I'm not sure when was the time you grew up, but this travel situation was already like in the 1990's just a bit less global (less effective spying maybe) and th

I'm not sure when was the time you grew up, but this travel situation was already like in the 1990's just a bit less global (less effective spying maybe) and though documented a lot less publicized. When you're not an American citizen, even at the time you could be detained indefinitely in high security prison without being able to tell anyone. The story of the guy to whom it actually happened on the motive that he was involved in importing super nintendo legalish accessory (game genie or disk copier or something along these lines) in a different country should still be floating around. Then there is this guy on whom they pulled gattaca stuff as in vacuuming his laptop keyboard and run the collected dust through lab analysis. This is pre-TSA stuff, so IMHO the travel situation in the US has not really changed in nature, only in scale.