Perhaps for some; I have long arms.

wait so, they were the REAL DEA or the fake ones? If they r real ones, was there any cameras or anything to prove that they took all ur stuff?

....awesome

This. What if that was his rent/food/travel money? WTF is he supposed to do then? In that case, those two douchebag agents just seriously f-ed with somebody's life.

Justice Souter's dissent in Illinois v. Caballes (not to mention your story) should put to rest the myth that drug dogs are infallible (or even generally accurate):

"The infallible dog, however, is a creature of legal fiction. Although the Supreme Court of Illinois did not get into the sniffing averages of drug dogs, their supposed infallibility is belied by judicial opinions describing well-trained animals sniffing and alerting with less than perfect accuracy, whether owing to errors by their handlers, the limitations of the dogs themselves, or even the pervasive contamination of currency by cocaine."

I would go much further than Souter does here, and include "deliberate mishandling" as a huge factor that leads to drug-dog false positives. By this I mean the cop does something intentionally, like a special command or hand motion, to make the dog react as if there was a "hit." If police trainers can train dogs to paw and bark at objects when they actually detect narcotics, it would be trivially easy to make the dog do the same when a police officer makes a subtle hand motion, or uses a "magic word" in conversation. Of course police have enormous incentives to search anything they can, on the off chance they find contraband. After all, departments receive funding (and individual cops receive promotions) based on arrests, convictions, amounts of contraband seized, etc. But, that pesky exclusionary rule would get those convictions overturned if not for the dog giving a justification, false or otherwise, to search.

Basically, drug dogs are an end-run around the 4th Amendment, which, as I said earlier, has effectively been repealed judicially.

updates viffer?

This is ridiculous that more than one of you have had to google your name and show the authorities your tourney results. What should the cash games players do? Tableratings lol?

Another interesting thing to remember is that any time you are traveling internationally, the US governement has the right to seize your laptop when you re-enter the country, and you have to give them all your passwords and information how to de-encrypt any files you have. They then either confiscate all your electronics or make a copy of your hard drive.

A lot of law firms or companies that do a lot of intellectual property work have stopped allowing their employees to fly into the united states with their actual laptops, and instead use blank workstations and VPN to their data.

I'm sort of surprised this hasn't happened to someone yet.

Are you serious? How are they suppose to know he's a poker player and not some drug trafficker? It's their job to question people like Viffer who travel excessively, have drug related charges and who for some unknown reason to them carry large sums of cash.

Sorry.
Welcome to rolled city
Population - you.

yeah ive heard of this, i read something on how to prevent it. maybe encrypt ur whole hd? idk

but im surprised noones gotten ****ed by this ridicolous rule

thats really really scary. they cant make u give up ftp and pstars passwords though can you? thats not a file or anything and theres nothing to de-encrypt or whatever. if they can though, thats really messed up. i hated international travel enough as it was, this isnt making me wanna leave the US any time soon.

If you encrypt it and don't give the password they will seize it. Many cases of this.

Buy a travel laptop that has nothing important on it. Wipe any details before you travel. This is what companies do.

they took your Rolex, that's ridiculous.
i could only imagine how many rich people this happens to, and how these guys are pocketing/splitting what they cinfiscate/steal from legitamate people.
sickening. not to mention, most these DEA/customs/airport workers are bitter because their lives are pathetic, and a 19 year old kid has more money than they've made in 10 years.