A Montreal-based photographer, Martin Reisch, made headlines after he managed to cross the U.S. border with a scanned image of his passport on his iPad.
Steve Jobs would probably say, ‘Here’s something to work on for the future.’ Maybe have some kind of digital certification or encryption to let people travel like this,” Reisch said.
It all began when Reisch was driving towards the border, and remembered that he left his passport at home.He thought of turning around when he remembered that he had a scanned copy of his passport on Dropbox, an online file storage service. It was a backup, intended to be used in case he lost his passport while travelling.
The officer took his tablet computer and went inside the border office. “I guess he looked me up in the computer and saw I’m not a criminal or a terrorist or anything.”
Though Reisch gor through the U.S. border, scanned copies of passports are not accepted forms of ID to cross the American border by land, according to the Canada Border Services Agency.
