On Thursday, a
Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reporter claimed that the Department of Homeland Security demanded access to her mobile phones when she was crossing the border at the Los Angeles airport.
The case highlights the powers that border agents purport to have, and how vulnerable sensitive information can be when taken through airports in particular.
"I wanted to share a troubling experience I had with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in the hopes it may help you protect your private information," Maria Abi-Habib, a WSJ journalist focused on ISIS and Al Qaeda
wrote in a post on Facebook. (Abi-Habib confirmed to Motherboard that the Facebook account was hers, but declined to comment further.)
Abi-Habib says she had arrived in town for a wedding, when an immigration officer approached her, and took her aside from the main queue. This by itself was not unusual, Abi-Habib writes: because of her job, she has reportedly been put on a list that allows her to bypass the usual questioning someone with her travel profile may encounter.
But things changed quickly, and Abi-Habib was escorted to another part of the airport.
Comment: Convenient incident for UK to increase rather than decrease military spending.