U.S. Customs Clears Chris Walla's Hard Drive
Customs rep: "We followed standard operating procedure...and when you start talking about...Guantánamo Bay, you get my ire up."

The saga of Death Cabbie Chris Walla's confiscated hard drive has taken another turn or sorts, one which leads toward something of a denouement.

As reported last week, U.S. Customs officials seized a hard drive containing music files belonging to Walla when a studio employee attempted to take them across the border last month, from Canada into the U.S., near Blaine, Washington. Walla, understandably upset, vented both to MTV.com and on his website just last week. The news spread and was embellished upon-- Did Homeland Security Take Walla's Hard Drive Because of the Political Songs Contained Therein??-- and now, Customs has stepped forward with their side of the story.

Speaking with MTV.com, U.S. Customs and Border Protection rep Mike Milne expressed bewilderment and "ire" at the chain of events that followed from what Milne calls a "standard operating procedure." Said Milne:

"I want to point out very emphatically that the U.S. government, this administration, the Department of Homeland Security and specifically [USCBP] does not censor musical content coming into the United States. Period. That's not the reason this hard drive was kept.

"We followed standard operating procedure...and when you start talking about...Guantánamo Bay [as Walla did in his blog post], you get my ire up. I go on Google News, and I see 125 different news stories out there with the headline 'Homeland Security Seizes Musician's Music', and it strikes me as unfair. And I will be spending the rest of the day trying to contact those people-- The Associated Press, the record company [Barsuk], and Mr. Walla-- to ask them if they can set the record straight."

Milne went on to claim that Walla's drive was taken simply because it was "commercial merchandise" brought to the wrong crossing station without proper documentation.

It also seems Customs has already attempted to contact the person from whom the drive was taken-- Hippowest studio engineer Brandon Brown-- on three occasions to say that the drive was cleared and is available to pick up. Speaking to MTV.com, Brown denied this. "Obviously, I would've gotten the drive if I would've heard from them," he said.

None of this has hampered Walla much. Since tapes sent across the border along with the hard drive made it through, Walla received his music and is still scheduled to release his solo album, Field Manual, through Barsuk on January 29.

Barsuk's Josh Rosenfeld, meanwhile, admits to being "naive" about border crossing procedures (he had originally furnished Brown with a note explaining the transport situation to Customs), but he doesn't completely buy the "commercial merchandise" bit. At the same time, he doesn't feel the confiscation was politically motivated, for obvious reasons. "They had no means of listening to the music on the drive at the time they confiscated it," he told MTV.com.

"[But] it seems like a funny coincidence. I mean, a hard drive containing data, and if it was confiscated for commercial reasons, why would they let him leave with the tapes? There's something that doesn't make sense about the whole concept of it being confiscated for commercial reasons."

Still, Rosenfeld isn't too concerned about the hard drive at this point, and he's grateful for all the press (ha, whoops) that's come out of this. "It'd be nice if we could get the drive back, but the data is already back in the United States. So in some way, it doesn't really matter. The whole thing ranks somewhere on the continuum between questionable and clueless to me."