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U.S. Begins Digital Fingerprinting In Airports
lemist writes "Cross Match has rolled out digital fingerprinting at major airports in the United States according to MSNBC. It's designed to increase border security. They appear to be using Cross Match's Verifier 300 LC. Note that the actual capture of the fingerprint requires no interaction with the device. It determines when the image quality is excellent and grabs it."
GNAA / Google confirms: Linux is dying.
By GNAA Staff
Here you have it: it's official; Google confirms: Desktop Linux is dying.
Now, you might be thinking this is just another cut & paste troll based on the typical *BSD is dying bullshit.
It isn't.
As you might have know, your favorite search engine, Google, has been running a little statistics service, called "Zeitgeist".
Since about a year ago, they started providing statistics of the operating systems used to access their search engine worldwide.
I will let the numbers speak for themselves:
Operating Systems Accessing Google in January 2002
Operating Systems Accessing Google in March 2002
Operating Systems Accessing Google in April 2002
Operating Systems Accessing Google in May 2002
Operating Systems Accessing Google in June 2002
Operating Systems Accessing Google in July 2002
Operating Systems Accessing Google in August 2002
Operating Systems Accessing Google in September 2002
Operating Systems Accessing Google in November 2002
Operating Systems Accessing Google in December 2002
Operating Systems Accessing Google in January 2003
Operating Systems Accessing Google in February 2003
Operating Systems Accessing Google in April 2003
Operating Systems Accessing Google in May 2003
Operating Systems Accessing Google in June 2003
Operating Systems Accessing Google in July 2003
Operating Systems Accessing Google in August 2003
Operating Systems Accessing Google in September 2003
Operating Systems Accessing Google in November 2003
If you've looked at even a few of these links, you don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Desktop Linux's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Desktop Linux faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Linux on Desktop because Linux is dying. Things are looking very bad for Linux on Desktop. As many of us are already aware, Linux on Desktop continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
According to Google Zeitgeist, there are about 80% of Internet Explorer 6 users. The only platform supporting Internet Explorer 6 is, of course, Microsoft Windows. These statistics are consistent with the earlier presented graphs of the operating systems used to access Google, with the Windows family consistently taking the top 3 ranks. Out of remaining 20%, the split is even between MSIE 5.5, MSIE 5.0, both Windows-only browsers. Netscape 5.x
or not...
what? we shouldent even try to do anything to protect ourselves? yes it's invasive, yes it tacks on an additional 15 seconds, no we don't care if you don't like it. Who do we expect to protect our boarders for us? Canada? .. oh wait..
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
first post
And they'll know we are Muslims by our lopped off fingertips.
I have been pwned because my
Wil Wheaton made a blog entry a few hours ago about digital fingerprinting and piracy concerns. Definitely worth a read.
28 countries are exempt from this testing including a lot of western european countries where the Sept 11th terrorists moved around with impunity. This fingerprinting scheme aint going to fix anything.
Welcome to gattaca !
Don't be mad when I offer the middle one.
I don't think this is a problem. I see how some people think this might be an invasion of privacy, and hey, if they put this thing in random public places, especially without letting us know, yes I'd be upset. But this is in AIRPORTS. You're required to check in before you ever get on the plane anyway. I think it's just another means of making sure that people who are on these planes really are who they say they are. That can't be a bad thing.
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
So they have my fingerprint... Are they taking names and other info, or are they just going to have a database full of 5 billion fingerprint entries, but no names?
Anal probes ?????
doh
Now, all we need to do is to have terrorists send us in a copy of their finger prints so we can keep em on file.
about a bunch of fucking niggers being treated like animals
(Too bad clones don't have identical fingerprints, and Raelian cloning methods still seem to be a bit .. umm .. fake? Besides, as the original, I'd be far more evil than any cheap knock-off!)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
It would be nice if a good fingerprint reader could be made cheap enough to use it for things like unlocking doors and starting cars. Wouldn't need to carry so many keys around. Should be simpler for these kinds of applications since it would only have to match against a very small local database of prints.
Are an incredibly easy way for the government to assassinate people. The skin there is exceptionally thin and perfect for micro-injection of virii or other agents. Plus they can be sure they got the right person. Goodbye privacy, hello death. It's the American way.
As seen on numerous billboards across the country, I had to bring this slogan here to slashdot.
Please read Orwell and maybe a history book about Germany in 1933-1945 and please don't block similarities off your mind by thinking "Nah! That can't happen here, we're a democracy!" - This democracy is rapidly declining and too many bury their head in the sand...
... here in Brazil we still use the only fool-proof method: Ink and paper!
;)
And BTW... I agree with the "reciprocy" we are giving to the americans
All they have to do is walk across the damn borders (north or south).
Or is everyone just assuming it, and not needing the labels? http://www.politechbot.com/p-04973.html
I've not one problem with improving security, as long as the improvements really are and work.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Nice move, eh?
"Money or your live!" they say.
"All my money is locked in the bank with my PIN and fingerprint!"
"TELL ME YOUR PIN OR I'LL SHOOT YOUR DAUGHTER!"
"1234!"
"Good. NOW YOUR FINGER PLEASE!"
*chopchopchop* -
There ya go...
Supposedly, (supposedly) DoD was looking into this as a replacement for military dogtags, and the BOP (Bureau of Prisons) was supposedly looking into it. Now sounds far fetched but according to the companies press releases: September 29, 2003 - Applied Digital Solutions, Inc. (Nasdaq: ADSX), an advanced technology development company, today announced that its wholly owned subsidiary, VeriChip Corporation, has retained the services of Stanley "Stan" L. Reid, a longtime technology industry executive and former congressional aide with extensive experience and wide contacts in Washington, D.C., to market VeriChip(TM) secure identification solutions to federal agencies.
...
Since 1996, Mr. Reid has served as president of Strategic Sciences, a Washington, D.C.-area consulting firm that specializes in marketing advanced technologies to the federal government. Mr. Reid has particular expertise in selling new, introductory technologies to government agencies, including the Departments of Defense (DoD), Energy (DoE) and State, as well as the agencies that have been incorporated into the Department of Homeland Security. (source)
Just think if they decided to do away with Social Security, or made this a standard for newer borns a-la vaccinations... Oh well that's why I'm glad I support the war on terror
MoFscker
Please excuse our xenophobic and jingoistic tendancies. Ya'll have a nice day now!
-psy
The Department of Homeland Security put out a PDF leaflet about the program, which contained their normal, almost incomprehensible pictograms like those on ready.gov
I thought they needed some better, and funnier, subtitles.
On one hand, this shouldn't affect anyone's privacy at all, because all travel information to foreing countries (or even domestic travel for that matter) is already a matter of record. As long as you are who you say you are, I don't see how this affects anyone not trying to travel under an alias.
On the other hand, particularly since 28 countries are exempt, I don't see how this will be very effective at stopping undesirables from getting into the country.
The libertarian in me founds this whole thing distasteful though, but in an imperfect world this is a rather small infringement on my rights and I suppose on the balance it is worth the inconvenience.
Well the US Govt has a stance of trust nobody, my question is whats going to stop a guy with three suitcases full of plastic explosives walking into an Airport and making a crater out of it. Fingerprints arent gonna help much then. All these security measures are just put in place to make the people feel safe, however a plane could come from a foreign country which doesnt have or cant afford to implement this technology. Osama is still to be caught, intelligence has done nothing, and you dont hear of any new breaks in locating him. All we see is his head on Al Jazeera threatening to eradicate the infidels. When Sept 11 occured, no one knew who these guys were, they could have been on the plane just as easily with the fingerprint technology implemented then. The real threat is knowing who your enemy is. All we have is one face, we dont have his many followers. This could just lead to a witch hunt of massive proportions
Brazil I guess is making every American do a fingerprint test to get into the country as a response to what the story is about. I found it pretty funny..
Oh my God. This was on CNN 4 days ago & just now showed up on slashdot? What is this? A slow news day?
With that kid in Iraq whose arms got blown off during the war....toe prints ????
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
We got ours taken at the American Embassy in Israel when we were there a few weeks ago (were there to get a new visa stamp).
Anyone 14 or over is required to have their prints taken, and chcked every time they enter the US.
The article is right; it really didn't take that much longer than usual. As long as it doesn't slow the already crappy process to go through at 5 AM after a 12 hour flight, it doesn't really bother me.
Dehomag (the German branch of Hollerith - the ancestor of IBM) got its start assisting the Germans with a similar effort - using computing technology (punched cards) to track all kinds of things in the interest of security, efficiency, and thoroughness. They got their start automating the census, and wound up empowering governments with then unheard of levels of efficiency in attaining many of their goals, despite the changing nature of those goals.
Again we are seeing a watershed moment in the efficiency, security and thoroughness of states ability to enforce their policies. Lets hope that this time the population will gain a proportional increase in control over the agenda of the state.
The alternative will be no less than a repetition of history.
16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
17 and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
Who do we expect to protect our boarders for us? Canada?
Uh, no you shouldn't expect Canada to protect your borders for you, and the moral implication repeated constantly (such as your pathetic little sheep-like "oh wait") that we should is absolutely ludicrous. As a Canadian, I personally have no problem with the US crawling down into the basement, curling up into the fetal position and sucking its thumb -- It is your country, and as a visitor people simply have to accept each country's sovereign right to self-protection. Of course this measure would have done absolutely nothing to prevent 9/11, nor does it do anything to affect the hundreds of sleeper cells in the US, nor does it do anything but provide the illusion of safety for the ignorant (such as yourself). Of course this is from the same administration that is so bloody uninventive and unoriginal that they can only imagine that terrorist could only possibly conceive of hijacking airliners and smashing them into buildings -- until the terrorists put toxins in the water supply, at which point they'll then imagine that the world's terrorists are perpetually focused on putting toxins in water supplies...rinse and repeat.
Having said that, it is fascinating, though -- The United States currently hosts some 8 to 11 MILLION illegal aliens. The United States has rampant illegal weapons and drug trade. The United States Southern border has a guesstimated 6,000, uncaught, illegals crossing it every single day. Yeah, keep up the Canada jokes...You and Hillary Clinton can keep up the charade that we're the source of your security ills.
Were the September 11 hijackers travelling under false passports? I was under the impression that they were not. If this system had already been in place in 2001, would the outcome have been any different?
Is accurate knowledge about who is entering the USA through airports really a significant problem for those trying to predict and prevent future terrorism incidents? I would have expected that a greater problem was knowing the intentions and tracking the actual actions of individuals.
If this system works perfectly, surely people with terrorist intentions will know it, and simply not enter the USA legally? It's not as if the USA's borders are impregnable - there are large numbers of people managing to enter without passports or visas. It's like carefully putting a lid on the bucket to make sure you don't spill any water, but ignoring the leak-hole at the bottom of the bucket.
... and once we all get used to this, I wonder how long it will be before they want to fingerprint ALL airline passangers. Many might say I am paranoid, but I have always been worried about "having control" of my fingerprints -- yeah, yeah, I realize I leave them behind everywhere, but there's something scary to me about the government having them. Just too bad that they don't have some kind of device that I could be reasonably sure would check my fingerprints against the known criminals and then DISCARD them -- I'd feel much better if I knew that they weren't keeping a permenant record of them for possible future use who-knows-when and who-knows-how. And, please, don't give me the age old line of "If you've done nothing wrong, what are you afraid of?" Some of us just like privacy (and respect it in others) for the sake of it.
I say bullshit.
Anyone who is ready to give their life in order to kill as many Americans as they can will have a backup plan. There are many ways into the country. And who checks the accuracy of the info the first time through?
Besides, this is an excellent example of treating the symptoms and not the cause.
I really think if we had a foreign policy that didn't run the equivalent of a rape-and-pillage mission every 6 months, we could forgo the whole war on terrorism.
Of course, it would be hard to powergrab and make billions of $$$ if that was the case.
Good ol' Tom Ridge was interviewed on the Tonight Show a while back. He said that the WOT would never end. I think he meant the War on Peace.
I am far more terrrified of our 'elected' officials than any AK toting zealot.
Will we have to start making Xerox copies of our asses to ride the subway?
everyone is looking at the screen, not the finger...
Time to break out the gummy bears
This post patent pending.
What happens if someone was wearing gloves?
this is supposed to make america safer?
right
more please and maybe those xenophobic Americans will like getting treated like the criminals they are
good luck , 191 countries are applauding you
I am in a country expempt from fingerprinting (Canada), but because of this I will not vacation in or visit America. The US government has wanted to restrict Canadians in the past, and will find a way in the future.
European vacations are only a little more expensive than American ones, in the future I will visit Europe. If they want to go out of their way to make me feel unwelcome, why should I visit?
It's official! The U.S. is now a police state. It bad enough your government violates your civil rights, but it's something else when they do it to foreigners, who didn't even have the opportunity to vote in a *cough* rigged *cough* U.S. election.
I don't know how people can justify allowing themselves to be treated like criminals, just because it "speeds things up". The fact that that people have sold their liberty to be processed a few minutes faster is unconscionable. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. By contrast the price of sloth and fear seems to have become living in tyranny.
I don't buy this nonesense that fingerprinting and photographing people is going to save the U.S. from terrorists. Does a suicide bomber care if his picture or prints are on file? This is being done purely to feed Americans' fear of terrorists and simultaneously to make them feel safer, at the expense of those who can't vote in the U.S.
The Bush Adminstration has assured itself of losing votes in states that depend heavily on tourism. It has also done more to damage the U.S. economy as a whole. Moreover, it will become a diplomatic disaster, as Brazil will now start fingerprinting American visitors. How is this help any trade talks involving banned U.S. beef?
The U.S. is a scary place right now, with Ashcroft and the other lunatics in the Justice and Homeland Security departments prepared to stop at nothing short of having surveillance cameras installed in every room in every home in America.
This sounds like a place to rub a little anthrax.. well except for the fact that it would be targeting non-US citizens.
Seriously though, how many people will touch this same couple of cm of space within the same day, one right after another. I hope they have considered a way to keep this surface sterile - perhaps a UV backlight or something. Otherwise this sounds like an international virus hub.
ôó
Digital fingerprints? That's redundant. Fingers are also called digits.
How ya like dat?
... at Miami International. I just got back from winter break back home in Panama. The actual process is quite simple and none of the people I saw going through it seemed to have any problem with it, pretty much everyone seems to accept it as one more thing the US is doing in its effort to 'protect' itself.
It's almost business as usual at the airport, customs officers just have two new toys: the fingerprint scanner and a webcam. The added hassle is less than 20 seconds. Left index, right index, look at the camera, done.
Do I think it's a Good Thing? Not really, do I mind? Not really, after all, I'm not a terrorist!
Push the envelope. Watch it bend. -Tool
instead of spending my money in a country which once was called 'land of the free'. Now free to violate international law.
I think you voted for the wrong people last time.
IIRC They were travelling under valid documentation.
Knowing who is on the plane or in the country would not have prevented September 11. They didn't know who was going to hijack a plane.
The scary part is focusing on foreigners isn't going to solve the problems. They end up harassing innocent people, and causing lots of bad will, but doesn't make it safer for anyone.
I can think of a few recent issues that really shocked & upset the US.
9/11
Columbine
Unabomber
Oklahoma city
The Sniper
Hmm, looks like picking on foreigners might not be the most effective way to decrease terrorism.
If you are travelling from a country that participates in a visa waiver program (e.g. Australia), you don't need to get your finger print checked. This is on the assumption that such countries will have biometric information recorded in the passport by October of this year. I'm guessing this means any Australian travelling to the US for less that 90 days that doesn't want to have to apply for a visa will need to replace their current passport (probably at considerable expense).
Between now and October, however, a traveller with a passport from a visa waiver qualifying country can get in without ever being finger-printed. The message from the US government could not be clearer: if you are going to commit acts of terrorism, don't tell us you are going to stay longer that 90 days when you first enter the country, and please make sure you do this before the next Federal election.
Ok, let me get this straight. This fingerprint/photo will NOT BE applicable to countries that have visa exemptions (read most of European countries). So another words, those traveler doesn't require this security measure if they can show a passport that they came from an examped country.
Uhm haven't 9/11 prove that terrorists actually got some brains? How hard is to to fake an examped country's passport and enter US from that country? During WW2, the fake docs produced by the concentration presoners were so good that it even fooled the Nazies. If those presoners can do it what are the chances that those terrorists could do it too?
This is just nuts, havn't those law makers got any sense of logic at all?
If you are going to do this, SCAN EVERYONE! NO EXCEPTIONS! It looks like 9/11 terrorists also achived something they never considered besides causing havoc. They have actually cause US congress to pass laws that have no logic. I am sure those 9/11 terrorists are laughing with the virgins they were supposed to get when they went to hell.
I'm going to blow up a piece of it.
Wtf is wrong with you people whining about govt keeping track of your fingerprint and even dna.. you think they want to clone your sorry asses? Yeah just what we need..
Seriously, if you have issues with the government trying to protect its citizens then piss off and move to another country where they just cut off your fucking fingers and keep THAT on file..
I'm tired of seeing all of these critics who slam every protective measure put into place without suggesting a viable alternative..
If it were up to YOU people (you know who you are) we'd open our borders wide and slap targets on our backs..
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
A fingerprint is just a fingerprint. It is, essentialy, just a fact with no meaning. The fingerprint itself holds no information about who the fingerprint belongs to, it's just a token.
DNA on the other hand holds a load of information in and of itself.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Back in my day, we had analog fingerprints, and we liked it. We used the stand by the fingerprint counter for hours just to look at them. I still prefer the analog version -- they are just richer and more mellow, y'know?
Tell that to the youth nowadays and they just won't believe you. Kids.
What's to prevent the bad guys from putting a bit of rubber with a bogus fingerprint embedded in it to get around this?
:-)
If it's thin enough, a temperature test [and possibly pulse detection] could be fooled.
Maybe they should also scrub your fingertips with steel wool to make sure it's the real print...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
This is crazy. Next thing you know they will be forcing all visitors to our free land to be finger printed and mug shots taken.
Foreigners pre-guilty until checked into Guantanamo Bay.
With the state of the US, I can't even make up a funny slippery slope, cause we are already at the bottom of the hill.
Well considering they match it up with the fingerprint in the passport that was put there at a consolate, I would say the US has AS MUCH information as the country from which they're traveling.
In short, this proves that the people coming into the country are the ones that went to the consolate. Unless we're invoking well forged documents. Which is fine, because that's difficult and expensive, and another opportunity for the terrorists to make a mistake without the good guys having to pay for it. Add RFIDs into future passports, you've got speedy customs + hard to forge documentation. With major inconvienences for a few where the system (which is very trusted) fails.
And as for the privacy. FUCK THE FOREIGNERS. If they don't like it, STAY THE FUCK HOME. Or go to Florida and get murdered. Either way, I'm fine with it. Just shut the fuck up.
Does anyone sell a product for removal of ones fingerprints from ones fingers?
never mind my normal looking body, I will be subject to the same treatment as pickpockets and lewd drunkards and prostitutes - being finger printed. Now, why arent Europeans being treated the same? The simplest answer is they are white caucasians and the rest of the world is not. I dont care for the privacy implications of it, but the ethnic and sectarian implications are just blatantly obvious - people from certain parts of the world are "normal" and the rest are just animals that need to be branded on their hind side. I would never have set foot in the US, had I know that even a straight forward honest person will be treated like a crook - albeit on his way out.
Way to go America! The land of the free and the the fingerprinting brave...
This is just another step. There are any number of other situations where you're required to present fingerprints and other information for background checks as a condition of employment. Need a security clearance? Want to be an elementary school teacher? A daycare provider? A warehouse employee where explosive materials are stored?
They take your fingerprints, and do what with them after the background investigation is complete? File 13? I think not. It goes into your "permanent record", and I ain't talking about the one that the high school administrators threatened you with.
Once you release the information to the gub'ment, you can't take it back. There are many seemingly innocent "checks" that will funnel the information into places you really don't need it to go. My fingerprints are on file with the gub'ment because of a job application that required a clearance. Ultimately I didn't take the job, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm "accounted for" to the same degree as someone who's been arrested. I didn't realize how disturbing it would be until after the fact.
There's only one major difference between Facist dictatorships and Communist dictatorships -- does the government own and control all industry (Communist) or is it controlled by a few private citizens who are close friends with the administration (Facist)? The methods of control and the usurping of democracy work the same no matter what econmics lie behind your totalitarian system whether we arrive there through bloody revolution like the Soviets or warmongering, security obsession like the Nazis.
(Yeah, yeah, f--- Godwin's Law. Remove the racist purges and replace zealous worship with apathetic inaction by the masses and you've got a good model of where we could be going if Bush were honestly an evil man instead of being mostly misguided. Read German history. The parallels are terrifying, and yet reassuring in that we did not step off that chasm that presented itself so many times.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
This is so damn amusing considering a new star was found 50 million times brighter than our own sun & broke the laws of physics today. Yet this was a refused story. See space.com to see real news for today. Read slashdot for this crap.
Someone won't visit because they don't like your parents' houserules. waaaaaah waaaaah
Disclaimer: This is not my work, I got it in an email and thought it was relevant to "president" Bush's Homeland policy building:
Consider the following, it's an old tactic: Adolf Hitler presided over a major national disaster (the burning of the Reichstag, the national parliament building) which he was discovered later to have participated in creating. That event gave him the opportunity to declare an emergency and expand his dictatorial powers further. He used the war-terminology "homeland" often, and whipped up fervent patriotism to support his wars. He used war as a means to distract people from domestic troubles and issues, kept the population of the country in constant fear, and exploited that fear for his own purposes. Hitler said in his writings that if you cannot create war then at least continue to propagate the idea that war is coming. -- R. E. Bell
"Never leave people in peace, because when they are in peace, you are nobody. Then they don't need you; your very purpose is gone. They need you only when there is danger; so create danger. If there is not real danger, at least create the climate of a false danger." -- Adolf Hitler
Important info:
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
http://dieoff.org/synopsis.htm
http://www.peakoil.net
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm afraid you've set off the terrorist alert sensors. Run while you still can.
Meh.
I think I'll head over to Kuro5hin to find out why this is a great thing for our country
Want to let the terrorists win? Just get Osama's estranged cousin (who has honorary US citizenship) to blow up a bus in downtown Chicago.
You can bet that's when Big Daddy will require all citizens to carry intra-state passports (thanks to the interstate commerce clause) with all the requisite retinal/fingerprint data he could ever want in order to track your scrawny buttocks.
Yeah, right.
No one from Brazil can go to the US directly, and visa versa. Works for me.
Or we can have someone blow up some important national landmark and murder 3000 people and see how seriously Brazilians take not only their national security of their country, but that of others as well.
If no Brazillians ever came to the US, no one here would miss them. I assume the same is mostly true of the US citizens visiting Brazil. Good riddance.
OMG, you're right! Well, we might as well do nothing then, rather than take incremental steps to make things that much harder for people to slip through. After all, you wouldn't design a computer network with more than one level of security, why try to protect your borders that way?
If you re-read my post you'll see there are TWO parts to what I was saying. The first is that the system will not catch 100% of terrorists. In fact if some nerd like myself can see a flaw within 5 minutes, I'm sure that the actual effectiveness with be considerably less than 100%.
The second part of my post is prefaced with the words "On a related note" meaning that you are supposed to consider this in conjunction with the first point. The second point is that there WILL be false positives. Some innocents are going to get labeled as terrorists. And that's not too much fun for whoever gets the unlucky draw.
This pervasive "well, it's better than nothing!" mindset that I see so much of these days regarding our counter-terror efforts really spooks me. It sounds as though you're perfectly happy to disregard all those false positives as no big deal or, perhaps, an acceptable cost for some feeling of safety. In designing a system, an engineer will look carefully at the trade off of Pcc (probability of correct classification) versus Pfa (false alarms). Then it comes down to a judgement call, of course. What tradeoff are you willing to live with. The purpose of my original post was to ask if anyone has any feeling for what those numbers are! If we don't, then we're just doing a bunch of bullshit to make ourselves feel good.
And, personally, I won't be feeling too good about sending innocent people to Gitmo.
GMD
watch this
Just charge Americans extra airport tax!
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Where, oh where have all our (and foreigners) rights gone?
Now the US will be safe! No more anthrax letters, no more Oklahoma city bombings, no more highway snipers!
This will end all terrorism! Whoopdeedoo!
You can't take the sky from me...
...in a world where you can bypass a "high-tech" CD copy protection scheme with a magic marker, how long is it going to take people to find a way around this? Or inversely, how long is it going to take for mismatches to be made?
What the article fails to mention is the most important aspect of the new database: the Terrorist Boolean.
As the above biometrics only help to ascertain that you are you, it was felt an added feature to easily separate the terrorists from the regular population was necessary.
As such, as part of the interviewing process there will be an "Are you a Terrorist?" question. When the traveler responds the Terrorist Boolean is set accordingly.
The boolean may also be set at anytime by authorized representatives of the US Gov't such as the RIAA, and MPAA. In addition undercover officers looking for any Anti-American expressions or beliefs - including privacy advocates, anti-war activists, free software advocates, alternative energy supporters, and anyone generally disagreeing with the supreme-leader-of-free-nations, George W Bush.
(in case you missed it, my point is that biometrics of any sort mearly help confirm that you are who you claim to be - not what you might decide to do. The 911 hijackers came into the US, or were already living in the US, under their real name with valid papers. How would this new system help THAT?)
Blockwars: free multiplayer game
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
first: I can slap on elvis's fingerprints and go through customs. Then what?
second: Before this, you could change your name, get a new passport and enter the country with no one the wiser. Now what?
third: Imagine your itinerary says you'll be leaving from airport x on day y, but your fingerprints show up at airport z on day w. A note goes into your file for irregular movements.
The problem isn't that they have a name, its that they have it all digitized along with a fingerprint, which is a very firm identifier. Now you and your movements can be tied together closely. Whats to keep them from requiring foreigners to give up their finger prints to rent cars, planes, boats, hotel rooms and so on.
The EU has very strong privacy laws and they're being bastardized for the sake of the United States of America and their 'security' arrangements, which everyone generally recognizes as a dog and pony show so that people will feel better about travel. This, unlike most arrangements, actually has some real value to it, but like most *good* ideas it has to be invasive. oh well.
You got that gem in an email?!
What impeccable sources you have!
Next you'll be finding the quatrains of Nostradamus that predicted 9/11/01.
I especially liked the "way" you "cleverly" put "scare" quotes around the word President.
You blathering idiot.
If you're a victim of identity theft, you'll need to get that finger cut off.
Chip H.
"No, I'm *not* a member of the Yakuza."
how funny is this article that unwillingly proves the inefficiency of that measure.
After a short presentation, we have the list of countries that are exempted from having their tourists and/or workers scanned. Which countries are these ? Europe, Japan, Australia. I can understand for the two latters, but if September 11th proved something, it's that terrorist networks are deep-rooted in Western societies, especially Europe and the US. So, guys, you still have until October to make a great deal of this measure.
Plus a nice snippet in this paragraph : The travel data are supposed to be securely stored. Oh, Yeah.
The funniest thing is that people do believe in that kind of crap. They think it will make their country more secure. They think that preventing a crime or other legal issues -(Oh, Yeah)- charged person will prevent them from having some other non-beared people bombing towers with suicide planes. Or maybe it's the governement that initially thinks it will make the people more confident. Until the next time. But for now it's working. Psychological assault, well done.
Apart from that, there are remarks to make on a more general scale :
Again, I'm not trying to depict a black and white landscape. It's not the Arabs versus the Americans. But indeed it has some things to do with the global relationship of the West with them. Think about it ; we've been playing the geopolitic bastards with them for more than a century now. How may they feel ?
Regards,
jdif
Reminder : I'm not Arab :)
Let's overcome our weakness.
But there's one group you'll definately start keeping out, and that's tourists. Why risk having your flight cancelled or getting turned around at the airport from a false fingerprint reading when you can just go somewhere else? It'd be interesting to look at the numbers of say, Canadian vs US ski resort visitors over the next few years.
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Condoleeza Rice is Hitler!
Donald Rumsfeld is Hitler!
Tom Ridge is Hitler!
Dick Cheney is Hitler!
Colin Powell is Hitler!
Arnold Schwarzenegger is Hitler!
Carl Rove is Hitler!
The NRA is Hitler!
The Boy Scouts of America is Hitler!
Everybody is Hitler, except for that guy over there with the mustache who was putting people into the woodchipper! He's not Hitler.
Have any of you actually been through customs as of late. Jesus now its going to take a full 2 days to get through god damn atlanta >_
I think its a hilarious move, after all, what is good for the goose is good for the gander. Lets see France, Russia, China, N. Korea, random Middle Eastern Countries and others reciprocate the U.S. of A's security arrangements. It doesn't even have to be a terribly efficient or practical finger printing system, the mere presence will annoy the State Dept.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
When you get offered five fingers wrapped in a latex glove in return!
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I see nothing wrong with ID-ing visitors from other countries at this point. After all, in the US, we are in a state of war. And until that changes, there will continue to be clampdowns in the name of security.
Does anyone remember the ColdWar? I remember hearing about those "Duck and Cover" videos children had to practice for in an event of nuclear war. Yet, I don't hear anyone bitching about that.
Life is not for the lazy.
All this extra security at airports, then add in the health-screening if SARS gets loose from China again. (One new case found) In that case, everyone might as well stay home.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Why US corporations managed US president and turned its attention to Iraq, after having failed to find ex-CIA agent Osama Bin Laden in Afeghanistan..?
:-)
The writer Salman Rushidie was told by the British secret service not to fly to New York at Sep. 11, 2001. Why..? British are the best SS of the world and CIA just sucks..?
It's impossible for four planes to leave their flight paths for 90 minutes without being intercepted. Why the US Air Force attacked just one airplane..? It crashed in rural Pennsylvania.
A bomb truck attacked Pentagon and they said that was a hijacked plane.. why..? That hole at Pentagon wall was so small that you can't put the airplane wings inside it.. and were is that video...
The tragic events of 11th sep 01 were to play a pivotal role in the presidency of G W Bush who, almost overnight, was transformed from a president with a dubious mandate into a national hero.
US terrorists, leave your fingerprints at our country, too.
Please note that this is an incident that happened in Japan and not the U.S. However, it doesn't quite seem like that long of a shot.
A friend of mine (American citizen) living in Japan had been in the U.S. to visit family during the holiday season. On his way back to Japan, he had a number of gifts and personal items, including a few porn DVDs. In Japan, for some strange reason, porn is OK, but all pubic regions need to have mosaic or other methods applied so that you can see them. Weird, but true.
So my friend's collection of American Porn (actually, it was non-mosaic Japanese porn sold in the U.S.) was considered contraband. He was smuggling porn into the country.
They took him aside to a small room, where all of his luggage was searched for other contraband items such as drugs. They also strip-searched him. And... yes, you saw this coming, they performed an anal proble to make sure he wasn't hiding anything up his rear side.
Anal probes to search for hidden porn!! Is that twisted or what? But the point is, your joke isn't that far-off.
I want to know whose products they are using to do the one-to-many match on the backend. How much hardware do they need for an "instantaneous" match? How big is the database? Are they keeping fingerprints that don't show up in the DB or discarding them? All these would be more interesting to me than what box they use to initially capture the prints. Perhaps someone from Cross Match submitted the article? The article itself doesn't mention Cross Match at all.
Lasers Controlled Games!
This seems raciest IMHO. Why are almost all the countries on the list white-European?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is any of this digial information being tied back to demographics? I don't see how a two finger biometric and a facial image are going to do much good if no other information is being collected. Are they scanning the visas and associating the biometric data to the scanned visa data? It certainly sounds like these "biometric stations" are just harvesting biometrics and not actually performing searches against an AFIS.
or others in the US administration should get fingerprinted when they visit brazil.. roflmao...
hahahahahahahahhaha
that wud be so funny!
"welcome mr.president... please your fingers tightly against the ink pad and press then press them on to this paper- right here. You may wash your hands now"
hahahah
As long as the borders with Mexico remain open to millions of illegal immigrants welcomed in by big business (GOP) to drive down wages as well as welfare pimps (democrats) for votes, this whole fingerprinting and homeland security nazi bullshit is a fucking JOKE.
Here's a tidbit from yours truly, a bonafide illegal alien. I'm not exactly an illegal alien, but somewhere between today and one fine day 15 years ago when I first submitted my green card application (still pending), there exists no doubt one or two technical violations the INS could dig up that would render me "out of status" (read "I can be shipped out tomorrow in handcuffs along with the latest batch of men with more complexions more swarthy than my own).
I mention the above not for sympathy but to offer some perspective. During the last 2-1/2 years (when I started counting), not only have I re-submitted previously-submitted documents (big pile of paper with a fee payable each time), but also I have been fingerprinted 5 times. "Five!" you say? Yes indeedy. Seems the INS has become more and more keen on this sort of thing since their last in an on-going series of reorganisations.
What struck me about the last round of fingerprinting was not the fingerprinting itself. I've since long gotten over the dumbfounded feeling aroused by contemplating the only two logical possibilities I could come up with for the nonsense, to wit, that (a) the INS had again lost my fingerprints (a distinct possibility as they've repeatedly "lost" my paperwork for months on end; or (b) they're concerned the tips of my fingers have changed or been otherwise altered since the last time they were inked and rolled smudgingly onto little square outlines preprinted on white sheets of card stock. What was interesting was that the notification letter arrived in my mail box soon after Mr. Ashcroft and Co. began implementing the Patriot Act in new and creative ways.
There's 2 interesting bits there to consider. First, there's the Patriot Act, which we all know protect y'all from us Canadians and anyone else looking to steal jobs, welfare money and virgin brides. And second, there's the "my mailbox" part. "What's so interesting about that?" you ask? Well, in 15 years I have never (ever) received a letter from the INS. My lawyers (several over the years) have received almost as few, and with the exceptions of overdue responses to occasional FOIA requests (stating no information was to be found), or the receipt of a notice (demanding new copies of old documentation), I'd say my lawyers have received nothing either. In fact, most of the notices I have received from the INS have resulted either from my lawyers' visits or my own occasional "whassup?" treks to the Federal Building offices in the city where I live. (If I was looking for sympathy, I'd additionally point out that these visits routinely consisted of arriving at 10:00 in the evening to be somewhere near the front of a Mon-Fri 2,000+ person line eager to get into the building when it opens at 6:00am, or at least by 1:00pm when the probabilities approach zero that I or anyone else would be so lucky to actually get in to stand in line for a number for a chance to wait another few hours to see someone who might actually know something. But I'm not. So there.)
So, what's the point to all this rambling? Again, 2 things: THEY now know who I am, and THEY know where I live. Not that I believe either of these two new realities will advance my application for residency, make me a better person, or otherwise add to the quality of my life or those around me, but I am confident it's made the majority of Americans sleep better at night knowing that SOMEONE is doing SOMETHING. I just wish I knew what that SOMETHING part was. My proud-to-be-an American-citizen dad did, too, but he passed away waiting to find out.
All in all, I'm an easy-going happy-go-lucky type. I do wonder, however, whether the millions of people that travel to the US every year will react with the same graciousness when subjected to a scrutiny unknown across most of the developed world, save for those arrested or imprisoned for crimes.
Of course not. They are cool. Just for US terrorists...
I live in Canada, which is one of the "exempt" countries, but this exemption hasn't stopped the U.S. from fingerprinting and photographing Canadians of Persian descent.
Basically this exemption is for white people of European descent in the end...
I won't bother mentioning the frightening parallels this brings to mind...
Still #1 -- Lonely Gay Geek
Anal probes ?????
terrorist with no fingers!
The US government has already exploited that chance by forcing all foreign visitors to fill out an insane form on the plane, asking among many, many other mostly bizarre things
The point is not to pick out people who are traveling under false papers, the point is to build a database of foreign nationals. 28 countries are exempt only because the United States could not diplomatically get away with insulting these exempt countries this way. The truth is that if GWB could get away with doing this for US citizens as well, he would. It's all about control.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
In spite of their propensity for guns and the fact that they make bitchin' tanks, the Americans know jack about security.
Before it was 'This is a picture of Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers' now it will be 'This is a picture of Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers. These are the fingerprints of Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers. This is the retinal print of Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers. This is how many hairs he had on his left butt cheek. This is how many hairs he his on his RIGHT butt cheek....'
The point is all you REALLY needed to know was that he was an Al-Quida sleeper agent, and they didn't know that.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Then surely no other hijacker or terrorist ever will! Oh hang on. Before Sept 11th no hijackers had flown a plane into the WTC either. That didn't mean they never would. No measure is going to offer 100% protection. All that can be done is to attempt to identify areas where a door is open for attack (whether someone has walked through that door previously or not) and to attempt to close that door.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
If they don't like it, STAY THE FUCK HOME. Or go to Florida and get murdered.
I take it you're referring to the media flap, a few years ago, abut the shootings of visitors to Florida. Some background:
* Florida (after a rash of rapes, drug-import related violence, and other crime) liberalized its firearm concealed-carry law, so that any law-abiding citizen could get a CCW after a background check and a short training program.
* Contrary to predictions of a bloodbath, violent crime dropped like a rock. It seems law-abiding citizens don't shoot others who aren't attacking them - and are VERY good at not making mistakes on this subject. (After several years - and hundreds of thousands of man-years of carry - under the new policy, only ONE CCW holder had improperly shot someone. The shooter turned out to be a crook they'd blown the background check on.)
* Now that carjacking the residents had become hazardous, an enterprising criminal gang recognized that people VISITING Florida wouldn't be armed - especially when coming out of an airport (where guns are federally banned) in a rental car. So they set up spotters at airports and also took advantage of the special license plates for rental cars, robbing and carjacking identified out-of-state visitors at rest stops.
* The increased rate of victimization of visitors was noticed - and made the news.
* Florida reacted in three ways:
1) They began issuing Florida CCWs to NON-residents. B-)
2) They took the special identifying plates off the rental cars.
3) They managed to catch SOME of the crooks.
The crime wave against visitors disappeared.
* But even during the peak of the anti-tourist crime wave, a visitor to Florida was MUCH less likely to be violently victimized than a visitor to its major competitor for sun-seeking vacationers: the gun-ban utopia of California.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
All this added security means longer lines in the unsecure areas, where people are always temporarily abandoning their big carts of luggage. It would be extrordinarily easy to suitcase-bomb large airport crouds these days.
My British Passport doesn't What really bothers me is that this process is going to add so much more time and aggrivation to flying. It's already bad enough x-raying shoes. Many airports here in the states are small or just can't facilitate enough security checkpoints to filter the amount of people the airport handles. Another thing is (I heard this on NPR yesterday) that the biometric data will be compared to US criminal records of drug lords and other wanted criminals, etc, since there isn't a conclusive list of terrorists. I mean, by definition terrorists are random people who probably will blow themselves up, so it'll be hard to keep tabs on them, unless they are "top dog" like OBL. People screaming about privacy infringement have a point that the kept names, faces, and fingerprints of foreigners can be used for "evil" rather than good. We can just look at the stolen election of 2000 in Florida as Jeb and his cronies (incl attorney general) turned a lot of the state's poor democrats into felons from other states by making name matches. Personally, I'm a believer in the possibility for all things made to be unmade, and that in a Godelian way no systems can be totally secure. Although the plan has good intentions, it won't stop much.
You really do have no idea what is going on in the world, do you?
The Chinese have hundreds of spies everywhere. So do many other places. The Chinese nuclear program grew rapidly in the 90's, mainly due to spying. And they are just one of many. We have only caught a handful of spies recently. For each one caught, there are probably hundreds. Granted, the USA has spies everywhere too, but other countries are expelling/capturing/killing them too.
Let's just say that no matter what you think, the world about 100 times more dangerous than you can possibly imagine.
This is a good thing for two reasons. #1 - it adds extra protection, and while not much, when combined with everything else, is a good start. #2 - it reminds us that we are still a target for numerous terrorist groups that for some reason feel a need to blame the US for all of their problems.
Mod me down if you want. The truth is the truth.
Oh, and the intelligence community has been saying for years (before 2001) that it will never be possible to end terrorism.
Everyone out there likes to complain about things, but you offer no real solutions. One of the loopholes this is supposed to close is people overstaying their visas. Several of the 9/11 highjackers had overstayed their visas. Is this the best way? No. But, it at least lets people know that it is there, rather than impliment a different system that is designed to be covert.
think about it.
I think that many people would prefer that we didn't have to do anything like this, however, we should never get as careless as we did during the period of 1993-2001. bin Laden & co are just biding their time until we get relaxed again (and just ignore the global terrorism problem). Then, they will hit us again.
-CPM
---You're all I need, When the water runs deep, You're all I need, Now I cry my soul to sleep -- Collective Soul, Needs
I thought I'd promote my fingerprint Imaging software. And also mention that this seems kind of bogus. Like others have mentioned none of the terrorists of 911 faked their identities and faking fingerprint with gelatin has been done.
bhagavana uvaacha.
This is a very good example of what a Paradigm can do to you:
In this "highly technical" society, the only way to enter the Country is by an airplane, so, let's take a picture and finger scans of all that people because we may catch a bad guy."
People who thinks like that never realizes that in reality there are a lot more "unsophisticated" means to do it. For example, the US can be entered swimming, rowing, walking, jumping, driving, and yes, even flying in a completly undetected manner.
Do you think Terrorists are going to even blink at this measure? Of course not!! They'll walk across the line along with the thousands more that do it every day.
BTW, I know somebody who have twice entered the US by car, without a passport or visa, met the migration police at the border and by just pretending to be an american citizen, they let him thru. Of course, he's Mexican, but he's also white and "looks american".
This measure will not prevent terrorism from happening inside the US. It is just another stoopid way of wasting money, stretching diplomatic relations and bothering people who for some crazy reason or another, want to enter that country.
Kudos to Brazil, I wish my country did the same.
NO RED MEAT!
. .
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
Four days ago I took LH444 from Frankfurt am Main to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta, and I was surprised to see this, uh- system in person.
The fingerprint scanners were pretty snazzy, but the cameras at each officer's desk looked like cheap spherical plastic webcams ziptied to even cheaper-looking lectern microphone holders.
As a US citizen and ostensible taxpayer ;) I'm actually somewhat impressed they considered off-the-shelf consumer products. OTOH, I don't feel any safer, but a more-expensive camera would have no effect on that feeling.
Has anyone else seen these? I'm curious whether these cheap cams are strictly an ATL thing - which would be strange considering it's the biggest airport in the country - or if this is a standard observed at the other ports of entry.
Snickersnee3: Build your own 3-watt Luxeon Star headlamp from scratch
Aren't all fingerprints digital?
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Having had the pleasure of being treated as as criminal by USA immigration and being scanned in I have to say good luck to the Yanks. You now live in the least free country of the world.
Land of the free, land of the sick and corrupt more like.
On arrival you have pictures of Il Duce Bush on the wall, you are processed like a criminal and then let out into a society where everyone is shooting each other. Its like the film Escape from New York without the benefit of being fiction
Linda Lovelace is Hitler.!
Marcella Bocelli is Hitler.!
Krisztina Bella is Hitler.!
Britney Spears is Hitler.!
Carmen Electra is Hitler.!
So, let's fuck Hitler...!!!
I made the reference because people were likely to be familiar with it.
:).
I cold have said Louisiana, and don't chase the muggers. I could have said Washington DC, or even NYC. But I felt Florida was more pithy. I appologize for offending your delicate, statistics backed, sensibilities
I've even been to Florida without being murdered.
Let's start by taking a logical look at this program as it stands today and where we are ultimately planning on going with this.
As it stands today it is only being used in selected airports on citizens from selected countries. Most of Europe is being excluded entirely. Presently this system is extremely ineffective at stopping terrorists from entering the country. Simply avoid coming in through airports equipped with the technology.
If this system is eventually deployed in every international airport there will still be several ways to avoid it. You could obtain fake documentation forged to look like you're a citizen of one of the exempt countries. You could enter the USA via a land crossing or by sea. If all else fails you could enter illegally by bypassing a land border crossing altogether, entering via Canada or Mexico. The government, IMHO, is also overlooking a huge issue. Many of the 9/11 hijackers came into this country on valid visas. This system is never going to be able to stop that. If a person is recruited and is going to attack this country, this new system will do nothing if that person is not on a watch list and is able to get a valid visa.
All in all I'd say the system, even if it is fully implemented at all land, sea, and airports, is never going to be able to protect us from determined terrorists. What this system will probably end up doing is giving us better border control in other areas. I'm up in the air about these effects. While I respect others right to privacy, I strongly believe every country is completely within it's bounds to try and effectively control it's borders. No foreigner has the "right" to enter into any other country. It's up to each individual nation to decide who it's going to let in and who it is going to keep out. It's also within every nation's rights to implement some kind of system to try an enforce it's policy.
The stated goal of this system is to stop terrorists from entering this country and I don't think it's really going to accomplish that. If fully implemented it will certainly make it harder to get in, but a determined individual on a watch list can still sneak in. Finally, it is never going to stop terrorists, like many of those who took part in 9/11, who are able to obtain valid visas and are not on any of the watch lists. Given all these facts and the associated costs I'm still in favor of the system because it's going to allow us to tighten control of our borders. We desperately need to tighten our control of our borders and this will certainly help in some respects. I am, however, not under the illusion that this is a perfect system. I know even if it is fully implemented at all land crossings, seaports and airports a determined known terrorist can still sneak in and an unknown/unidentified terrorist will always be able to get in if they get a visa and are not on the watch list. In the end the bottom line is that we have to try and do something and I have not heard anyone else propose anything better. I'm afraid that given the current technology and the current global realities, a system like this was bound to be implemented sooner or later. Let us hope, and constantly seek to ensure via some kind of oversight, that this system is never abused.
Am I the only one that really does not care or see the controvery hear? I guess my point is if you have such a problem being finger-printed on the way in then don't come. The only thing that I am annoyed with is how come everyone doesn't get finger printed and photographed. If you get a Texas DL you get finger printed and photograhped. The US should be allowed to track people as they come and leave the US. It is the right of the country to deny and admit people into the United States and knowing who is in the country is not a big deal. For the most part the United States Government knows about 99.9% of the polulace from tax records and drivers licenses. It is not so much of a leap nor an extreme injustice to know about the aliens visiting. Just because the US is going to start to track those visiting, and thereby knowing who they are, is no more intrusive than your local DMV, the IRS, Social Security Admin, et al, knowing about you.
Then the other thing that is blowing my mind is how come Brazil is having such a problem with this. I can understand that they feel a little singled out, but this reciprosity seems a little extreme. It is not like the US is singling out Brazilians only -- just those countries were we have the Visa-waiver program in effect.
This is seriously a non-issue.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
when they pry it off of my cold dead hands!
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
I like it. You don't want to be fingerprinted, then don't come into this country. I'm not sure of the reasons behind some countries being exempt, but my understanding only those countries citizens are exempt. I'm from Atlanta where this was tested, and they caught over a dozen people on the terrorist watch list in just a couple of months with this program. Seems to me it might help something...and hey, you don't HAVE to come into our country. You don't like it, deal with it.
Brazil is being kind of childish, by responding with only finger printing US visitors. We're finger printing almost everyone, while they act like we're picking on them.
Thena gain, Brazil is being run by anti-US socialists so what more do I expect?
Derek Greene
Because none of the terrorists were known criminals. There are plenty of deluded Islamic people with otherwise clean backgrounds willing to become gun fodder for their Cause.
This sort of statement fundamentally misunderstands the reasons for World War 2: [...] resentment and anger [...] crushed economy as well as bruised egos left the people ripe for ideological exploitation [...] created scapegoats for existing problems
So, wich one of these did you say isn't relevant to the US now?
You can't take the sky from me...
191 must do that. Brazil must be the world leader. They don't have nuclear bomb, they have jungle, they have beautifull girls boys and shemales, they don't have GM dangerous stuffs, they don't threaths nobody, don't make war, their latin lovers make love. That's all, 191 countries follow your leader.
I disagree with most of his post, but there's nothing wrong with quoting "President", when the title is applied to Bush the Second. Face it, Bush stole the election through the connivance of the conservative dominated Supreme court (which has psychos like Scalia on it - he's really crazy, just read some of his arguments). Oh, and apparently a not-insignificant portion of the ignorant electorate voted for him on the assumption that he was his father (the father was a man whom I respected for his long service to the nation and his expertise).
"The slave who knows his master's will and does not get ready...will be be beaten with many blows."Luke 12:47-48
This could be dangerous for americans traveling to Brazil. The relationship with foreign citizens there is based on reciprocity and that latins boys have big monster dicks.
As with all losses of freedom there are always people fine with it because it does not affect them. However, as Martin Luther King so eloquently expressed, if all of us are not free then none of us are free. Eventually these measures will be applied to regular US citizens. This system is being perfected at the cost of the freedom of foreigners (myself included). Have no fear, ur next.
btw...all those going ons in Guantanamo...don't worry ur next for that too (Padilla was just the first).
awww, are you still a little bit steamed that Al Bore lost?
Newflash, aint no Democrat gonna win next time either.
The South plans to implement a similar scheme, but only for yankees. The southern states are excluded.
One is in the air, one is on ground.
Both carry large numbers of people.
We get raped by security at airports and not at bus stops because why?
Don't give me that crap about an airplane can kill more people. I've seen people get on the bus with LARGE items. Maybe enough explosives to take out an entire embassy!!!! OMG!!!!
Please rape us at bus stops too... I want to be raped.
Oh please..
not really: now you can board a plane with nothing on you, spot a marshall, steal his weapon and hijack the plane. it has made air travel less safe.
I don't have fingers you insensitive clod!
Not citizens = no "constitutional" protected expectation of privacy
Here we get our photo taken along with our fingerprints when we have done a "CRIMINAL" act.
While the fingerprints for Australians only apply for people requiring a VISA, which is for a stay of over 3 months for citizens, I don't see myself going to the US any time soon as I'm not feeling too welcome by our Anzus partner.
By the way, would you object to a national ID card? Would it bother you if they where able to track and analyze your movements and purchases, the books you read and the people you associate with? I'm sure Microsoft would be more than happy to supply the database technology, although Oracle would be a better choice!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
ok what if someone boards a plane in mexico or canada or brazil or any other country in north and south america and then while they're on american soil, just before a landing decides to hijack and crash it? a helluva lot of good the stupid fingerprinting system will do then, not like its going to make any different. all bush is doing is wasting tax money in good for nothing schemes which is destroying america and the freedoms it once stood for.
...and Spanish passports, and Italian passports, etc., whether they come from these countries or not. Getting honorary citezenships based on ancestry, business ownership, "artist" status, or whatever is trivial. Many people I know have several passports. I bet some of the 9/11 terrorists had one or more European passports too, whether or not that's where they were from.
December 09, 2003 02:10 PM US Eastern Timezone
VeriChip Corporation Signs New International Distribution Agreement for South Africa
PALM BEACH, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 9, 2003--
Minimum purchase requirement to maintain distributor exclusivity for 5 years calls for sale of over 51,000 VeriChips - initial order placed
Applied Digital Solutions, Inc. (Nasdaq: ADSX), an advanced technology development company, today announced "immediately after its CEO's appearance on CNNfn" that its wholly owned subsidiary, VeriChip Corporation, has signed a 5-year exclusive international distribution agreement with AfriTrace (Pty) Ltd. of South Africa. AfriTrace's sister company, IdentiPet (www.identipet.com), has purchased over 300,000 animal microchips from Applied Digital's majority owned affiliate, Digital Angel Corporation (Amex: DOC) over the past 14 years.
Under the five-year exclusive distribution agreement, AfriTrace must meet annual minimum sales quotas to maintain exclusive distribution rights in South Africa. If these annual minimum sales quotas are met, the new distribution agreement calls for the sale of over 51,000 VeriChips and 2500 proprietary VeriChip scanners. AfriTrace has placed an initial order of 300 VeriChips.
With years of experience in the mining industry of South Africa, AfriTrace initially intends to use VeriChip technology for mining applications; e.g. identification of miners and location of miners within complex mine labyrinths.
About VeriChip(TM)
VeriChip is a subdermal, radio frequency identification (RFID) device that can be used in a variety of security, financial, emergency identification and other applications. About the size of a grain of rice, each VeriChip product contains a unique verification number that is captured by briefly passing a proprietary scanner over the VeriChip. A small amount of radio frequency energy passes from the scanner energizing the dormant VeriChip, which then emits a radio frequency signal transmitting the verification number. In October 2002, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ruled that VeriChip is not a regulated device with regard to its security, financial, personal identification/safety applications but that VeriChip's healthcare information applications are regulated by the FDA. VeriChip Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of Applied Digital Solutions (Nasdaq: ADSX). For more information about VeriChip, visit www.adsx.com.
About Applied Digital Solutions, Inc.
Applied Digital Solutions is an advanced technology development company that focuses on a range of life-enhancing, personal safeguard technologies, early warning alert systems, miniaturized power sources and security monitoring systems combined with the comprehensive data management services required to support them. Through its Advanced Technology Group, the Company specializes in security-related data collection, value-added data intelligence and complex data delivery systems for a wide variety of end users including commercial operations, government agencies and consumers. Applied Digital Solutions owns a majority position in Digital Angel Corporation (AMEX: DOC). For more information, visit the Company's website at http://www.adsx.com.
Statements about the Company's future expectations, including future revenues and earnings, and all other statements in this press release other than historical facts are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and as that term is defined in the Private Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties and are subject to change at any time, and the Company's actual results could differ materially from expected results. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect subsequently occurring events or circumstances.
Contacts
CEOcast, Inc.
Investor Contact, Mathew Henderson, 212-732-4300;
mhenderson@ceocast.com
Im all for it! Give the yanks more guns. Build a BIG wall around the usa and THROW guns in there. Should sort the problem out in a couple of decades i reckon.
They're analog!
2004/1 ... Jack-booted Good ol' Boys arrive at /. to track down the posters of every subversive comment. .. Bush renames "White House" to "White Palace" immediately after election. .... Bush declares northern Mexico part of Texas, throws out residents, and builds "Texas Palace" there. .... In new "Freedom of Religion Act", Catholics, Muslims, moderates and atheists are declared official terrorists. Pre-dawn raids on the Vatican successfully eliminate the terrorist threat known as the Pope. .... Loyalist US Army enforces "Two terms is Two Too Few" Executive Order.
... .... In "Most evil people in the last 200 years" poll, George Bush beats Hitler 10 to 1.
2004/11
2005
2006
2007
2050
I recently travelled to Canada from Bermuda (passing through the US), and at the Bermudian airport's US customs preclearance desk they had the fingerprint scanner the submitter mentioned. They also had what looked like a Logitech Quickcam Express (the black one) to take your picture. I asked what I'd have to do to get fingerprinted and they said 'we have our criteria'. Pretty tight-lipped :D
Am I the only one that sees this as a stab on the future use of biometric identification schemes?
How can I, being for ex. a businessman of a foreign country competing with a US company and traveling to the US, trust on using byometric ID for anything important in my corporation afterwords?
It is know, or at least suspected that inteligence gathered info was supplied and used before by US corporations to battle foreign competitors (ex. Boeing vs. Airbus Consortium). Who is going to have access to the database?
How can I allow a foreign country to have precise byometric info on me, and to keep it in a database, cross-referenced with my personal info?
This might be as much a privacy issue as a trade secret one.
These "homeland security" measures that Bush and Ridge are saddling us with are a giant conjob. I travel around NYC, and they've reduced the NYPD to a bunch of overtime crossing guards. If I were sick enough to want to sabotage something big enough to get on TV, it would be really easy. The airports are just as porous. Meanwhile, the Sunday before New Year's Eve, somebody buzzed their small plane around the Statue of Liberty ( under a mile from the hole where the World Trade Center stood) for several minutes before the FAA even warned them away from that closed airspace. During a Christmas/New Year week of steady Orange Alert. Any heads roll? Any tightening of the security? Found any "evil doers"? No. This is a scam to keep us scared, obedient, and ignorant of the very real changes the Feds are pulling on us.
If you want to know why, just think about all those military contractors that Bush was going to hook up with "missile defense shield" contracts ($100s of billions - trillions). After the WTC planebombings, they couldn't convince anyone the #1 threat was missiles. So they turned their proposals and whitepapers into "TerrorWar" marketing and "Iraqmire" lobbying. Do you think all that Pentagon biz development just went away? They need that money! And they're getting it. But they don't have actual TerrorWar products, so they're just keeping up the smokescreens and scapegoats while they retool. By the time we catch on and get tired of just rounding up foreign looking people, their systematic abuse of every possible fringe group will probably have produced actual nuts who will follow Osama bin Laden's career highlight. Then the contractors will be able to say "I warned you", and keep business rolling. Unless we start calling them on it, and stop playing along by watching their TerrorTV and taking them seriously.
--
make install -not war
One problem is that even if you can correctly identify every single person entering the country, you can't stop any terrorists until they have a known terror record.
Still, this should effectively put a stop to anyone attempting their second suicide bombing! And that's no worse than most of these anti terror programs.
It seems not too long ago that the US and especially the US press used to go on about how fingerprinting when entering Japan was an invasion of privacy.
I don't hear them yelling in protest so loudly now.
All except the ones they've been doing for the past hundred-some odd years before the computer.
Bseides, last I checked, my fingers are analog.
Contact Me (got tired of viruses emailing me).
If the plans by the US Office of Homeland Security come through, I won't be able to fly over to the USA with my brand new EU passport without submitting my fingerprints and/or retinal scan with the visa. The new passports will, at the request of the beforementioned office, have to feature digital biometric information that will be fed to a federal database.
I will not submit to this.
litigious bastards
suck it sco!
Well, this is the first step for doing it the way it's done in the 5 element.... later they will add few pistols that will point to your face if you are found to be a criminal :)
.... you know what will be coming in the futur....hum....hope that 5th Element Jovovich will fall in my cab soon.
That's why I love Sci-Fiction
Karma: Very Very Very Very Bad
Just wait until all incoming visitors to the US must submit DNA as part of the recordkeeping. After all, we wouldn't want any visitors committing crimes, and then leaving the country wihout someway of tying physical evidence to the ingress/egress record, right? Next step after that is to have all US citizens leaving the country submit DNA as well... just in case you're leaving because you're on the run. We'll just have to screen it against all current open crimes...
Once this registry with very current info is established, expect everyone from the left to the right to start mining it - late on your car payments? Exit visa DENIED. Forget to turn in your library books on time? DENIED.
At a certain point in the future, you'd better have your papers in order when travelling from Chicago to LA...
An unjust peace is preferable to the most righteous of wars. - Cicero.
Even peace may be purchased at too high a price - Benjamin Franklin .
(I just read those two quotes together in a book VERY recently, and they stuck in my head. Does anyone remember what book it is??? Arrgh!)
Forget about US national security. The real reason for these measures is that someone in the Bush administration has been short-selling airline stocks. There really seem to be a real desire to drive the industry to the ground at all cost.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Back in the Clinton era, if this was attempted, you would have had Limbaugh and O'Reilly as well as every half baked right winger in this land screaming out "Big Government!!!" and "Jackbooted Thugs!!!!", but now it's OK??! What happened to your fervor my friends? If it just because it doesn't apply to you that it's OK? If so, I'm glad I don't live in your head, my brain would get cramped in something that small.
8 of 19 alleged hijackers are still alive.
Waleed M Alshehri - alive and well in Casablanca, Morocco
Marwan Al Shehhi - Alive; same link as above
Ahmed Alghamdi - Alive; same link as above
Wail M Alshehri - Alive
Ahmed Alnami - Alive; same link as above
Abdulaziz Alomari - Working for Saudi Telecom
Salem Alhamzi - Working at a petrochemical company
Saeed Alghamdi - Alive; same link as above
The US has dealt with the problem. bin Laden was at one point Minister of Defense of Afghanistan. Right before the US crushed that government flat. No country is going to tolerate "terrorist training camps" aimed at the US for years to come.
So lighten up already. Yes, there will be incidents in future. But they'll probably come from some completely different direction, like the Oklahoma City bombing, which was done by 100% Americans. We'll have to deal with that when it comes.
With all these Orange Alerts recently ("They're going to attack on Xmas - no, New Years - in Rapahannock County - no, LA - no, Vegas") it's beginning to look like al Queda is down to a couple of guys mouthing off to get attention.
By nightfall your country will be teeming with orcs!
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
AHAHAHHAHAHA
ahahaha ahahaha
AHAHAHHAHA
ahahaha ahahaha redundanfreakincee
*sniffs*
AAHAHAHAHHA
ahahaha ahahaha
AAHAHAHAHHA
ahahaha ahahaha
AAHAHAHAHHA
Okay, that was news to me. There's still no reason they wouldn't fake passport from whitelisted countries instead, though.
(There's no need to e-mail me to get my attention. My preferences ensure I get a message when I get a reply, and I keep an eye on the reply counts. If I don't reply to someone it's likely because a) I can't be arsed b) they're rude idiots c) they're anonymous cowards or d) they're rude, idiotic, anonymous cowards (got a lot of those today).)
I for one welcome our new SCOviet Russian overlords to whom all our base are belong.
Let me mention that most people in Brazil are OK with this decision to identify US citizens.
The mayor of Rio de Janeiro is the one against it, and some people there bought that idea too, but they're just a minority in Brazil.
This is obviously immigration control disguised as an anti-terrorist measure.
The stories we are being spun just seem like a grown up version of the Man from U.N.C.L.E. and
THRUSH. The Man From U.N.C.L.E
I am concerned as to how the War on Terror affects me, personally. Already I was never entirely
trusting of tall buildings and so no change there. I am a little nervous of flying but there
are enough things to go wrong already that hijacking is just another problem. And as we are
going to win the War on Terror, so we are told, I will be able to re-enter high buildings and
sleep on planes. But only when everyone who hates us is dead will tall buildings and planes
be safe. A lot of people are going to have to die.
Which is insane! There must be another way.
Anyway, back to the mundane issue of how this all effects me. And you. We are all being told
by our governments to be vigilent. We are on variously coloured alerts of several levels of
seriousness. We have to be on the lookout for terrorists. Which presents us with a problem:
How do we identify a terrorist? By suspicious activity. We have no choice but to tolerate
being viewed suspiciously by the police and other more secretive government agencies.
This news story from CNN provides insight as to what is meant when the authorities say that
some activity is "suspicious" or "consistent with known methods of al-Qaida". You might
already be guilty of this behaviour so click here:
Don't annotate your almanac!
Perhaps it is one of my many character flaws but I find I am unable to obey _all_ the laws
_all_ the time. Sometimes I feel guilty just passing by a policeman. [Othertimes, like you,
I smile and say hello.] Did he see me jay-walking? Have I fastened my seat belt? Is he
aware I have annotated my almanac?
I assure you this does not happen often but next time my collar is felt by the local constabulary
I wonder if, having now read the CNN article, I will find myself babbling that the jottings
in the margins of my copy of Lonely Planet are not "suspicious".
USA and UK law allows a policeman to arrest someone he suspects of terrorist activity and that person can be help incommunicado but lawyers
are critical because the laws are pretty vague about what this activity is. Such activity,
presumably, would be "consistent with known methods of al-Qaida". By the measure of the USA's
FBI advice to policemen described in CNN's above referenced article it seems any of us can be arrested at any time.
Am I the only one who thinks that the erosion of civil liberties is unlikely to address the
threat of terrorism? Should you share my opinion about the suspension-of-liberty vs terror issue
(i.e. that it's not the either-or choice we are told it is) I advise you not to air it at USA
airport security. Were you to do so while you are prodded in the genitals both with enthusiasm
and a Geiger counter (or while they flick though your almanac) I bet you would miss your flight.
In my view liberty is fragile and is threatened more by authoritarians than by terrorists.
All these supposed counter-terrorist measures are getting too invasive and pervasive for me.
Paul Beardsell
They only get known when they're dead.. I mean, after they blown some bomb, plane or such.. What do you expect? Bin Laden showing himself in person at an airport?
...and tonight, as I was trying to rush through customs from one flight to a connecting flight, the entire validation system went down for about 15 minutes, leaving me and about 200 other people in a panic of nailbiting anxiety. The customs agent told me that the crash was due to their having installed the new software needed for the fingerprinting and photo database, and apparently the system had gone down all over the US. All the agents were issued backup CDs to boot up from (although my agent seemed to be having a hard time figuring out how to put the CD into the drive) and then things were back to normal, although presumably without the new photo/fingerprinting system. All the computers were running W2K Professional and had a cool (tho ominous) Department of Homeland Security logo on them.
Think back to the 9/11 attack. Can you recall how fast the names and photographs of the hijackers were on the front page of every newspaper? That tells you they had the names -- yes, the names on the flight manifests! -- photographs and doubtless much more but these guys got on the planes! Having that assemblage of data, can anyone explain to me why every airline's reservation service didn't have lookup tables for known terrorists? Okay, the Administration claims, "Who coulda' known?" But lookups are so simple, fast, non-intrusive and operate before the flights take off(!) it seems they should have been and still be in place. Anybody know if they are in use?
Those who trade freedom for security will soon have neither.
What will they do if I sand off my fingerprints?
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
You HAVE sat on the subway's seats, haven't you? :-)
More than mere navel gazing.
You have no rights when you try to enter another country. Customs does not need probable cause or a reasonable suspicion to search your person and effects. The immigration officer can refuse you entry for any or no reason. That isn't just the United States, that's every country in the world.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Garbage indeed, but there was solid prosperity mixed in with that garbage. The Nazi economic platform consisted of a government designed to faciliate business. It might even be said that they formed the first modern Corporate State (as fascism is 'corporate' by nature), especially considering that the Nazis were focused on Germany's military-industrial complex.
There is a reason that one of our better Presidents warned America of that poisonous alliance between business and government; I fear all the "security" infrastructure we are building is only expanding that danger in a new direction.
So to bring this back to the point at hand. Even though comparisons between the current US Administration and the Nazis are.....tenuous, at best, that does not mean that the path is being paved for another madman ten, twenty, or thirty years from now.
==============
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
...until you are actually admitted into the US (hence, Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay). Assuming you are already an American citizen (which I am, since you say "our borders"), "our" civil liberties will be unaffected since only travelers from 28 foreign countries are to be fingerprinted - and the US is not one of those 28, obviously. I can't believe people think that travelers from other countries shouldn't have to verify their identities before entering the United States. Bush critics criticize him for not doing enough on the war on terror, while simultaneously criticizing him for doing too much.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
There were several terrorist incidents when we were stationed overseas - I witnessed one, my family avoided one thanks to our chronically late mother (Thanks, Mom!), and some escaped Basque nationalists stole our car (that was not fun). Three in three years if you discount the occassional ass-beating by local teens who hated Americans (well, us anyway), a riot (my bad), and the consequences of unwise activities by myself and fellow American teens (often misguided patriotism or plain mischief).
Nevertheless, the other 99.5% of the time we were as safe and sound as bugs in a rug, living in a great country with kind and friendly people, immersed in a rich culture, surrounded by millennia of history, and had a fantastic time. Those are the times that I remember and cherish - going to the Prado, walking through El Escorial, marveling at the Valley of the Fallen, visiting the tombs of Saints, roaming through ancient castles, seeing the Hanging Gardens, touching Queen Isabella's jewelry box (it was about the size of my Shuttle XPC), meeting Queen Sofia...and tons more great experiences.
Even at the height of tensions between American military folks and Spanish civilians (during the biological warfare accident/linseed oil poisoning of olive oil) we - the Americans - were never subject to the invasive 'security checks' foreign visitors experience coming to the United States.
Fast forward exactly 20 years from January of 1984 (when we settled into our new stateside duty station)...
The Patriot Act I and II, fingerprint scanning, CAP fighter and Apache patrols over American cities, "orange" terrorist alerts, "war on terrorism" with ever-shifting definitions of "terrorist", jailing of American citizens without charge for years, propoganda in American media ---
After one terrorist incident in three years (albeit a terrible one) wrecking the peaceful tranquility of the nation's daily domestic tragedies, America is moving toward a police state. Even as hopping Spain was with machinegun toting Spanish military dudes and several terrorist incidents (bombings, shootings, mass poisonings), 99.5% of the time everything was cool and there wasn't nearly the level of hysterical anti-democratic overreaction we've seen here in the United States. Nobody got on TV to talk about how terribly vulnerable to terrorism we were; everyone knew it. Nobody went out to fingerprint, track, and data-mine everyone in the world - you just needed proper ID; match face to picture and signature to signature.
All the security in the world isn't going to stop terrorism; just ask Israel - it probably has the best-trained and equipped security forces on the face of the planet. By their own figures they stop 90% of suicide bombers, but nobody can stop them all. The Palestinian resistance has demonstrated its capability to carry out a 'successful' bombing on a daily basis - killing a dozen or more civilians and wounding scores - terrorizing millions.
Even if we could wall up everything, put cops on every street corner, monitor and surveille whoever we wished - we cannot stop terrorism, not without addressing the root cause that motivates people to kill themselves and a bunch of people. And I'm not talking religion here.
I'm talking a sane foreign policy that doesn't make enemies out of everyone we walk over or steal from to 'protect our national interests' - or enemies of the 'friends and allies' with whom we used to divvy up the spoils.
Instead, we need a policy that simultaneously roots out genuine terrorists while helping those who have a legitimate beef with us for having trampled all over them. We need to focus on reducing the environment that breeds terrorists and terrorism, not fueling it.
Some facts for you:
Your first-world country is great man!
Just keep buying goods from the poor miserables here! (sigh.. you know that my computer is made of used cans and coconuts?)
DNA id's are composed of junk-DNA strains.
They contain NO information on individuals that we are aware of.
Its not like they keep a _complete_ DNA picture of you.
"/Dread"
Your enlightened and well reasoned argument composed of decomposing straw men has led me to the light of salvation. The world really does run on hugs. Thanks! That was just super of you.
Maybe, just maybe I'm mistaken here. But a little conquest can be good for people. Would the Russians be powerful if not for their subjegation at the stirups if not hands of the mongols? Or China without it's warring states period, and the same, followed by further victimization at the hands of the West? Sometimes people just need killing. It's not pretty, it's not happy. But not everyone is reasonable, especially the psychopaths, and sociopaths. If I came to your house to kill you, and rape your wife and daughters before I looted it, would you offer to make me a hot cup of coco while we talked about my troubled childhood? Doubtful.
You're invectives are so original and clever, I feel almost silly pointing out it's unreasonable to expect everyone to be reasonable given the empirical evidence. But what do I know. You've got so many buzzwords in your vocabulary, I'm like mondo intimidated!
instead of trying to keep them out. Why is it that Yanks never address the reasons WHY you are so hated in so many places? Or the irony of where people like Bin Laden got their training, anthrax, etc.
You tried prohibition, it didn't work. You waged a "War on Drugs" that didn't work. Now you are waging a "War on Terrorism". Even if it WAS something more than a thinly veiled excuse to protect the price you pay for gas it would still likely fail because you are treating the SYMPTOMS and not the CAUSE. And here's a lttle CLUE for you - adopting a strike-first, unilateral foreign policy is not going to make you safer. It will breed more resentment, hatred and suicidal zealots.
They should have put *that* on the statue of liberty:
We. Don't Want. You.
followed by:
Keep your crappy beaver pelts, shells, pine
cones, or whatever the fuck you use for
currency.
We don't want you here.
BTW, please try not to use "we" as though you speak for all americans. You don't speak for me.
We are high risk company from Middle East and Central Asia. We are looking for supplier of either passports from these 28 countries or the technoology to forge them. We pay good money.
Ahmed ibn al-Kaif el-Kazar, CTO
Osama and Co.
you fucking troll.
What you just described also perfectly describes the end of the First Punic War.
s/Hitler/Hannibal/, and voila! Second Punic War. Of course, without all the gas chambers and concentration camps.
Actually if you look at the stats apple is in fact dying going from 4% to 3% despite all the late hype and marketing from Apple Corporation.
Obviously Apple Corp. is finally dying.
This system just adds to a database. A LARGE database, actually created by a company I indirectly work for. (And we will leave it at that.)
Any time you make a travel reservation - airline, car, hotel - anything - it is categorically stored and used in later profiling. This happens now, I am sitting not 200 feet from systems which contain this very data, as I type this message! And I mean, every single little tiny detail of your information that you submit (everything) is captured.
Fingerprint ID is just a way to tie you personally and physically into this same information store. One of the fundmental difficulties of profiling criminals is determining their identities - however if you can cross-reference millions of peoples' information with their physical ID, profiling of that data becomes a more trivial task.
Whether you believe me or not is irrelevant. I know this is happening because I know where the data comes from, and how it gets there. Here's the real kicker, hold on for this one... How can this be, you ask? "But this is invasion of privacy!" you say. Well, no. The government FUNDS these data stores, but they are handled by NON-GOVERNMENTAL agencies, at least in the collection of the data. It's all big corporate level stuff, who allows the government access. There are no checks on who can use it or how, because the government itself is not collecting the information. There is a big gaping loophole and I'm sure they'd rather you not know about it...
Then again, we're fighting a war across the world. Who has time for this crap anyway...
Can't seem to find my post anywhere, so here is my little news item again. WMD found in TEXAS!! http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1229/p02s01-usju.htm l
A ferry line in Denmark recently started using fingerprint scanners in their frequent traveler program (questionable, I know, but that's not the point). Now, this line goes to an island (Bornholm) which is home to a lot of craftsmen, especially potters. Turns out that many of these potters have lost their fingerprints from years of turning clay. I wonder if they'd be allowed into the US.
"A *person* is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
- 'K' in Men in Black.
Sure, Israel is a US ally, great. So are many other countries. Why is the status of Israel among US allies sacrosanct? Trust me, Israel is more than capable of looking after its own interests (check its war record again). Questioning why the US should constantly fuck itself over in deals with Israel is not tantamount to advocating throwing the Jews in ovens.
Christ, get a sense of perspective. Of course, perspective does seem to be lacking in the Jewish community: for instance, last time I visited a Jewish Center there were three times as many Israeli flags as American flags, so I guess they do not care about alienating their fellow citizens.
Looking at all this ruckus about fingerprinter etc from a European (UK) perspective, and having spent 30 years of my life before that in South Africa, I think that all these measures are nothing more than a Dog & Pony show: smoke and mirrors . ..
In the bad old days of South African Apartheid, the white government legislated all kinds of things, pumped millions into the security forces, and spent huge chunks of the budget on trying to prevent attacks by "terrorists" from the banned liberation organisations such as the ANC and PAC. What good did that do? Sweet blue blow-all. All it did was challenge those organisations to be more creative about infiltrating their cadre's and hitmen & women into society, and the bombings continued, as did the agitation. Leaders of these organisations were identified and incarcerated, to no avail. It just didn't work, despite the fact that it turned the country into a police state.
Likewise, there is SBFA that the American administration can do to prevent determined terrorists from getting into the country and committing acts of terrorism - nothing at all. Personally, if I were an American citizen, I'd be protesting about the pointless waste of my tax dollars.
The only way the USA can make itself less of a target, is to change its arrogant attitude toward the rest of the world: realise that not everyone wants to live like an average American, and not everyone defines freedom and democracy in the same way as the USA does. In the same way that the freedom movements in South Africa were rebelling against the arrogant tyrany of the white government, who considered its world-view to be normative, there are nations out there who see the USA's attitude in much the same light.
I don't in any way condone the use of violence as a means of protest, and what happenned on 911 was just not on, not for any reason, but once again drawing a parallel with what happened in apartheid South Africa: put yourself in the shoes of the average oppressed black man for just a moment. Your back is to the wall: there's no more room for manuever. What option do you have but to resort to violence? Especially if that is all the government understands?
In this respect the USA (and Tony Blah) is supremely guilty: the WMD ruse was just an excuse to use an option that should have been an absolute last resort. What options do those nations have where the USA and other western nations have interfered but to resort to violence?
Didn't they know about how easy it is to fool fingerprint systems?
Graduate of the LeRoy Funkified Badass School of Soul.
While taking the fingerprint may only need 15s, checking the print against a database of 200, 500 million prints will take much longer and will produce many false positives that have to be investigated.
Uh gee- remember Oklahoma City, The Unabomber? Ring a bell?
Definitely have a need to watch out for who is in the country already. Unfortunately while we happily go along violating our own human rights we don't have the will to concentrate our efforts and resources on those most likely to be terrorists, i.e. people like us.
Keep agreeing with asinine policies that don't make you safer but erode your liberties.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Remeber to scream that many times the day the system fails and you are spirited away to Guantanamo without any legal recourse.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I dont know what the percentages are, but I recall that rock climbers and people who work on building sites are very hard to fingerprint because they are always rubbing down their prints. So spend every flight sanding your hands down and explain it away as 'I climb on gritstone';
If the goal is matching fingerprints to terrorists, the probability of matching will be low, as their database will be horribly incomplete. all they can realistically do with biometrics is (a) verify that the person in front of you matches the person who was granted the document (not that their identity is actually valid), and maybe (b) when registering docs, pick up on duplicate identities through duplicate fingerprints.
And neither are many of my co-nationals.
Since the US instituted these and other insane measure flight occupancy for flights from Mexico to the US has fallen by 30%.
For the first time I am reading and listening to middle class Mexicans that emphatically refuse to be treated like criminals.
No we don't like it, and as much as I regret it (I really wanted to see NY and Las Vegas) iw will follow your kind advice and will not visit your country until those demeaning measures are repelled.
My considerable purchasing power, and the one of as many people I manage to convince, can be used elsewhere.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
How many international Terrorists does it take to blow up the Oaklahoma Building ??
Whats the point in being paranoid about all the strange and foreign people when your school kids blow the crap out of each other and your own people do just as much terrorism with in their own borders ???
Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) Addicted is me
nuff said :(
Oh well, why do I ask, I am sure a responsible administration would never ever consider holding some hundreds of innocent people in custody for the sake of possibly capturing one or two suspected terrorists.
Not the thumbs.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
I agree with you. When I arived in Germany around '89 I was a little kid and remeber checking the car with my mom for bomb before we got into it. That was normal. I still live in Germany, same base. Funny thing now is that the Germans are patrolling the gates to the US bases. Why? Becouse the US military is so undermaned.
1 .s tm
I think the reason US is going nuts is becouse the last time US citizens experianced war was during the civil war. Even WWII, Americans that lived in the US didn't see or hear any gunshots.
Anyways, if you want to read something scary, read the artice below. Note the date.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/west_asia/3702
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
Bush should have followed up on the warnings by placing the FBI, State and INS on a higher state of alert (i.e., look carefully at middle eastern visitors and what they are doing). If such a state was in place, the warnings raised earlier in the year may not have been ignored.
See my journal, I write things there
Now you can't wait for the toilet........ From the Sydney Morning Herald "Qantas passengers have been ordered not to queue outside toilets while making the 14-hour flight to and from the US. The directive was issued late yesterday by the US Transport and Security Administration, which is demanding pilots make a pre-flight announcement banning passengers from "congregating in groups around toilets or anywhere else in the aircraft". "
To get your German license, you will need official proof-of-address (Anmeldbecheinigung) and your passport. No fingerprints, but they have a good lock on who you are and where you live.
See my journal, I write things there
Fake passports aren't easy. Especially from the "whitelisted" countries. US Immigration is quite good at detecting fake passports. The good fakes come from official blanks, but there remains a problem with the serial numbers. About five years ago, I heard a fake passport using genuine blanks from EEA country would cost about $10K. I would guess that has gone up several times more recently.
See my journal, I write things there
Godwin's law! Point to red! Face! Bow! ...err, damnit, you HAD to go and invoke Godwin's law AND make plenty of good points.
If I ever meet you I'm gonna punch you right in the kisser, because it's the closest hybrid between kicking your ass and humping your leg.
In related news...
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
How are you gentlemen !!
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
maybe they mean digital as in inputed into a computer
...a subdermal RFID chip injected directly after birth? Or a little necklace containing an emitter, like those used on wildlife animals, so your whereabouts can be tracked via satellite? It'd be small and you can add some fancy gems to it if you want. Even better, they could add pain generators to it, that go off every time you approach a sensitive building without permission: 100m - makes you wee in your pants, 50m, knocks you out. Something like that. Possibilities all over, great security.
As long as I could get a fake id that way, it doesn't matter what controls are in place. I'll show up as a valid UK Citizen with a valid identity.
Wake up UK, control identity theft first. This nazism (which has just been proposed by the UK Government http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3375711.stm )
doesn't solve the problem of terrorism.
Didn't anyone learn anything from the IRA troubles in Northern Ireland and the Basque Seperatist troubles in France/Spain.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
That early into the administration all the previous administration's methods were still in place
That's actualy not true at all. The bush admin got rid of a lot of senior admn. people including those working in national security, and replaced them with republicans.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Looking at the operating system they are using (Various Win32 platforms) it should be trivial for any Al Qaeida script kiddie to hack in and change the details. Id be very dubious of placing Airport security in the hands of such Security Moguls as microsoft.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
0.1% is 1 in 1,000. Not one in 10,000, you mother fucking idiot.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
How is a proposition to invade that many states less of a holocaust? I tell you: Arab countries have ~600 million inhabitants. 400 million of them are surely pissed off right now at the US and will snap out when Uncle Sam invades another country. You can "pacifiy" only so many countries in a decade and even that is going to create huge problems.
Invading _more_ than 7 countries in a decade is enough to being worse than Hitler.
Hitler only attacked Russia, Poland, Slovakia, France, the UK and 2 countries in north Africa - 7 countries.
Say hello to World War III, Mr. Ultra-Ignorant.
How dare you compare Bush to Hitler. Hitler was a democratically elected leader who until Germanys final defeat was mostly respected by his countrymen.
Many will cry foul, but even I, a radical free-rights person, don't see a problem
These are people that are voluntarily coming to the US to visit.. Its a choice. We dont need them here anyway, so if they balk they can go back where they came from.
Now when they start that with citizens.. that's a problem.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The fingerprinting system may or may not prevent terrorist attacks - it's really impossible to say. In a way, it makes sense to get the visa system clean first (or at least try to clean up this horrible mess).
But what has apparently be overlooked by American authorities / officials is the psychological impact. It really pisses people off. Even here in europe.
I have dealt with the US immigrations authorities a lot (i was studying there) and it's hard to describe the feeling when you are at the receiving end of it. Maybe prison is comparable. You talk to people behind bullet-proof glass, watched by marines with M16s, go through security scans like at the airport, the place is filled with posters that show handcuffed people who broke some immigration law (implying: YOU could be one of them), and, what's worst, the immigration officers do not believe a single word you say - regardless of what it is they always suspect some kind of scam. Even the holy pope himsef would wonder if he had done something illegal.
And that's in Europe! Other places are probably even worse.
Fingerprinting and taking pictures is not improving this situation.
You reap what you sow. And american immigration sows distrust and suspicion. In order to win peace in the world, the USA must win the hearts and minds of people. As it is, America is doing the opposite, most visibly at its outposts all over the world. The free world, looking like a prison or fortress...
I am not against checks, but there has got to be a way to make this humane, and to remove this aura of complete and utter paranoia. (European newspapers were reporting of "snipers on roofs and marines in attack-helicopters on new year's even in NY... )
One of my pet peeves is the way we assume we know stuff about the psychological state of "the German people" in this particular case. I had a textbook in college about how the Germans, each and every one of them, had a father complex as a result of The Great War. Seriously.
Can't we just accept the consequences of Versailles without going into a bunch of mumbo-jumbo pop psychology? I don't mind sociological explanations -- resentment of Versailles, and in particular of its economic consequences -- just the mind reading we're supposed to be able to use to explain an entire society at once.
This is like saying Americans are accepting these increased security measures because we're all so "co-dependent." You may as well cite Chinese astrology to explain that the "Ram Generation" in America is particularly accepting of involvement in Afghanistan due to its fondness for mountains.
He created scapegoats for existing problems in the person of the Jew....
If Hitler "created" antisemitism, there's a long history I just don't understand. This biography I'm reading about several generations of Czech women makes no sense at all...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
This a horrible idea because this fingerprinting system will not work if certain countries are exempted from this system. What is going to stop a terrorist from getting a passport from one of these exempted countries and using it to get into the USA, the answer is not much, all they have to do is steal someone's passport and their identity, because identity theft is now a big thing in this country.
Sincerely MonkeysKickAss
Oh, but the US has nothing to worry about... why would we ever want sky marshalls on these planes?
Associated Press
PARIS -- French authorities are searching for a passenger who didn't turn up for a scheduled Air France (search) flight on Christmas Eve, France's justice minister confirmed Wednesday.
The comments were in response to a report by a television network saying that European authorities were searching for a man with alleged Al Qaeda (search) links who failed to board an Air France flight on Christmas Eve.
"I confirm that we are looking for someone, but I can't say more," Justice Minister Dominique Perben (search) told RMC radio. "What's important when someone who doesn't take a plane is to know why he didn't take it."
The ABC report cited unidentified American officials as saying the passenger had a French passport and was believed to have undergone training in Afghanistan.
The report also quoted French officials as saying that the man was feared to have a small bomb whose components might get past airport security. The report said he was ticketed for Air France flight 68 from Paris to Los Angeles on Dec. 24.
The flight was one of six between Paris and Los Angeles on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day that was canceled following security talks between U.S. and French officials.
Perben declined to respond to questions about whether the suspect was a French national, had a criminal record or was on a watch list of the French counterterrorism agency, DST.
Opening it?
Previous policy was to cooperate with hijackers to prevent the loss of life. Open the door. Stop them from murdering the passengers and stewardesses.
Go along with the flow. Don't fight it. It will be resolved.
Times change. I doubt a hijacked flight will happen again without alot of bloodshed, and I doubt even stronger that, should a hijacker kill someone.... they will make it off the plane alive.
People have been goaded into taking actions and no longer becoming the passive sheep they once were on said plane. At least I've got to hope my fellow fliers feel so if it happens to me.
As long as you do not address the core problem, no security is going to help. To every intelligent security measure, there's comes an equally intelligent counter-measure. Nuff Said...
That seems to imply a different biometric measurement...
Tim
reading it at my work right now...
and the advert on this article gives me the following:
Forbidden
You were denied access because:
Access denied by access control list.
How perfect for this article
The people who complain about the fingerprinting are exhibiting the same paranoia as the ones who agree with it. The only difference is who they are paranoid against.
One is paranoid against the government, and the other against terrorists. It is basic background.
Some points to make:
1. Foriegn Visitors with valid documentation like VISA's and other items have been known (over 100,000 still in the US) to not return to thier respective countries when the VISA has expired.
2. US Citizens are protected against unreasonable search and siezure but NON-US citizens are not. There is a double standard, but that is the case in ALL countries.
3. We are required to have a passport and the amount of information included should also include a fingerprint. This would allow better identification for various reasons and prevent as much passport abuse (YES I HAD MINE STOLEN in CANADA of all places).
4. The fingerprints matched up against a database CAN also be used to find criminals.
5. False positives may cause some hassle but then again you can die if you walk out your door.. some risks have to be taken.
6. From a fingerprint, you cannot tell what a person looks like, or smells like, or has in thier mind. A fingerprint, picture, and name is all they have.. NOT DNA.
7. There is a difference between domestic and foriegn terrorism.. its that US Citizen double standard again.
8. Sniper and 9/11 and Earlier World Trade Center are all from foriegn terrorists.. and guess what, a lot of them were here ILLEGALLY.
The final point is my opinion here. I do think some measures are fine to put in place and this simple fingerprinting is DONE even in BANKS now to verify for checks.. so I have no problem with it.
Ask me about DNA.. and you got a line drawn. If you are a criminal and have been convicted.. then your DNA can be taken... another discussion.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
The supposed terrorists that trained at the Fla flight school trained on Cessnas.
US company Raytheon landed a 727 six times in a military base in New Mexico without any pilots on board. This was done to test equipment making future hijackings more difficult, by allowing ground control to take over the flying of a hijacked plane. [Der Spiegel, 10/28/01]
(Slashdot recently ran a story on 'upcoming' advances in flight technology that would allow for remote control. The New York Times and other media outlets ran similar stories about 'upcoming' technology after 9-11. Bush made reference to such 'upcoming' technology. According to Raytheon's press release, it existed in 2001.)
James Bamford's 2nd NSA book, "Body of Secrets," mentions a set of proposals by the Joint Chiefs (acquired via FOIA) to terrorize US citizens in a plot to provoke a politically-motivated war with Cuba. (Google "Operation Northwoods")
I have yet to see anything more than circumstantial evidence linking the "list of names" to the terrorist deed committed on 9-11. Not that it's comprehensively listed above, but there does exist just as much circumstantial evidence to suggest that the source of terrorism was either internal or known-about and orchestrated, as there is to suggest that the mystery names or Al Quaeda "did it". Why are most people willing to jump to one conclusion based on evidence but not consider the others?
Why do most goats follow the Judas?
Does anyone know what happens if you haven't got any fingers?
Oh, is that so? Please post a link to the declaration of war by Congress, I must have missed it. Also, can you tell me which country we are fighting against -- was it Eurasia or that other one I can't seem to remember? ;p
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
Basically- if I wasn't already holding a US
passport, I would cross off "visiting the US"
from my list of things to do.
I don't see how it is right to treat citizens
of other countries like common criminals; I would
not put up with it and I would boycott US
tourism.
There are lots of nice places on this planet to
visit that won't treat you like someone caught
at the scene of a crime.
Sign me "An American who loves his country but is
disgusted with his government."
The President is completely responsible for what goes on while he or she is in office. Blaming 9/11 on Clinton is like blaming Carter for high gas prices now.
Bush IS responsible for 9/11 and where's why:
1. He ordered the Air Force wing assigned to guard Washington to stand down on 9/11
2. He waited over 15 minutes after the first plane hit to stop reading to children at a photo-op before doing ANYTHING
3. Him and his family's oil business have long connections to the bin Laden family oil business (coincidence?)
4. Both of the New York bound flights crossed an Air Force base before hitting the city, when both where as many as 200 miles out of their lanes.
5. Bush has yet to respond to 9/11. Specifically, against Yemen and Saudi Arabia, the two countries that attacked us. Instead, he bombed the shit out of the two poorest war torn countries in the area, for doing nothing other than having very unpopular governments.
Bush is responsible for 9/11. The terrorists are merely pawns. He, not Clinton, ignored the calls from Chirac warning about this specific threat. He, not Clinton, was engaged in backroom business deals with the Afghanis and Bin Laden to build a pipeline though Afghanistan. That deal went bad. Bush is the president who did act accordingly after the attacks.
The two countries that did attack us escaped with impunity.
Bush is responsible for everything that has gone wrong in this country since he took office. His economic policies have devastated this community, and countless others. He is a liar (false claims about WMD), he is a cheat (using the Supreme Court to overrule a recount, what are you afriad of dubya?), he is convicted criminal (1976 DUI), a cocaine abuser and he is AWOL from the Texas Air Guard.
He is not fit to command a military that he abandoned. How dare he wear the uniform of the country when he couldn't even show up sober for service.
Screw him. He got us into a war we can't win, in a country we don't belong in. Thanks to him, either a fundamentalist Islamic state will be created in Iraq, or a new dictator will emerge.
George Bush Sr. and George dubya are the two worst presidents this country has ever had. The first created a huge mess, and ruined the economy. The latter took after his old man. When our nation was attacked, he saw an opportunity to finish his paw's evil works. Just remember, we knew Saddam had weapons of mass destruction - we have the receipt!
People from the "exempt" countries who are in the US under green cards and other semi-permanent visas (I say semi-permanent, meaning work visas and such, as opposed to general tourist or travel visas) are going to be fingerprinted as well.
As I see it this is two things:
1. It's the US government doing something to create the ILLUSION of action (it won't solve anything, but the general masses in the US will think it does).
2. It helps pressure non-exempt countries into abiding by certain US policies. "Do our bidding and we may make you exempt."
I'm over simplifying, but politics is politics.
The fingerprinting on American airports is an overreaction and a sign of paranoia...
By acting as an independent state instead of a US client state, and by electing a president (Lula) who doesn't bow to the wishes of the World Bank and the IMF, Brazil has cued itself up for a "regime change" or a "liberation."
The US usually does this in open countries by funding and instigating unrest and anti-government violence (as they did in Chile and are now doing in Venezuela). The spooks who work these kinds of projects come into the country disguised as businessmen and really don't like to have their fingerprints and photos on file there. When the unrest and violence start in Brazil (and it will), at least your country will be able to look through its records where it may just be able to identify the perpetrators.
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
The perceptible attitude of the US suddenly changed, and not for the better.
None of that justifies anything, but given that the guerilla or terrorist swims in the population as the fish swims in the sea, that sea suddenly got less hostile than it had been and things that may have been too hard to plan successfully may have become less likely to fail.
So yes, a very sudden alteration in risk could be produced by a very new president, even though the conditions in which that risk was experienced had been set up by the previous administration.
One important thing you've touched on is the character of terrorism; it's an information/propaganda war designed to use the weaknesses (and strengths) of the mass media against the populace to make them more fearful than they rationally should be.
42,116 people died in car accidents in the U.S. in 2001 and the death rate was 14 per 100,000 (see National Highway & Traffic Safety Administration). For comparison the national murder rate is only 5.5 per 100,000. And more people died in car crashes in California in 2001 than died on 9/11. Yet this doesn't make the news because it isn't dramatic enough is it?
So you're right. In addition, it's utterly pointless to put the whole country on the same level of alert. I don't think the terrorists have any targets in Peoria, Illinois. I suppose they have to make the alert national to prevent terrorists from figuring out whether the feds are onto them.
Mark my words, this is the beginning of the end for the United States. We are becoming a culture of spoon-fed MTV kids who whine about being entitled to only the best things in life and who have ADD and pay for everything with credit cards. Ironically, in our attempt to "defeat" the terrorists in an unwinnable war, we have accomplished what the terrorists wanted in the first place: the partial destabilization of our country. In combination with the rise of the MTV culture, this illness of America is likely terminal.
Rosa Parks - style.. .
This is a measure designed to delay brown-skinned people. (notice, the average skin-color in the exempt countries).
The brown-skinned people will be delayed in boarding, and thus will end up with seats in the back of the plane. Segregation, 1950's style. The way Strom Thrumond would have wanted. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Look at this pic from crossmatch, the makers of the fingerprint system.
The hand in the pic has hair and veins sticking out. It's a guys hand with a woman's fingernail.
These are the people we are trusting to "secure" our airports? It sounds like an oxymoron on par with "Microsoft Security"!
Who is this 'enemy' that attacked us 'several times,' and what does Iraq have to do with it? Besides the two Islamic terrorist bombings in the United States (both against the WTC), what are we talking about here? The Oklahoma City bombing? The anthrax letters? Please be a little more specific in who and what you are referring to.
==========
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
Having had to do the dance with INS in the process of getting my wife to the US I'd have to say that while they are definitely annoying and beaurocratic I can't see where/how you would get to compare it to prison.
(This was dealing with the US Embassy in Peru where they had designed the place to deal with the Shining Path back in their hey day.)
While the building was quite well fortified there was no oppressive feeling to it. (To top it all off we picked up her Visa on 9/11.)
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
your fingers are "digits" ;-)
Which is all I know, so I welcome more thorough and educated analysis. :)
:P) then eventually you will settle into a mutually beneficial cooperative state.
:P).
It's a variant on the strategy used in the "prisoner's dilemna"*. In that game, and here, you have a choice to make and so does your opponent. You can choose to try to benefit only yourself at the expense of your opponent, but if your opponent does the same you both suffer. If you cooperate, you both get some benefit, but less than if you choose to take and your opponent chooses to cooperate.
How do you get to the cooperative state? If you volunteer to cooperate, your opponent can take advantage of you. You have to discourage them from taking the larger reward. The solution is to do whatever they did last, every time. If they cooperate, you start to do as well. If they don't, you don't next time. If your opponent is also rational (a huge assumption in game theory, which is why it's theory
So yeah, if Brazil's goal is to get the USA to stop fingerprinting, then this is a decent strategy. Not that it will work (see parenthetical about the assumptions of game theory
I wonder what would happen if we did this with everything? What if we killed 3,000 of the Taliban and then stopped? What if, instead of bulldozing a village after a cafe bombing, Israel stopped after they'd killed the twenty or so militants needed to match the number dead? What message would it send? No, it would never work. There's more going on than a single binary decision. There are too many varied interests involved on both sides for them to resist the temptation to try to grab more for themselves. But once again, that's why it's theory!
* Ironically, the strategy does no good in the actual "prisoner's dilemna" situation, since it only works on repeated instances of the same choice.
The enemies of Democracy are
Can they use a hash of DNA? This way they will not know the privete information about you (if you are likely to develope diabetes, or if you are likely to turn out an alcoholic... or alike).
Of course, it is not going to work. There is no way fingerprinting can prevent a bunch of giggling terrorists chattering on the satellite phone about wild tales of future attacks, and then laughing while the US blunders about trying to prevent it. Al Qaeda wants fear, economic damage, and the US humbled. Satellite phone chatter is a cheap way to get it, and the idiots in Homeland Security fall for it. Or cooperate with it and the terror in America's heart that results as a way to make Bush out to be some evil conquering good guy in an election year.
You hit the nail on the head with "War on Peace". Of course the flunky of the King of Terror's favorite pet, the Mongol King George, would think Peace is the real threat. Not that Peace is amused by their antics: the last time Code Orange was invoked to hinder a peace protest, Mongol King George got dumped on and spent quality time stuck behind a snow plow!
If Peace can get one of her special ops doves to infiltrate the Pentagon (last May), perhaps she can get a human dove in the White House to save us from this mess.
"The path of peace is yours to discover for eternity."
Japanese version of "Mothra" (1961)
It sounds as though you're perfectly happy to disregard all those false positives as no big deal or, perhaps, an acceptable cost for some feeling of safety.
"Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither."
--Benjamin Franklin
doesn;t something new of this scale need a law/bill to be passed before it's implemented?
Looks like another variation of the Nolan Chart.
The basic idea of the Nolan Chart and its variations are to clump the many separate components of political opinion into TWO groups, rather than one.
Measuring their values and laying out "political position" in two dimensions more clearly shows clustering of ideologies and differences between them than collapsing the many components of opinion into a single "left-right" scale. Using only one dimension causes ideologies with a pair of extreme positions to be mashed together with middle-of-the-road milksops, obscuring major difference.
More dimensions would be better. But opinions on various subjects tend to be highly correlated. So it's easy to pick two (or three) sets where cancelation won't confuse any two popular ideologies. Also: Examining (and naming) the nature of the subjects where opinions cluster can lead to additional insight into political thought.
My personal favorite version is World's Smallest Political Quiz, which groups opinion on ten subjects into two groups of five - half on regulation of personal behavior, half on economic behavior - then displays the data with the chart rotated into a "diamond" position, so that the traditional "left-right" axis (which ends up at 45 degrees in a 2-D cartesian plot) is left-right, while a new "authoritarian-libertarian" axis appears as up-down. (Of course the "libertarian" corner is at the top. But a communist, fascist, or member of a US political party might prefer to invert it. B-) )
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. We're not talking about fingerprinting every person that comes into the USA. We're talking about people who need VISA's to get in.
r am/index.html
Therefore, if you are from Europe, Canada, Japan, Singapore, etc... where all you need is a passport, you're fine.
At least that is what CNN is reporting:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/01/05/fingerprint.prog
So relax, this is a minor inconvience for only some people, and frankly I'm surprised it took this long for us to have something like this. I would have even expected this elsewhere by now...
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
This URL appears to have been long-since changed. It seems like the BBC changed the way their entire site works..
Anyone else pull up what the poster mentioned?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/37021.stm
For anyone that is interested in taking a look..
wee! Replying to my own post! :)
Great post!
No interaction? I would have thought you would at least need to put your finger on it.
But the matter is well-settled by the Supreme Court, i.e., that the Bill of Rights does not attach to non-citizens outside of the territory of the United States.
Don't you think there is a reason that the (non-American) war on terror detainees are in a camp in a leased base in Cuba? Clearly, the Bush Administration did its legal research on the issue.
Trust me, IAAL.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
To get your German license, you will need official proof-of-address (Anmeldbecheinigung) and your passport. No fingerprints, but they have a good lock on who you are and where you live.
... we just thought it was cool that we got to be fingerprinted.
Exactly. When I first lived in Germany (1987) and had to get an Anmeldbescheinigung I was shocked. The idea of having to check in with the local constablary every time I moved (I worked a summer job in one city outside of Cologne, and went to school in Darmstadt, so I had to do this twice) of course invited me to compare that with my relative anonymouty in the United States. (Registering my boom box and paying a radio tax struck me as big brotherish and weird, too. Actually, that still strikes me as an unfortunate approach to funding of the public broadcasters, but compared to what is done by industry to our private sphere in the US, it is nevertheless quite benign).
Flash forward seventeen years (2004): I've been fingerprinted five (5) times (!!!) for my job: twice at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, twice at the Chicago Board of Options Exchange, and once at the Chicago Board of Trade. Then there was that interesting opportunity in grade school, when a local law enforcement officer came and taught us a little about the police and the FBI, then offered to let anyone who wanted to be fingerprinted. At 10 years of age (IIRC) none of us were too aware of the privacy implications
By my second stay in Germany (working a summer job in Leverkusen) I'd come to appreciate the greater degree of freedom and privacy afforded my in Germany vs. that of the United States. No selling my phone number to telemarketers, no fingerprinting, nothing obvious or Big Brotherish as we've come to expect in the states.
Most Americans, upon finding to their surprise that they are more free in many places abroad than they are in their own land, find it to be truly ironic. I merely find it sand, to have seen a country slip so far toward authoritarianism in so short a time. Alas, I haven't worked in Germany since the mid-nineteen nineties, so emigration there is nigh unto impossible.
I do miss the privacy though, and the freedom.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Just because it doesn't explicitly say privacy doesn't mean the idea isn't in there. I've heard this a lot, but just how, exactly, are you going to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" WITHOUT some measure of privacy?
But the matter is well-settled by the Supreme Court, i.e., that the Bill of Rights does not attach to non-citizens outside of the territory of the United States.
SCOTUS can also be wrong. If you really are a lawyer: Hepburn v. Griswold. Nuf said. As the Consitution does not say that the government is exempt from it outside our borders, I don't see how you can make an argument that the government is exempt from it's restrictions outside of the U.S. If it is, why don't we just make the Iraqi's into slaves to rebuild the infrastructure?
Clearly, the Bush Administration did its legal research on the issue.
And I'm sure mp3.com did lots of legal research on Beam It, too.
You say "The purpose of the Consitution, undeniably, is to protect the American people". I say, you still don't get it. The purpose of the Constitution is to define what the people have said the various branches of the US Government are allowed to do, what they are required to do, and what they are forbidden to do. The Bill of Rights does not GRANT PROTECTION to the people so much as it DENIES POWER to the government. You, like many other people, are confusing cause and effect. Power flows from the people to the government, not the other way around. Read the Virginia Declaration of Rights if you are still confused as to the concepts on which the US Constitution is based.
The stated purpose of the Constitution is to "form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity". Madison, Mason, and company rightfully felt that the biggest threat to Liberty was an out-of-control government, and that the best way to be secured against the danger of maladministration was by STRICTLY LIMITING WHAT THE GOVERNMENT IS ALLOWED TO DO.
The Fifth Amendment says "No person shall be [...] deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" It dosen't say "except if they're just visiting". The Sixth Amendment says "the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial". It doesn't say, "unless they're accused of being an 'unlawful combatant' or a 'terrorist'". Nowhere in the Bill of Rights does it say "the Citizens", or "the Taxpayers", or even "the Residents". It says "the People". As in each and every man, woman, and child, period, end of freaking story. You know, the same people who were all "created equal, [...] endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."
The Constitution does not grant the President or Congress the power to pick and chose whose rights are protected and whose are not, nor does it give Congress the authority to pass legislation granting itself or the President any additional powers beyond those enumerated within the Constitution. Additional powers may only be granted via a duly ratified Constitutional amendment. The fact that we the people have allowed Congress and the President to usurp power they are not entitled to just shows how ignorant and apathetic most Americans have become. We need to wake up and put our government back into it's rightful place.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
I came back from christmas break in Belgium yesterday. I got printed in Atlanta. I was pleasantly surprised that the process went pretty smooth. Smoother than I had expected...
;-)
;-)
but they had to carry in the vaseline in my case. Apparently, my fingers don't leave good fingerprints.. a good (?) thing to know if you don't want to bother with gloves when killing someone
Anyway, it took about 2 minutes in my case, instead of the normal 20 seconds. The positive side is though, because the customs officer was distracted by the malfunctioning, he forgot to ask me about stuff I was importing. I successfully smuggled in 5 bottles of wine and about 3 kilo's of Belgian chocolate
-- debian linux - vim powered
This new fingerprinting will only allow the government keep track of us even more.
True. Expect the fingerprinting to be extended to US citizens who even travel to one of the countries on the fingerprint list - AFTER the elections of course. A national ID card - one of the wet dreams of the Bush administration.
Considering all the terrorists of 9/11 came into this country legally(as far as I know, dont quote me and tell me if Im wrong) this would not have stopped them from getting on the plane.
Correct. The program will have to be expanded to fingerprint screening BEFORE passengers get on the planes, so expect US Customs and Immigration to begin screening in foreign airports and in transit airports. Of course if they can get the foreign governments to do it then US citizens will not be exempted. I suspect the plan is to share the fingerprint information the same way as Echelon data is shared. The Brits spy on American communications and the Americans spy on British communications and then they simply pool the data - circumventing domestic spying laws very effectively in both countries.
Can you tell I trust this admnistration to protect the Constitution about as far as I can throw the lot of them?
What the US truly found is that it had 1 ally at the time of 9/11. Not because Britain was willing to go to war; I agree it was ill-advised. Rather, because France and Germany used the time before the war as an opportunity for their own domestic political gains rather than actually working diplomatically for a solution.
It's disheartening, but I'd say that the fall of the CCCP marked the end of the western alliance, as petty bullshit all around began the moment we didn't have an enemy to unite us. And since terrorist groups in the middle east isn't attacking Europe, France and Germany don't give a damn, which is very unfortunate and selfish.
As for making attacks more likely, well, there haven't been any, and I'd say they would if they could. Indeed, I'd say we pissed them off lately. However, if we are attacked as on 9/11 simply for existing, it's hard to say our risk was low previously.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Oh yes...Very usefull...
So, when you learn they overstayed their visas, I mean it happens when they are trying to leave, no ?
So, you expell them before they leave by themselves, or do you keep them in confinement on US territory because they don't have the right to be on US territory ?
Advanced Philo Major required, please post analysis in answer 8p
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
You're a terrorist trying to get him to take the coin out of his pocket
"We have got to make Stan understand the importance of voting, because he'll definitely vote for our guy." - South Park
You have to do more than read the article. You have to get past the mistaken assumption (made by "officials" quoted in the article, and not questioned by the article's authors) that a chance of a false positive for a group is the same as the chance of a false positive for each individual group member. Alas, most people don't know that much probablity theory.