When George Orwell wrote his classic dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” in 1948, he envisioned a gritty world dominated by a dictator known as Big Brother in which all aspects of citizens’ lives, now reduced to “proles” (Newspeak for ‘proletarian’ - the Marxist working class), were electronically monitored and controlled. Privacy was a thing of the past, only nobody remembered the past and all references to the past, or anything else Big Brother did not wish the proles to know about, were wiped from the public record.

Privacy is a basic right. Without it, humans are too often reduced to being pawns of the state with all our individual foibles, indiscretions, thoughts, views, actions, and beliefs laid bare for all to see and, too often, punished.

In an era so dominated by electronics, privacy is increasingly becoming a rare commodity and the various invasions of that privacy by the state and its agents - to say nothing of business interests - needs to be vigorously resisted. Too often it is not. Like the proles in the Oceania of Nineteen Eighty-Four too many of us are complacent and even prepared to accept certain invasions of privacy “for the greater good,” arguing that if someone has nothing to hide, then why should the individual be concerned about having their hard drive searched or their internet activity looked at? A more Big Brother-ish concept would be difficult to come up with.

Recently, Xtra! printed a piece about a gay couple returning from the US who were detained by the Canadian Border Service Agency (CBSA), apparently because there was a problem with the paperwork on a vehicle they had purchased at a vintage car show in Gettysburg, PA and were towing back to their home in Ottawa.

However, for some reason the Canadian border guards chose to go through their truck and open their laptop. One of the men, Rick Frenette, is quoted in Xtra! as saying, “they opened up the laptop, and I guess one of the icons said ‘porn’ on it.”

How many gay men don’t have porn on their computers? There is certainly nothing illegal about gay porn, or possessing it, as long as it is clearly between consenting adults.

When the agent came across some locked material, he asked for the passwords, which were provided to him.

While the border guards seem interested in the contents of Rick and his partner Shawn’s laptop, they never checked the men’s cell phones, Shawn’s Blackberry, or the loose burned CDs in the truck’s glove compartment.

The two men were then left alone for an hour as border guards conferred in an office. When the officers returned, Rick and Shawn were informed their laptop was to be confiscated due to “questionable material” having been found.

The “questionable material” was a downloaded video of light water sports, no more explicit than any number of videos and DVDs one can legally purchase in Canada at any adult video store. Also on the laptop were amateur porn videos of the couple.

As Marcus McCann, who wrote the Xtra article points out, “...[T]he Supreme Court of Canada has pointed out in the Little Sister’s bookstore case, porn that would be perfectly legal to make, sell and possess in Canada is often stopped at the border. Academic papers, fictions, letters and correspondence, bootlicking pictures, family photos — it can all get you in trouble.”

Compounding this is the fact, as expressed by Joe Arvay lead lawyer in the Little Sister’s case, that up to 70 percent of the porn confiscated at the border, whether personal or being shipped to various retail outlets in Canada, is gay or lesbian porn. Straight porn, it would appear, pretty much gets a free pass.

Following the Xtra story, various individuals suggested in the Xtra on-line forum the appropriate thing for individuals to do is encrypt their files and refuse to give up the password, which one would not be legally bound to do anyway as it is a form of self-incrimination.

On the surface, encryption would appear to be a good idea and, I would suggest, would probably be something one might want to seriously consider if there is even the slightest risk your particular fetish or kink might be exposed to those not particularly...uhm...informed, be they roommates, family members, or CBSA agents (or the RCMP, for that matter).

However, encrypting ones files is, I would suggest, a tad “bassackwards”. The issue here is not pornographic material stored on the hard drive of one’s laptop. The issue here is the possible abuse of search and seizure laws, certainly governmental abuse of privacy issues. Why should Joe or Josephine Average have to take extra-ordinary steps to protect themselves from such state interference?

An argument could be made, I suppose, that if one is taking one’s laptop across the border, either for business or as part of what you bring with you on a trip, then don’t have porn on it. Again, this strikes me as the reverse of what should be. It’s my computer, it’s my files, and it’s my business and as long as the porn is not illegal (i.e. kiddieporn, bestiality or snuff), the state has no business poking its nose into my hard drive (sexual innuendo intended).

I don’t have a laptop but when I was with Egale Canada I considered getting one. If agents of the state can start snooping around looking for “questionable material” when they have no reason to even suspect there is such material on the computer, that is a gross violation of privacy rights. And who gets to define what “questionable material” is? The government?

Would some of the documents I had on my hard drive pertaining to Egale discussions re age of consent, public sex, bathhouses/bawdy houses etc, or the situation facing Persian/Iranian queers for that matter (oooh...”Iran”....gotta see what THAT’S about....the guy’s probably a terrorist sympathizer or something....), be open to scrutiny? And if so, open to being confiscated because the content is not, or may not be perceived as, “mainstream?” Cripes, hardly any of the work I did over the last 15-20 years was “mainstream.”

If authorities have a justifiable reason to suspect a hard drive might contain illegal material, that is another matter entirely. We have checks and balances in place in this liberal democracy we call Canada to not only allow authorities to investigate and seize such material, and lay appropriate charges, but also to protect the average citizen from inappropriate and illegal search.

The issue, as I see it, is government interference in the personal and private lives and property of the citizens it was elected by. The argument then becomes “Where does one draw the line?”

Indeed. Scads of documents - legal, philosophical, and political - have been written on that concept alone...one can hardly even begin to address it in a magazine column.

As one of the commentators to the Xtra piece pointed out - this is what the CBSA is going after in a post-9/11 world? We have a tsunami of illegal firearms and drugs pouring across the American-Canadian border and border guards are concerned about two consenting adult males playing with piss and taping themselves having sex with each other? Hmmmm.....

Of course, it is not just the Canadian border guards who may be stepping over the line here. Their American counterparts are no less guilty.

According to a recent on-line article on itbusiness.ca, US customs agents were recently given new powers to seize notebook/laptop computers and other electronic devices of not just Americans but also travelers of other nationalities at the border as part of an “anti-terrorism” program.

A recently released Department of Homeland Security (HDS) policy indicates that agents do not need suspicion of wrongdoing to confiscate electronic devices and that data contained in the devices may be shared with other agencies for decryption or other purposes. The policy covers laptops, MP3 players, pagers, cell phones, PDAs, voice recorders, digital and video cameras. Not just confiscate, but copy any and all material found. This material can then be “shared” with other government agencies as “needed.”

Ever since 9/11, the Bush Administration has systematically walked all over individual rights in the US, all in the name of “National Security.” Few voices have been raised in protest and what protest there has been has been decidedly weak; certainly muted. No riots, no storming the hallowed halls of the Capitol (or the White House itself), no cries of “Live Free or Die!” The American Founding Fathers must be rolling in their graves.

Americans, by and large, seem to have quite accepted their government encroaching on freedoms just so the average American can feel safe from the latest bogeyman...The Terrorist.

Whether the restrictions of such freedoms have had any effect on national security remains to be seen. Certainly George W. Bush would not be the first leader of what was hitherto seen as a “progressive nation” to use essentially legal - or at least quasi-legal - means to subjugate its citizens and create a totalitarian regime. It starts out in small increments and, assuming there is little or no resistance to those, builds to greater restrictions and greater repression. The repression of rights and freedoms comes to be seen as normal and necessary.

Such repression is not normal and rarely necessary.