Comment by tptacek
10 years ago
No, border crossings have been like this since long before the PATRIOT act. Computer scientists were turned away at the borders trying to fly in to give Black Hat talks; I worked for a Canadian company and had strict instructions to tell the Canadian border people I was traveling to see friends, and so on.
This has nothing to do with terrorism. It has to do with visa classifications, and the skittishness of countries about people visiting (or, the concern is, immigrating) to do work.
Also: as a reminder, the UK has long been concerned about people smuggling arms and the like for the sake of terrorism: the majority of arms used by the IRA originated in the US for decades before 9/11 (after which the US supply largely dried up, as did US funding of such terrorist groups).
That does not sound correct to me. The IRA got most of its weapons from Libya [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ira/inside/wea...] from the 1980's on, and the Good Friday agreement was signed (presumably suspending arms smuggling) years before 9/11.
And the majority of the arms used by loyalist paramilitaries came from South Africa via the UK security forces.
Our government and arms businesses are happy for the guns to leave the UK, though.