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.

Comments

Crap

[Scarblac]

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.

Re:In Soviet Russia... too true...

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

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."

You won't have problems giving your data to Russia

[gorbachev]

"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.

Look up "Police State".

[khasim]

So far, from the opinions I have gathered, being required to show ID and other papers arbitrarily demanded by authorities ranks pretty highly.

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 worries about war crimes

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

BushCo have already pardoned themselves. Or tried to anyway.

Stopping Terror -- A New Perspective on Freedom

[GrumblyStuff]

It's about keeping enough people scared long enough to completely change what it means to be "free" in America.

Just as creepy as 1984 seems, get a load of this.

When one maniac can wipe out a city of twenty million with a microbe developed in his basement, a new approach to law enforcement becomes necessary. Every citizen of the world must be placed under surveillance. That means sky-cams at every intersection, computer-mediated analysis of every phone call, e-mail, and snail-mail, and a purely electronic economy in which every transaction is recorded and data-mined for suspicious activity.

We are close to achieving this goal. Some would say that human liberty has been compromised, but the reality is just the opposite. As surveillance expands, people become free from danger, free to walk alone at night, free to work in a safe place, and free to buy any legal product or service without the threat of fraud. One day every man and woman will quietly earn credits, purchase items for quiet homes on quiet streets, have cook-outs with neighbors and strangers alike, and sleep with doors and windows wide open. If that isn't the tranquil dream of every free civilization throughout history, what is?

-- Anna Navarre, Agent, UNATCO

I played this game as a teenager. It was cool then. It's still cool now. ...but it's getting fucking scarier all the time.

Privacy in US

[mldqj]

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.

Re:Europe and Privacy

[Jeremiah Stoddard]

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...

Re:Dominate. Intimidate. Control.

[xtracto]

A very interesting piece about security on airports can be found here

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:

On March 21, 2003, Cleveland Hopkins International Airport was placed under a 40-minute lockdown, prohibiting all passenger entries or exits and all plane departures. TSA agents hit the alarm when they spotted a little toy gun on a child's belt buckle in a carry-on bag.
The TSA confiscated the child's belt buckle. Spokesman
Rick DeChant announced, "Had Mom or Dad helped this kid pack, this [airport lockdown] could have been avoided."

Or this:

  On March 8, 2003, a terminal at the Hartford, Connecticut, airport was evacuated after a screener was caught taking a late afternoon nap by an X-ray machine.

or this:

After the flight landed, the marshals nailed another terrorist suspect: a physician and retired U.S. Army major named Robert Rajcoomar. He was handcuffed and taken into custody because, as TSA spokesman David Steigman later explained it, he "had been observing too closely."

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.

Lets return the favour to USians

[johanw]

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.