Originally Posted by bschaff1

From my personal experiences I have only been flagged once by customs and this was at LAX which is similar to the OP. First, i made it through immigration with no problems except the agent saying my passport was in poor shape and should be replaced, after grabbing my 2 bags i was going through the nothing to declare line and was directed over to the special screening line. When I got there I received the thorough bag search and a lot of questions about my work, where I visited, and what I went traveling for. The agent then asked me what was on my laptop and numerous memory cards and asked permission to search my laptop for pictures. Since I always make sure to take a clean laptop out of the country I said go ahead and the agent did a search for jpg files and found nothing of interest. Over the whole course of this the agent and I talked a bit and he explained how most likely I was simply flagged because I was a solo traveler coming back from Asia with no business reasons to be there. In addition, I should add in that the agent that did the search was professional and kept everything as neat as possible.