Searches of the Person: A New Approach to Electronic Device Searches at Canadian Customs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What goes through your mind at customs? As you wait in that folded line, edging closer to a row of enclosed booths manned by uniformed officers, surrounded by security cameras and warning signs? Perhaps you’re trying to act naturally, then wondering if it shows? Perhaps you’re mentally recalculating the amount you’ve scribbled onto your customs declaration? Or perhaps you’re exhausted from your flight, maybe nursing a bit of a hangover, not thinking about much at all? When you finally get to the front of the line, how do you expect your conversation with the customs officer to go?\nAccording to Canadian law, one thing that you have in this moment, whether you’re thinking about it or not, is an expectation of privacy. And if search and seizure law can be distilled into a single question, it is whether your expectation of privacy is reasonable at any given moment. This paper discusses the expectation of privacy that travellers have at Canadian customs with respect to their electronic devices.\nThe paper proceeds first with an examination of two foundational Supreme Court of Canada cases, Hunter and Simmons. The paper then examines how the lower courts have interpreted these foundational cases so as to apply to searches of electronic devices (something not anticipated by the foundational cases themselves, which were decided in the 1980s). The paper then discusses more recent Supreme Court jurisprudence addressing the unique privacy considerations posed by modern technology outside of the customs context. The paper then examines different proposals for modifying the way that device searches are conducted at customs in order to comport with this more recent Supreme Court jurisprudence. Finally, the paper concludes by offering a new proposal for change, which relies heavily on a reassessment of the foundational cases.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".