Updated, 21.41

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.

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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