SupidSecurity is a web site that specializes in "Exposing fake security", or to be more succinct, finding security provisions that aren't and exposing them to the light of day. Today, they have an article from Reuters (via Yahoo) discussing an American who was fined $10,000 for crossing into Canada.

The long version of the story is that the gentleman in question lives in a border town in Maine where the nearest town is in Quebec. Thus, he and his half-dozen fellow citizens tend to do their shopping, church, etc. in Canada. Until the new security changes last May, this was fine. Both the US and Canada had granted these people (along with a few hundred others) special permission to cross the border at points unmanned by customs officials. This was particularly useful for the residents as their local crossing is closed on Sundays and their nearest manned crossing is almost 200 miles away.

As part of our "added security" since 9/11, the US Government has added gates and cameras to the crossing and has revoked the crossing privileges of our citizens (although Canada has not). So, when Richard Albert crossed the border to go to church, they caught him on camera and contacted him later that week to hand him a fine for US$10,000 for crossing the border when and where he shouldn't have.

I'm just not sure that a gate that can be easily driven around and a camera that isn't checked over the weekend are going to really be effective in stemming the flow of terrorists to our shores, especially with 5,300 miles of mostly-unprotected border between the US and Canada.

Seems to me that a more effective approach would be to cooperate with our Canadian neighbors and stop them outside of Canada...