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Visiting the US? Forgot your passport? Try your iPad.

Is an iPad enough to get you across the US border? Martin Reisch says yes. Officials aren't so sure.

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A Canadian man says he used a photo of his passport, stored on his iPad, to cross the border into the US. Here, the Apple iPad 2.
  • By Matthew Shaer

Earlier this week, a surprising story began ricocheting around the Internet – a Canadian man named Martin Reisch had crossed from Canada into the United States using nothing more than his driver's license and a photo of his passport, which he had uploaded onto his Apple iPad.

No, there isn't an app for that. He simply had a digital image of his passport. 

According to Reisch, he had traveled from Quebec almost all the way to the Vermont border when he realized that he was missing his passport. But he did have a saved image of his passport, which he allegedly presented to a border control official. "He kind of gave me a stare, like neither impressed nor amused," Reisch told the Canadian Press. "He was very nice about it," Reisch added. 

Only hiccup: US officials say Reisch is not telling all of the truth. 

"The assertion that a traveler was admitted into the U.S. using solely a scanned image of his passport on an iPad is categorically false," a customs official told Wired today. "In this case, the individual had both a driver’s license and birth certificate, which the CBP officer used to determine identity and citizenship in order to admit the traveler into the country." 

Reisch, for his part, has battled back, maintaining that he did not have his birth certificate – only, as he originally said, his iPad and his driver's license.

Check Reisch's Twitter feed for more, and in the meantime, don’t forget to sign up for the weekly BizTech newsletter.

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