Here’s a story of how you do get tagged and tracked and attract special attention at international borders:

In 2007, Zedushka and I visited the Russian Federation and spent 3 weeks in Moscow visiting our son. Our other son took a flight from JFK and together we flew from Amsterdam to Moscow. On the way back, we parted in Amsterdam, he flew to New York and we flew to Detroit.

Going through customs in Detroit, we were asked “where is the 3rd member of your party?”

Those bright shiny holographic Russian Federation visas always caught the eye of TSA even on domestic flights, until we got new passports in 2009.

Last year we visited Israel. My daughter asked me to take $9,000 of her life’s savings and deposit it into her U.S. bank account. Security in Amsterdam spotted the wad of cash in my laptop case and notified authorities in Detroit. At DTW customs they ordered me to empty the laptop case and count out all the cash, including all the leftover euros that we had (the shekels they did not care about). It came out to < $10,000 which is the amount you are legally allowed to bring back without declaring.

After that we got flagged as “potential money launderers,” so that the last time we returned from a weekend visit to Canada we were asked how much cash we had.