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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.
Papers please.
It's every bit as nonsensical as the war on drugs.
Neither of them are supply-side problems, and attacking the supply side is utterly ludicrous, and just reduces our civil liberties. You know, those things that make America a great place?
If we really wanted to stop terrorism, we'd work on solving the problem from a social position. You have to understand why people hate you so much in order to fix the problem.
The war on terror isn't about being effective, it's about making people feel like we're doing something. Well, we're doing something alright, we're eroding our liberties until the terrorists have won.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
This is all fine, unless you're in the UK, in which case the government has conveniently made an arrangement for airlines to give the US all the information they want legally, circumventing the EU law on a technicality. It's good to know that Tony is independent of George's dog-handler these days, isn't it?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
What on earth do they need our email addresses for?! I fail to see how this is relevant security information, especially considering how easy it is to set up a new email alias, and how easy it is to fake an email.
Don't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
They left out the most important one..
[arnold]
"Who is your daddy, and what does he do?"
[/arnold]
Guys, I'm not saying the EU is perfect, but can you people in the USA please SMARTEN THE FUCK UP and kick out the junta now controlling your government? Yeah, "you" stepped in to europe and saved our asses from the Nazis. But that was OVER HALF A CENTURY AGO now. Things have changed.
Maybe we will be able to return the favour, if things get too bad over there, but I wouldn't count on it. Anyway, you didn't step in in europe until the situation had already degenerated into bloody war, and I suspect if we even tried to step in militarily before that point, all we'd do is make you fight the wrong enemy - i.e. us!
Well, I guess this particular move doesn't matter to me much, because until there's "regime change" in the USA, there's no way in hell I'm going there again anyway!
Land of the "free"? Don't make me laugh.
That doesn't sound right at all!
More seriously, here's some of the data they're talking about (from the article)
I also found this passage interesting:
I'm not exactly a friend of the airlines, but it seems like they're screwed either way.
... turning to the 3-D map, we see an unmistakable con
I'm not sure if this was meant as a joke or not, in either case, it raises an important issue.
If you ever have an opportunity to talk with someone who lived in a soviet country, I highly recommend asking them what tool of oppression featured most highly in their day-to-day lives.
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 an infringement of privacy and limits your ability to conduct your own business without being scrutinized by your neighbors (or worse your local constabulary).
Every time I have to show my drivers license at the airport I have a chuckle at the inane pointlessness of it. But in truth I should be pissed off. Why does the flight attendant need to know who I am? What difference does it make who I am? They're certainly not protecting me from terrorists because the last batch of terrorists all had perfectly legitimate ID which they used! It is an information grab by Big Brother, plain and simple.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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..."
Neither of them are supply-side problems, and attacking the supply side is utterly ludicrous, and just reduces our civil liberties. You know, those things that make America a great place?
Pardon? Have you that little background of our nation's history? "Civil rights" is hardly something that America has gotten right.
Take slavery, for instance. The first 80 to 100 or so years of American history were about completely denying certain racial groups any significant rights in large portions of the nation. Even after the Civil War started to change the status quo, things took many decades to improve. It wasn't until the 1950s and 1960s, nearly 200 years after the founding of America, that such groups started to get the rights they deserved from the very onset.
Women weren't in much better of a situation. They weren't allowed to vote from the early 1800s until 1920. South Carolina didn't ratify the 19th Amendment until 1969!
Of course, we can't forget the Japanese-American internment camps run by the US during WWII. I'll let you do your own research on those camps, since the whole subject is far too massive to describe adequately here.
Today we still see much antagonism directed towards homosexuals.
What we're seeing now just follows with the trends we have witnessed over all of America's history. A lot of people brag about how great their civil liberties are, but a quick analysis of the situation shows that what they say just isn't the case. Again and again over the entire history of the US, various groups have had their civil liberties stripped or not even granted.
Sure, America is far better than many nations. But it's very naive to think that America's history with respect to civil liberties is special in any way. More often than not we find that other nations offered various civil liberties far before America did, and often in a manner that was far more inclusive.
If you have not done anything wrong you have nothing to worry about
Ok you convinced me, I won't fly to the USA. I don't see any reason why a goverment should be allowed snoop in my private life "just to make sure I'm not a terrorist". Do they think terrorists are dumb enough to say "No, please only one way tickets and I don't need a method of leaving the airport. And please only a light meal, I don't want to blow myself up with a full stomach. But first I'll clear out my account and donate everything to a well-know extremist organistion." *sigh*
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
my point is not that halal meals should be indicated to the americans (pretty f'n far from that, actually). my point is simply that america would profile muslims, but this particular item (food choice) only allows them to profile 16 year old girls and rastas (please accept my hyperbole). outside of a mad powergrab, what is the point of this?
i cannot begin to imagine the thought process that lead to this filtering.
once again, a great example of regulations that will have no positive effect on terrorism, which can only cause great discomfort for the majority, and further weaken any notions of individual liberty.
and before any of you go on about how an airplane (or shopping mall, or street corner, or toilet, or your front lawn, etc.) is not private space, let me simply point out that at least without the collection of this data, my being there is not the grounds for the wet dream of some analyst. but now it is, thanks to the greatest democracy the world has ever known.
The EU has data protection laws and should stick to them. The US shouldn't be able bully the rest of the world to ignoring its laws. If this shuts down transatlantic travel, so be it. 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
"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
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.
I live in a popular tourist destination in America and one thing I've learned is that most of my counrtymen are complete morons. Wait. That's an insult to morons. People ask me, and I'm not making this up, "Do you'all take American money?" Or say assinine things like "You'all speak really good English!" No shit, asshole. This is the USA!
Now, imagine these knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers scared out of their puny, defective little minds and you have some idea of the average American. Too scared and stupid to think straight.
Makes me want to vomit.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Wow, good thing they dont do this to people crossing the US\Mexico border or my porch would have never gotten built.
Good, finally we have started to stand up to the insanity of frivolous data collection. There are just to many unknown factors here. How long is the data stored (probably forever), who will have access to it once it reaches US Shores (TIA?), what will they do with it, how will it be processed and cross referenced. A near endless line of question could really follow here.
How come it appears to be a very one sided transfer of data, after all we don't get the same information about americans travelling to Europe as we are expected to send over, do we?. Which is odd since we have had way more terrorist attacks on european soil then have ever taken place in the USA.
Since this is all carried out in the cause of preventing terrorism I do wonder if this will really stop any terrorist? Doubtful, if anything they have just given them a list of things to stay clear off if you want to slide under the digital radar. I'll eat porkchops or fish, buy a return ticket (even thou there will be no return), i'll pay via creditcard and generally provide the system with non suspicious information.
But if it stopped just one terrorist wouldn't it be worth it? When the violation of millions is justified for a single success I don't wanna play no more. I haven't been to America since pre 9-11 and quite frankly I don't feel any great urgency to return either, not for biz or pleasure.
If the EU can just stand firm and hold its ground I think we'll be the winner here, after all we'll loose far less economically then the USA will when others realise the same.
We won't miss privacy until its gone and then its to late cause it's just to easy to take away but very hard (if not impossible) to reclaim.
I'm sure they would gladly give up data for U.S. passengers. Does the EU want it? No.
A very interesting piece about security on airports can be found here
i on.billofrights.html and I wonder which ones still are working amendments.
So when are the people stand up and make some more tea in Boston? Or do you believe that the second amendment was just so you go squirrel hunting?
Looking at http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitut
1. Sort of
2. Sort of
3. Yes
4. Nope
5. Nope
6. Sorry, no
7. Not sure
8. No
9. Not sure
10. Well, they say "or", so I would say yes on a technicality.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I've heard time and again about ubiquitous cameras in Britain... 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. Perhaps I'm wrong?
BushCo have already pardoned themselves. Or tried to anyway.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
How about a rational one? Terrorists are not an army-they are an international organized crime syndicate. Those have been, and would be, handled perfectly well through good intelligence and police work. Just like always.
Oh, and (mod away!) I don't particularly care that they blew up the WTC's. 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?
Finally, not everyone who hates the Republicans loves the Democrats. We'd not have political parties at all if I had my way.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
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.
So far, from the opinions I have gathered, being required to show ID and other papers arbitrarily demanded by authorities ranks pretty highly.
This is why the flap about illegal immigration in the U.S. is so insidious. The only way to "secure the border" is to require all people on U.S. soil to carry ID all the time. Otherwise the border becomes a single point of failure, and once you're in you can get away with anything because in a free country everything that is not forbidden is permitted.
In the old Soviet Union everything that was not permited was forbidden, leaving people in a situation where they had to ask permission to do almost anything. I worked with a Soviet Georgian in the early '90's whom at first didn't understand that there was no form you had to fill out to make a long distance phone call. In the Soviet lab he'd worked in previously the procedure for making a long distance call was to file for permission, specifying who you were going to call and why, and then you were allowed access to the phone when (if) permission was granted.
This kind of routine intervention and restriction of citizen's lives is the eyes of some the only way to keep the country "safe". But others might ask: is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be bought at the price of chains and slavery?.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
it is moslem in most european countries.
Were talking about tourists and business travellers not immigrants. If they were coming to live in the US sure - but going on a holiday? Europeans flying to the US are not that big on emigrating to the US. We usually have far better lives back home than the US can offer (income/benefits/democracy).
Since several of the languages commonly used by Muslims, like Arabic, typically indicate consonants rather than vowels, and since there are several dialects and accents used by speakers of some of the most commonly spoken languages in the Muslim world, when transcribing directly to English, choices between English o and u, a and e, and other similar pairs are rarely set in stone. Similarly, many of the consonants are transcribed in different ways: kh, k, and qa and qu are all commonly used for both the Arabic letters qaf and kaf. That's why (in English) one sees a variety of spellings of proper names of people and items particular to Islam, such as the Koran (or Qur'an).
So, one may find a Muslim writing (in English) "Muslim", "Moslem", "Musulman" (from the Turkish, Farsi, Urdu, and Hindi), "Musliman" (from the Bosnian) , and so forth.
"grammar nazi"
This is a point of orthography, not grammar.
>1. What would have been a better response to Middle East Terrorists destroying the 2 tallest building in the world, right in NYC?
well, considering the WTC hasn't been the tallest building in the world (or even the us) since 1973.
I would consider spending billions more on education a better start.
for the price of the war in Iraq we could have built to World trade centers in every single state (well maybe not hawaii, with their earth conditions) and still had resources left over to kill the actuall terorists.
The "War on Terror" is mythological propganda. The real war is religious fundamentalists vs. religious fundamentalists. *snarky*
> That's pretty much all the rights you have at someone else's border: to go home.
Agreed, as an individual that's all the rights you have.
What's irritating is that governments don't have the guts to insist on reciprocity with the US.
Brazil did - and started fingerprinting Americans coming in.
Britain, on the other hand, instead enforced a law that let's you be extradited to the US for 'crimes' that were committed in the UK and aren't even crimes here.... reciprocity?
no taxation without representation!
It's a shame that, so many times, politics make people or businesses play piggie in the middle.
The two legal systems have a stand off, and in the process airlines, which were previously
able to do business without fear of fines, now risk $6000 per passenger fines.
Now, I imagine that this would be a hollow threat, as the airline industry would have
a powerful enough lobby to make sure the correct phone calls are made. However, so many
other industries would be hung out to dry in a situation like this.
The thing is, what is going to be the net gain for the US, besides gathering lots of
data about other people.
From the perspective out an outsider, I have seen the US go from being flavour of the
month (in the early 90's) to being somewhere people are fairly indifferent to, to a place
some people are openly dispising.
In my next incarnation, I hope to come back as a code monkey.
Fucking orthography nazis.
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.
I have lived in Soviet Union and can't say it's true.
I have NEVER carried my paper unless I was going to travel by air or conducted business with bank or goverment agency. You didn't need your paper otherwise. Militia (police) didn't stop you at random. You didn't need paper to travel by train, tickets didn't have a names on it. All this shit about carry your identification started at beginning of 90th, when SU sease to exist.
So right now in USA we have more restricted movement then in Soviet Union, except "locked" ("closed") cities, that ytou have to have special pass to go in, unless you lived there. (you didn't need a permission to leave city though). Otherwise... I missed easiness of travel inside Soviet Union.
That is already happening -- last international conference (organized by American companies in the tourism industry) I went to was held in Montreal. Easier for everyone coming from outside the US to get a visa....
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!
Oh?
You're walking down the street, just heading to the nearest Quik-E Mart. A cop car rolls by, turns around, and pulls up next to you. They ask you to stop. If you got your hands in your pockets, you can be sure they'll want you to pull 'em out slowly. Afterall, people have been shot pulling out wallets.
They ask who are you and what are you doing here. It's just a regular street. Sure, there's a few crummy neighbors around here but it's not like there's drive-bys every other day. Oh, you'll do as they say in a calm and orderly fashion. It could be cold and rainy or you were in a hurry. It doesn't matter. They got questions and they'll get answers. I mean, you're not a criminal, are you?
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.
How do you know the copper doesn't like to stop fat women so he can make fun of them?
I have to agree with Infernal Device, it is your neibors you have to worry about. In the place I used to live, the majority were of one religion. They'd call the police if you didn't have the "right" look or you weren't wearing clothes which conformed to what most of them wear or just if they thought you might not belong to their church.
Hardly a freedom loving people if they don't respect other's freedom. They even manged to close down all the dance clubs and such, so the only place for people to socialize was their church.
Terrorist: Yes/No?
No wonder things are so fucked up. All this innuendo and inference. Just ask the damn question. Here's an example: "Do you believe in killing people for the glory of your God?" If the answer is, "yes", that person goes in the terrorist category, and we put "Yes" in the Terrorist data field.
<napoleon>Well, Duh.</napoleon>
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 think this is more about paranoia and the desire of, in some cases, rather ignorant (but well meaning?) people to show who is the boss.
Pushing innocent people around does not phase a terrorist. I doubt a layman threatening a lawyer with a law suit has much of an effect on the lawyer either. I'm sure some measures are effective and will serve to protect the public. However the question is with regard to the measures that are clearly not effective and serve only to harm innocent bystanders.
Every time I have come from overseas, through an airport here in Canada, I feel like I am treated like a cow. Frankly I find it an insult. Frankly for international traffic between Canada and the USA I feel an open boarder is appropriate. How is it that 300+ million Americans can travel within the USA without this bullshit and 30+ million Canadians can travel within Canada without this bullshit, yet if a Canadian happens to visit the USA we are threatened by our boarder guards? And it happens on BOTH sides? The answer is very simple. This has almost NOTHING to do with security. Its all about collecting taxes... customes taxes.
Canadian customs officials are far more interested in asserting their authority over Canadians than they are over Americans. I'm sure Americans will say the same thing.
-------------
The desire to control and assert "authority" reminds me of many years ago when I did programming in a small company of about 40 employees. We had 3 departments who used the computer. There was a terribly under-employed operator who felt it was his job to guard the printer. Well - he didn't call it that... he called it distributing the printouts. To put this into context... the company owned one (1) 300 line per minute printer and ran a mini computer with some terminals hooked up and did a daily backup. Who here would think this would require a staff of three (3) people? A systems programmer and two (2) operators? Anyone? Lord - what a joke!
Any well managed company would have fired the bloke and told the systems programmer to do the backups... because there was NO NEED for a systems programmer... Besides the guy didn't know how to program, and there was no systems programming required anyways. He was a glorified and over paid systems administrator and not a very good one at that... but I digress.
Our computer operator guarded the printer. Programmers had to routinely wait for hours for him to get off his ass and put a printout in the tray. User's had to wait also, but not as long. Once the printout was retrived from the tray we could confer with the user's if necessary and user's could confer with us. But we all had to wait while this guy took his sweet time. And of course for "security" reasons, programmers were not allowed to touch the printer. Programmers could write the code that ran all of the company's business interests... but we couldn't touch the printer.
I did take over the administration of that mess. I got rid of the systems programmer and the operators and promoted the secretary and she did a fine job. Programers got their own printouts and were more than happy to put user's printouts in the proper bin! Wow! over $100,000 per year in salvaged salaries and no complaints after that.
Just like the under-employed systems programmer and the two subordinate operators, customs officials will also strive to create a justification for their jobs. But does it really stand up to scrutiny?
-----------
Analogy to the boarder guards? Once you are in the USA you can travel without being treated like a cow. Once Americans are in Canada they can travel without being treated like a cow. But from one stockyard to the other... we get treated like cows.
The thing is that if we try to gain select country priviledges with regard to boarder travel then we get accused of things that boarder on racizm. This simply leads to a police state. Frankly I do not think a "war on TERROR" justifies our authorities terrorizing innocent travelers to the extent that they do. Very little of what they have done in the past can be justified and its getting worse.
Actually, the only thing separating us here in western Europe from the terrorists is the Atlantic Ocean.
Call me a Troll, but I feel safer going for a vacation in Turkey than I do visiting a conference in the US.
-- Your Friendly Euro-trash neighbour
For example:
- They collect info on if you have a return-fligth or only one-way. So, you make sure to book a return-fligth.
- They want to know your email-adress, so you make sure to use an average-looking one never associated with anything fishy.
- They specifically want to know if the ticket was paid for in cash. So you don't do that.
- They want to know if you have a history of booking and then not-showing for fligths. So you make sure not to have such a history. (and if you do, you establish a new fake identity that doesn't.)
The list is longer, infact the list is 31 points long. But literally 25 or so of the 31 datas are easy to manipulate by the determined flyer, and it's a near *certanity* that exactly that will be done. This means that even *if* profiling based on these data could bring something (which I doubt) it now *certainly* doesn't bring anything, since any data you do get on a terrorist is virtually guaranteed to be manipulated.Profiling works sorta, some of the time. It does however *NOT* work when used against an extremely small, but extremely determined group of people who:
...on the visa card (green one) they pretty much ask you just that.
But the best one is...
"Do you intend to partake in any illegal or immoral activities while in the United States? (y/n)"
What counts as immoral anyway? And where's the "hopefully" option?
throw new NoSignatureException();
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.