Since we are sharing experiences:
This morning I went to Ben Gurion Airport for my El Al flight back to
New York City. I wore my Wikimania t-shirt, badge, and lanyard, and
prominently carried my Wikimania shoulder bag, along with a Wikimedia
shoulder bag. I was asked, among other questions:
What was the purpose of your trip to Israel?
Didn't that conference end about a week ago?
What are your parents' names?
Where did you stay in Israel? Near the city center?
Do you belong to any community or congregation? Any communities with
which you celebrate holidays like the Sabbath?
What languages do you speak?
Where do you live?
What is the origin of your name?
An agent asked me about whether I had liquids; I showed my little
bottles/vials and was told to put them all into my checked luggage. My
bags were X-rayed, my laptop X-rayed separately. Then I was directed to
secondary screening. All my bags were opened and hand-searched and
swabbed. I was asked about my ZaReason laptop specifically because it's
not a brand/model they'd seen before.
An agent took me to a curtained, well-used cell with no clock,
hand-searched me and swabbed me ("spread your legs," "raise your arms,"
"now face me," etc.), and took my wallet, passport, phone, shoes,
brooch, and overshirt away for inspection. I don't know how long I was
there. She eventually returned all my belongings to me; one pocket of
my wallet had been unzipped and the contents were scattered in the tub.
I could see from a dialog box on the screen that the agents had tried to
look at the contents of my phone. I do not know whether they tried to
turn my laptop on, or found a way to access its contents.
Overall I estimate the hassle took about 45 minutes to an hour. But at
least they let me take my laptop on the plane.
In contrast, before I could get on my flight from New York to Israel, El
Al agents interrogated me and searched me and my belongings for
approximately two hours. Worse, they put my laptop into my checked
luggage, so I could not do any work on the flight (I had not planned on
checking any luggage, just using two carry-on shoulder bags).
As part of my search and questioning in New York, an agent took me into
an employee break room and hand-searched and swabbed me and took all my
belongings to be inspected. I know from mistaken time settings on my
phone that they opened my phone and temporarily took out its battery,
then had to reset its timezone, the date, etc. I do not know whether
they tried to access my laptop's contents.
In New York, I showed the agents a bunch of Wikimania conference
information printouts, the registration letter, and my business cards,
and was wearing my Wikimedia bag. The agents asked, among other questions:
Do you have a family? Do you have children? Why didn't you take your
husband's name? Why isn't he coming on this trip?
Do you know anyone in Israel? Do you have his phone number?
What do you do for a job? Do you go to an office? Could you talk me
through what you do each day? Did you have to do any special training
for that job?
You don't have more luggage than that?
Where did you go to college? What are the jobs you have had since then?
Why have you had so many jobs in the past two years? You say you did
some consulting for GNOME; can you open your laptop and show me some
work you did for them?
Will you be traveling in the area after the conference?
The agents in New York were kinder and less brusque than the agents at
Ben Gurion, and -- since they'd delayed me for so long -- walked me to
the airplane's jetway, ensuring I skipped to the front of the airport
security line and any other queues.
In both cases I was traveling alone. And in both cases I was myself, a
US citizen whose parents and name and skin color came from South Asia.
I can't pass as anything else.
An agent asked me, at the Tel Aviv airport, what community or
congregation I belonged to. I didn't understand at first, and my first
thought was, "the free software community, I guess?" The community that
congregates at Wikimania, that I'd come to Haifa to celebrate. And my
search and interrogation experiences were, to me, the least welcoming
thing about my Wikimania.
To bring it back to the thread topic: No one asked me about the
conference CD.
-Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
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