Air America breaking news: "USA to fingerprint ALL visitors !!!"

"Chad Irby" wrote in message
om...
In article , nobody
wrote:

Brian wrote:
So how can we identify a person other than fingerprints? Passports,
DLs, and every other form of ID have been no problem to duplicate
for terrorists.

And just how will the usa verify your fingerprints ?

By comparing them to known terrorists. Pretty simple, really. They can
fake IDs (or get them issued "officially" from many countries), but it's
a bit harder to fake fingerprints.

If you're a foreigner who has never been to the USA, your
fingerprints will be "virgin".

Not so. We have a lot of records of known bad guys from other sources.

"Bad guys"? I now realise you are a teenager.

nobody wrote:

And just how will the usa verify your fingerprints ? If you're a foreigner who
has never been to the USA, your fingerprints will be "virgin". So terrorists
will now know that they can only travel once to the USA since on a second
attempt, they might be spotted.



A good point, unless one of the dozen or so uncoordinated US watch lists
happen to be updated with information from MI5, all of the eight British
citizens arrested on terror charges last week, with clean records, would
have gotten into the US with return tickets and reservations for Disney-
world.

gld

In rec.travel.usa-canada AJC wrote:

Having finger-prints taken for a driving licence? Maybe in Cuba, the
former DDR, or some other 'big brother' regime, but certainly not in
any free country. Finger-printing is for criminals.

So you must be familiar with the process.

Seriously, driver's licenses are used as ID in the US.

Try to think. Figure it out. Oh wait. Nex

On Sat, 3 Apr 2004 17:30:05 +0000 (UTC), Alan Pollock
wrote:

In rec.travel.usa-canada AJC wrote:

Having finger-prints taken for a driving licence? Maybe in Cuba, the
former DDR, or some other 'big brother' regime, but certainly not in
any free country. Finger-printing is for criminals.

So you must be familiar with the process.

Seriously, driver's licenses are used as ID in the US.


And your point is what? Driving licences are used as a form of
identification in many countries whose governments don't keep a
database of innocent citizens' fingerprints.

--==++AJC++==--

Alan Pollock wrote:
Seriously, driver's licenses are used as ID in the US.

You know, I am amazed at the transformation of the USA. In the past, the mere
mention of a national identity card would make the republicans rabid,
professing that such a card would infringe on the rights of freedom and
liberty (etc etc).

It is interesting that those very same people today are calling anyone who is
against the current regime's measures "unpatriotic" even those measures
actually do infronge on many of the basic principles of the USA (right to fair
trial, innocent until proven guilty etc).

While a citizen has some power over his government in case of abuses, a
visitor does not. So if the US regime misuses its own citizens information,
you can eventually boot them out (or even impeach them). But for travellers,
they have no such right.

This is especially true when a regime does not have modern data privacy laws
and can essentially do as it wishes with the personal data it collects.

Lets turn the tables around: lets say that the Taliban had required all
visitors to be fingerprinted and photographed when they visited Afghanistan.
Then, they would choose an american indentity at random and proceed to murder
some prominent person in the USA, making sure that they leave some innocent
person's fingerprints as well as wearing a mask making the real guilty person
look like the innocent.


That is why, if you are going to leave personal information with a government,
you must have trust that the government will not misuse that information. The
current USA regime has broken that trust because it has misused the information.

Look at the Jetblue personal information which had been meant to stay within
one department for study, but not only spread to other departments, but was
also handed over to some consulting firm that not only analysed the data but
also displayed privated information in their examples during a presentation at
a conference.

In nobody wrote:

That is why, if you are going to leave personal information with a
government, you must have trust that the government will not misuse that
information. The current USA regime has broken that trust because it has
misused the information.

As did the one before it, and the one before that, and the one before that
and ...

As will the one that follows it.

--
Bert Hyman St. Paul, MN

"Bert Hyman" wrote in message
...
In nobody wrote:

That is why, if you are going to leave personal information with a
government, you must have trust that the government will not misuse that
information. The current USA regime has broken that trust because it has
misused the information.

As did the one before it, and the one before that, and the one before that
and ...

As will the one that follows it.


I hope you are wrong or we will never be willing to return to the USA.

On Sat, 03 Apr 2004 15:48:59 -0400, nobody wrote:

Alan Pollock wrote:
Seriously, driver's licenses are used as ID in the US.

You know, I am amazed at the transformation of the USA. In the past, the mere
mention of a national identity card would make the republicans rabid,
professing that such a card would infringe on the rights of freedom and
liberty (etc etc).

It is interesting that those very same people today are calling anyone who is
against the current regime's measures "unpatriotic" even those measures
actually do infronge on many of the basic principles of the USA (right to fair
trial, innocent until proven guilty etc).


Patriotism can be a great force for good and bad. Throughout history
extremists on the left and the right have used it to their advantage.
--==++AJC++==--

On Sat, 03 Apr 2004 23:27:54 +0200, AJC wrote:

Patriotism can be a great force for good and bad. Throughout history
extremists on the left and the right have used it to their advantage.

Excitation of nationalist feelings is always bad. "Patriotism" is just a
convenient word to make it sound otherwise.

No matter what, it's an "us vs. them" thing.

"devil" wrote in message
news
On Sat, 03 Apr 2004 23:27:54 +0200, AJC wrote:

Patriotism can be a great force for good and bad. Throughout history
extremists on the left and the right have used it to their advantage.

Excitation of nationalist feelings is always bad. "Patriotism" is just a
convenient word to make it sound otherwise.

No matter what, it's an "us vs. them" thing.



The Frenc have a word for it: chauvinism. That is what we are seeing in the
USA now: "my leader right or wrong!"

ML