I have endured...
<rant>
...being treated like a criminal when entering the US for several years (fingerprints and pictures being taken, questions asked about things that are definitely within the sphere of privacy). Privacy is not protected in my experience; within 2 years I visited the US at two different ports of entry, and the questions I was asked at the second place were quite clearly related to something I had said earlier, at a different place -- meaning to me that clearly, a file on me has been created which can be accessed by US Customs and Immigration officials everywhere.
Under the laws of my country, that would be a felony: breach of the right to privacy. But no, the US step things up a notch: by now, you have to pay a fee to be processed into the country.
Older Germans (and any visitors) may well be reminded of the procedures involved with visiting the GDR before it disintegrated. Chances back then were that your personal statistics were filed (and accessed whenever you returned), and you had to pay a set amount of money per day for your visit (that was DEM 25/day compulsory exchange IIRC -- I remember a citizen joking that that was making the GDR the largest technology museum in the world, with a DEM 25/day entrance fee).
Now, who am I to compare the Land of the Fee (spelling intended) to that old, no-longer-existing soviet satellite state? The answer is that I am an honest person, who has been seriously mistreated by US C&I people, several times. When they got the go-ahead to confiscate (that's right, not just search but confiscate!) anything they fancy, from jockstraps all the way up to business notebooks, I quit going there. The problem being that the border hounds might impound my notebook -- and under US law, they are not required to give it back or to recompensate me, no matter what they don't find on it. There is a real worry attached to that thought: what if a border guard just simply fancies a piece of electronics, and therefore confiscates it, gets it "lost" in the procedures... and the tourist is left shy of electronics worth several hundred or even thousands of quid that may be part of his livelihood (like my notebook is to me)? There is no procedure available to stop that, or if there is (and I have tried to find one) I am unaware of it.
My personal reaction was to simply stop traveling to the US of A. It had become clear to me that they no longer want the money I used to spend there; rather the country has begun to entrench itself in a sort of new Iron Curtain.
And yes, I'm quite certain that this comment is going to be incorporated in my US C&I file. *shrug* I'm not going to go back there, anyhow. I hate being treated as a criminal just for wanting to spend my money somewhere.
</rant>