Heavily Redacted CBSA Laptop Search Documents Reveal Vague Rules for Anime as Child Pornography

The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association has published documents received from the Canadian Border Service Agency regarding the organization’s policy for searching laptops after filing a request for the documents under Canada’s Access to Information Act.

What was recieved was heavly redacted with whole sections removed and the salient points defining anime as child porn follow below:

• A later document notes another example: “Japanese Anime – most not child porn” (A-2009-01850-Vol6 on p. 13). It defines anime as child pornography when the characters are explicitly defined as children involved in sex acts and the characters lack breasts and pubic hair.

Now, if the CBSA states that most anime isn’t child porn, what are the titles that it considers as such so that I can make sure not to have them on me on the off chance that I happen to travel to Canada, taking into account what is already available in R1 and Japanese releases?

Without a published list, its pointless to have such a policy in place unless the intention is to allow subjective interpretation of the policy by Customs agents. That would then place a good majority of non-hentai anime in the child porn category, judging by the fixation on finding such material in the rest of the policy documentation.

While the documentation details anime in particular, there is no specific policy in place for manga and other types of publications, those falling under the more general policy for images:

So according to the above “cheat sheet”, if the above were applied to manga scanlations/scans, it would mean no loli/shota/straight shota manga doujins/images on your laptop, unless you run Linux, as their image scanning tool in ICWhatUC only works on Windows machines, scans for image files, including images in the web browser’s cache, image files with strange file extensions (like .doc instead of .jpg) and files in the recycle bin. Deleted files and files in archives do not show up.

Being able to have anime and manga on your laptop when travelling to Canada would be nice, so the best thing to do would be to dump the files in ZIP/RAR archives and run Linux before you leave while making sure you travel with luggage and not have visits to Southeast Asia, Germany, Spain and other areas known for child pornography on your passport, lest you be flagged for inspection.