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US–EU Flight Talks Collapse
fantomas writes, "The BBC is reporting that the current US-EU talks over data collected from people flying to the USA collapsed last night. US Customs and Border Protection is insisting on access to the airlines' records and 34 pieces of data to be collected from each passenger. This data has been gathered since 2004, but only as a temporary measure. The European Court of Justice threw out the temporary agreement and set a deadline of Sept. 30 to arrive at a new one. Airlines that refuse to hand over information to US authorities may be fined up to $6,000 per passenger, and the passengers themselves held up in immigration for hours. Good for the EU on protecting the privacy of their citizens? Or are they hindering the War on Terror?" An EU official said that the EU wanted to give away less data, while the US wanted more.
Crap, I'm flying to Costa Rica from the EU this Thursday, the plane will make a stop in Miami. I hope the customs checks aren't going to be more insane than they've already been recently.
That said, the US can't really complain too loudly if EU carriers stop giving them all the info they want now - it's clearly against EU privacy laws, and apparently at least one EU carrier (Air Italy) has never given all the info and wasn't prevented from landing, so it would be hypocritical to refuse landing rights immediately.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Julia, Are You Awake
Read it
"Orwell was writing about the reality of 1948, with the layers of appearance peeled-off. The shallower chisel-marks of his own time were cast into sharper bas-relief by supposing an arc that played 36 years into his future.
And here we are. Here we have been."
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
"When you fly into a country that is under threat of suicidal hijackers and other evildoers"
So you won't object too much then when the Russian officials demand all your data then? You do know that they've had a bit of a terrorist problem there for quite some time, right?
Or China. See, they claim the same thing. Falun Gong, all those Tibetan monks and any other organization fighting to topple the Communists. All terrorists. And that's why the Chinese Government needs to know the addresses of all the Taiwanese people you've ever been in contact with. Funny how the ones living in China keep dissappearing right after you flew in...
I have a better solution.
In Soviet US you belong to the Government.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
EU should go a WTO tribunal and demand compensation over the any US fines or loss of revenue to its airlines. The Bush administration has given the finger to international standards and international law and will continue to do so until the other nations of world stand up for themselves
And what makes you think that the current administration would give a damn about what the WTO says? Considering how the Bush administration has flaunted its allies, the UN and international law time after time over the past six years, agreeing to the compensation you propose seems like the very last thing that would ever happen. Since they'll just ignore any WTO rulings that aren't in their favor, it's a rather lousy way for Europe to stand up to them.
How about EU collecting the same data from US passengers?
Symmetricality should should be a precondition for such a measure.
It is the transfer of power from the citizen (government of the People, by the People, for the People) to the Police.
In a Free society, the police are restricted in the exercise of their authority to defined circumstances. The traffic cop can pull you over if you're in your car.
When the police can stop you and demand identification at any time, you have lost your Freedom. The police now have control over you.
Who do you think the police will be stopping more often?
a. Fat, ugly, old women
b. Attractive young women
Think about your answer to that. Then think about if your wife, sister, daughter was cute and young and whether you'd want her in that situation.
No, it's my position. I don't care if the terrorists win. If the terrorists win, there'll be no more War on Terror, which means we win too. The War on Terror has caused nothing but problems - tax money and numerous civil liberties, gone like the fucking wind.
ResidntGeek
Indeed, but do you think Russia would have given a rat's ass about Britain and Ireland falling to the Nazis ? No, if the USA hadn't stepped in, the soviets would have "won" an essentially bilateral Third Reich/Soviet war, and inherited control of all ex-Nazi territories in the end game, very likely including, by that stage, Britain and Ireland.
Well, of course with the newly-fascistic USA having expanding and permanent-looking military bases in both Britain and even formerly-neutral Ireland, maybe it's the case that it just took a bit longer for us to fall under the dominion of a hostile power, but it seems that we did and do enjoy rather more autonomy than say, the Ukraine did under soviet dominion !
EU airlines in US Courts, US Software companies in EU courts - I'm prepared to predict how this might go.
BushCo have already pardoned themselves. Or tried to anyway.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Just as creepy as 1984 seems, get a load of this.
I played this game as a teenager. It was cool then. It's still cool now.
> There must be better ways, and there are. For instance, Gandhi is an example.
This is not only wrong, it is the sort of fallacy that keeps the ruthless in power. Gandhi's hunger strike was successful because it caused mass riots. Similarily, Martin Luther King is a pretty face that we put on the fact suppression of the blacks was becoming too expensive. For a more recent example, look at the Paris suburb riots of last year. Those people had asked for better standards of living for a long time, through voting and petitions and serious talk and citizen initiatives, with no substantial results over decades. When the riots started, it took less than two weeks for a new legislative measure to launch, which is improving everyone's life in french suburbs right now. Violence works because it increases the cost of the status quo, thus making policy changes more attractive.
Now I'm not a revolutionary, just a sociology geek. I'm not saying you should finally put those quarter of a billion privately owned firearms to work. I'm just asking you to look past the "peaceful resistance" FUD and get some understanding of the situation.
blow your mind already
Two conferences.
One job offer in California.
A good friends wedding.
A vacation in Florida.
Those are the opportunities and experiences I have reluctantly and bitterly had to turn down
in the last 24 months because I simply will not travel to the USA ever again.
Those are the economic losses to your country and mine.
Last time I flew USA I saw a woman in tears because the security guards pulled her baby
out of the pushchair and literally shook it while it was screaming, it was like something
out of "Schindlers List"
Dark times indeed.
Please, when you guys finally drag Bush and his sinister cronies out for public execution can you
stick their heads on spikes in Washington and leave them there to rot for a few weeks as a warning to
future tyrants who would try and turn the "Land of the Free" into a third class tin-pot dictatorship.
Here's the thing. If I have a few grams of a strong alkali metal, and ask the stewardess for a glass of water, that plane isn't staying in the air long. Since something deep inside my soul tells me most dogs aren't trained to sniff alkali metals, I have a feeling that could be a very bad thing.
What's my point? Since it's impossible to protect against even a significant number of ways that a person who wants to die can destroy an aircraft, isn't it better to just scale back to rational, sensible security measures, and give people back their freedom to travel as they please, forced to deal with the fact that with freedom comes the possiblity of death?
I don't fly anymore. The thought of being treated like a prison inmate just isn't appealing. I'd rather die from a rubidium bomb than life treated like a terrorist suspect for the grand offense of wanting to fly from one unspectacular city to another.
It's been a long time.
When you can join a plausible need (border enforcement) with an unnecessary, implausible and/or unpopular one (national identification card), you've got what's called a cover story. In the 1970's, this was called crypto-fascism. Joining a popular cause to an unpopular one in a way thats difficult or impossible to separate:
I mean, verifiable ID is not a bad idea, I'm not against it. It's just that, where this is already being done (New York State for instance), its being handled by contractors, and, as far as I can tell there are no limits on what they can do with your data. Are they keeping track of everywhere you're scanned? Will this information be admissible in court? Enough questions to fly a few jumbo jets through.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
3000 people? Look at the annual death toll from cancer, heart disease, diabetes, or auto accidents sometime. Where would all that money really be better spent?
An excellent point, and one I've made repeatedly. If one tenth of the money (probably a lot less, but never mind) spent in Iraq was instead spent on improving, say, the 1% most dangerous traffic intersections in the country (okay, roads are a state issue, not federal, but work with me here), then we would be saving 3000 lives every single year, easily. Or if the money was put into medical infrastructure. Or anti-smoking initiatives. You know, whatever, the point is that while 9/11 is a tragedy that we should not forget, we most certainly do need to move on.
Terrorism is a problem, and we should address it, but if our goal is protecting the safety of the American people we're doing it in about the least efficient way possible. When we take this one problem of terrorism and make it not just a problem we should try to address but instead the single defining problem of our existence, we're really just being fucking idiots.
While 9/11 may be the single biggest terrorist attack in history, the US has not had the sort of long-term major issue with terrorism that, say, England has, and somehow they managed to make it through decades of the IRA without focusing on it to the exclusion of all other issues. We have a seriously warped perspective about what it means to be "safe."
I am the man with no sig!
But can air travel security get back to the way it was in 2000, when it was fun to fly and I didn't feel like I was going through an old Soviet country or third world dictatorship?
We are Americans damnit, everyone knows most of these silly rules do not make us safer, all those confiscated bottles out of people's shaving kits are not carted away by a bomb squad, they are dumped in the trash. If anyone on the security squads believed this stuff was dangerous they would be careful of how they dispose of what they confiscate, they aren't because everyone knows what they are confiscating is NOT dangerous.
There is no feeling quite like walking onto a plane with my backpack full of camera gear, a few days clothes and a shaving kit, stowing my pack under the seat in front of me, flying, getting off the plane and walking out of the airport into a new city with money in my wallet and everything I need for a week on my shoulder. This is part of what technology can do for people who are inclined to travel this way, a better use than collecting data on people who fly, and creating false threats to justify employing last weeks burger flippers as "security" and telling people they can't take toothpaste and shampoo on a plane. My apologies for any spelling errors, I am tired, as can be seen by my unorganized rant.
I went to San Francisco from Beijing to attend an academic conference this June. I was travelling with only a backpack, which somehow made me a suspecious target. At the SFO airport an officer demanded to check my backpack. I was carrying a digital camera. Without asking for my permission, and even before I realized what he wanted to do, he already browsed through tens of the photos stored in the camera. I was shocked. Although there was nothing really private there, that was simply unacceptable.
A few days after I went back to China. A very good friend wanted to buy a new DC, so she played with my camera for a while. She politely asked me if it was okay for her to look at the pictures before switching to playback mode.
So much for "respecting other people's privacy" in US.
I don't know about the rest of Europe, but if they act in any similar manner, then any praise for their protection of their citizens' privacy rights in this seems pretty silly to me.
There is a slightly different focus on privacy preferences in Europe than in the United States. It's also rooted in the fact that each country has comfort zones due to cultural issues (as far as I can tell, Germans are less camera friendly, French less ID card friendly; but the Germans are ok with ID cards because they're comfortable with anything that they perceive as making bureaucracy work better/faster.)
But on the whole, I'd say that it's just straight up hypocrisy; most of the EU privacy regulations were crafted to deal with how companies and other nations dealt with EU citizen information, and not so much how EU governments collected, retained and manipulated the data.
I am (and I suspect most other Americans are) pretty ignorant of modern day socio-political Europe. News media in the United States is pretty, well, American, and the mentions of European nations usually involve stories that affect Americans. So we hear about the "European Union" in negotiations with the US over something or other, or about the euro vs. the dollar in economic news, and that's our exposure to present-day Europe.
I wouldn't say we're totally clueless... in the sense of geography, I can point out any European country on a map. I know some world history, and thus at least a skeletal outline of the history of the larger European nations. "Ethnocentric" isn't even quite the right word for it -- I read German literature and enjoy Italian opera. It's just that a lot of us don't have a clue about modern Europe unless we've traveled that way.
Part of it comes from being across an ocean, I guess. We let the international businessmen and politicians work out business and political deals, and the general populous gets to remain blissfully ignorant of the details. Imagination makes up for the lack of information, and thus you get the prejudices I explained. The only way I know how things actually work over across the Atlantic is via the occasional online discussion. So perhaps the internet is doing more than just rotting my brains.
Hope you find this somewhat informative... I definitely learned a thing or two between you and the couple of others who responded to my post...
I've long believed that the real "land of freedom" is Europe, with the possible exception of Turkey. Short of denying the existence of the Holocaust, there's not much you can say anywhere here to get arrested. We have real choice when going to elections (e.g., in the 2005 election in Norway, a full seven parties each got more than 5% of the votes).
Hey, that was a great read. Are you from the USA? if you are, then accept my pitty. Really, if all of what is written there is true then there is no doubt that you have already lost your "war on terror".
Really, when this kind of things happen:
Or this:
or this:
They are clear signals that people in your country are completely terrorized. You have been terrorized by your own goverment. As other people already wrote, I avoid at all costs to pass have anything to do with USA. I travel from UK to Mexico quite often. The first time I went to UK was with KLM. I do not have an USA Visa and really I am not eager to get it. Next christmas I will flight to Mexico, I was looking at the prices and it is quite cheap to flight UK - Mexico via Chicago, but there is no way I will go trough all the hassle of getting a Visa to let the USA government get my profile.
Just as a side comment. Long ago, I believe it was between 1990 and 1995, an aunt went to USA for whatever reason, when was returning, they stopped her before boarding her plain because my grandmother, who had traveled to USA 10 years ago or something, appeared as if she had never left the USA. They were trying to make my aunt say were was my grandmother "hiding" in the USA. After several hours of questions I believe they let her go.
It turns out (after some famility talk) that when my grandmother flew to USA, she forgot to hand a paper she had to give to in the USA to mark her leave.
One of the things I learnt from that is the amount of information they DO have about you and me. I mean, we (our familiy) is in no way notable. We are middle class Mexicans. My grandmother was also a typical Juana Seis-Pack, nothing fancy. We were surprised to know how did they know my aunt was related to my grandmother (they did know before they started asking her).
It is because of that among lots of things that I dont want to put a foot in USA. If you see my comments I really have said harsh things against your government, and I am sure that if I put a foot in USA they will get me thinking I am some kind of terrorist for whatever reason and you know what? I wont give them that joy.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I suggest we return the "favour" like the Brasilians did: they separated all US citizens on airports and demanded a lot of forms to be filled in and fingerprints taken. Some that protested too loud were sent back to where they came from. This method seemed to help reduce stupid US demands, so the EU should consider it. After all, it wouldn't be the first American CIA operatives that kidnapped people on EU soil. Better register those potential threats to national security thouroughly.