Be careful what you write

[Torurot]

LSD as Therapy? Write about It, Get Barred from US
http://thetyee.ca/News/2007/04/23/Feldmar/

Google enabled the barring. Your past (very distant past) comes back to haunt you.

[stogie bear]

That's an interesting story but I can't help thinking that there's more to this than meets the eye.

"Google enabled the barring"

Errr, Google cannot bar anyone from America!

If your life is online then you can expect to get some repercussions because of it.

[Torurot]

Simply if the border dude didn't Google the guys name (how many similar names might there be with consequent false negative/positives) he probably would have gone across as normal. So in that sense Google "enabled" the barring. Of course Google does not control the border, Morons do.

[stogie bear]

I still think there's more to this innocent old academic than meets the eye. There's something that we don't know.

I'm willing to bet that people don't get barred from the US beause some immigration officials can 'Google' up some past quotes on a persons attitudes to illegal drugs.

Also the story has a clear bias against the US immigration service and doesn't appear to be balanced as a news story. Interesting though...

[katoeylover]

Since when was "google" allowed for immigration purposes. Are there no rights of reply to any allegation spurted on the internet.

As stogie says, he must have been redflagged for something else.

[Torurot]

Since when has immigration given "right of reply" on entry. Once on Google there is no way to get off. Perhaps if a site falls over eventually you run out of their cache?

[stogie bear]

You are sounding worryingly like a conspiracy theorist!

[mardhi]

Somehow I doubt the average Immigration officer has access to the Internet from his PC set-up at the immigration desk, nor the time to do a search and read through probably hundreds of matches - the guy had already been flagged I suspect.

Cheers
Mardhi