip to London objected when a federal agent asked him to type his password into his laptop computer. "This laptop doesn't belong to me," he remembers protesting. "It belongs to my company." Eventually, he agreed to log on and stood by as the officer copied the Web sites he had visited, said the engineer, a U.S. citizen who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of calling attention to himself...........