US Expands Fingerprint and Mugshot Program for Visitors

prakslash writes "The US State Department has expanded its anti-terrorist fingerprinting program to include visitors from close US allies such as the UK, Australia, France, Germany and Japan. Everytime a visitor enters or leaves the US, they will have to get their mugshot and fingerprints taken - something that used to be mainly limited to your local police precinct. More news can be found here and here. In addition to the huge costs involved, one has to wonder if this will affect tourism to this country." Hmmm, a huge database of digital mugshots and digital fingerprints, which will be kept forever - hope we have enough RAM to search through it quickly and constantly.

Comments

A tourist's view

[Psychic Burrito]

As a swiss guy that visited the US four times already as a tourist, I can clearly say that I wont visit this nice country again after these measures are in effect.

Maybe I plan a last trip before they start, but after that, I'll have to wait until you get back to friendlier ways to handle visitors. Sorry.

Re:No way !

[Shakrai]

Second, the US was only acting to save it's own skin. They didn't join until they were directly attacked, and frankly if their input was so important, and germany was going to be able to unite europe, there would have been nothing the US could do to stop it when the germans came after them next.

Directly attacked by the Japanese. And yet we put that war on hold and focused our primary efforts on defeating Nazi Germany per our existing agreements with the British.

Nothing to stop them when the Germans came after us next? The Germans wouldn't have gotten out of Russia alive regardless of a second front or not. There was no second front when the Russians crushed the Germans at Stalingrad. That was the end of Nazi Germany -- not D-Day. The only thing I'd point out is that if we didn't invade Europe France would probably be under Russian occupation (or at least a satellite state thereof) to this day.

I'd also point out that the only reason we were attacked at Pearl Harbor is because we cut the Japanese off from their oil. Why did we do this? We did this to protest the Japanese annexation of Indo-China. That's right -- we went to war with (what was up until that time a fairly friendly country -- at least to the US) Japan to protect European colonial interests in Asia because you couldn't protect them yourselves because you were too busy fighting with each other.

Third, why should the US get some special free pass for all time on their insane foreign and domestic policy? Why can't people criticize a country that assasinates elected leaders, sends a Canadian citizen to Syria to be tortured, invades Iraq without permission putting the world at risk of increased terrorist attacks, etc.

Please tell me what elected leaders we have assassinated. I follow the news and I haven't heard of that. We had the right to invade Iraq under the principal of self-defense if they had WMDs and the ability to deliver them to the United States. Of course the WMDs turned out to be a lie and the Bush administration will pay the price for doing that but if you believed that they had WMDs and wanted to use them on us then we had every right to do what we did.