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STEVE JOBS WOULD be so proud. A Canadian man claims to have put his Apple iPad to original use over Christmas when he used it to gain entry to the United States – in a completely legal manner.
Martin Reisch told the Associated Press that he had forgotten his passport but would have had to make a two-hour return journey to his home in Montreal to retrieve it.
So he decided instead to try showing a US Customs and Border Protection officer a scanned copy of his passport, displayed on his iPad.
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Reisch said that the border official was not delighted with his alternative to a passport. He told the AP that the official “took the iPad into the little border hut. He was in there a good five, six minutes. It seemed like an eternity. When he came back he took a good long pause before wishing me a Merry Christmas”.
The 33-year-old claimed he had been travelling over the land border with the US in order to drop Christmas presents to a friend’s house in Vermont.
The Canadian news agency, CBC News, quotes a Canadian MP called Brian Masse as saying the incident was “troubling” because a scanned version of a passport “is not a secure document”.
This is backed up by a spokesperson for the US Customs and Border Patrol, who told Wired that the assertion was “categorically false” – and that Reisch simply wouldn’t have been allowed to move without valid identification.
In Reisch’s case, they said, he had presented a driver’s licence and a birth cert, which customs officers used to vouch for his nationality.
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In other news, Martin Reisch’s distant cousin Muhammad Al Reisch was refused entry with a proper passport at the very same boarder crossing later the same day…
Canadian and US authorities are extremely Hi Tec.
In principle there is no difference between a passport and a picture version on an iPad.
All they do is scan in your barcode and double check it with their own records.
Had to do something similiar in Germany a few years ago.
It worked.
Thanks to modern technology.
Why is it when i tried to cross from Canada into North Dakota (and down
to Kansas) to go see my wife in 2008, (no criminal record of any kind,
nor drug related, i have been a good boy) i was arrested, sent to jail,
seen a immigration judge and bounced back to Canada and been sitting out
a 5 year ban…..and he crosses the border with a iPad? I heard the
there is a app for everything but this is ridiculous. When i was “taken
into the office” i was photo graphed, finger printed and had this
nightmare…someone help me out here…Ladies and Gentlemen i may be from Canada….my family died here and been struggling to make any type of ends meet….i just want to go home to Kansas (yes i consider Wichita Kansas my home)….seriously…HOW did he cross? WHY was he allowed to cross?
A Customs and Border Patrol spokesperson told Wired.com, “The assertion that a traveler was admitted into the U.S. using solely a scanned image of his passport on an iPad is categorically false. In this case, the individual had both a driver’s license and birth certificate, which the CBP officer used to determine identity and citizenship in order to admit the traveler into the country.”
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