So … they promptly sent me off to secondary inspection and did a full search of my hard-drive for all images. All 19k of them, as it turned out, including family pictures and presentation silliness, but was mostly program images, clip art from Word, temp file detritus, etc. Who knew there was so much junk? But why the bug hunt? As most readers will have now surmised, which I didn’t straight away in my sleep-deprived state, they were looking for illicit pictures. In the digital age, laptops are apparently the new cross-border smuggling mules.

border control checking all pictures on a laptop. bizarre, and a losing proposition. i had no idea that the mullahs had come to canada, too.

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