Slashdot Mirror
US Citizens To Require ''Clearance'' To Leave?
jo7hs2 writes "The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has proposed a system which will in essence make it mandatory for you to have permission before leaving or entering the country, effectively putting everyone on a no-fly list unless the government says otherwise. Interestingly, the proposal does not seem to cover personal travel, only that on some sort of carrier like an airline or cruise vessel. While this certainly is concerning, it isn't exactly new, as a passport is already required for circumstances covered under the proposal."
This is nothing like the fact that we already are required to use a passport for a number of these same reasons.
A passport is documentation to foreign countries that you are a documented U.S. citizen.
Being required to "check out" of the country with DHS, despite all the calls of "Godwin rule" invocations, is exactly like Soviet Russia, Communist Cuba and China, and Nazi Germany, in recent history.
Seriously, if you people don't get out and vote these facists out of office, you're going to be just like the guy from WWII who wrote the poem about how, when there was no one else left, they came for him, and there was no one left to stop them. Enough with the "But I don't have anything to hide". When are you going to realize it's not about, and never has been about, "hunting the terrorists" and "making us safe", it's about "controlling the people", through fear, and travel restrictions, and spying? The more people say "But I dont have anything to hide, let them go ahead", the more they win.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
One day, older American will weep and younger Americans will be confused by lines like:
Capt. Vasili Borodin: I will live in Montana. And I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits, and she will cook them for me. And I will have a pickup truck... maybe even a "recreational vehicle." And drive from state to state. Do they let you do that?
Captain Ramius: I suppose.
Capt. Vasili Borodin: No papers?
Captain Ramius: No papers, state to state.
Capt. Vasili Borodin: Well then, in winter I will live in... Arizona. Actually, I think I will need two wives.
Captain Ramius: Oh, at least.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
I suppose I should expect this from the ever-ready-to do its research Slashdot, but where are the sources for this article?
If you look at this "news site's" front page, you'll see a lot of the traditional conspiracy rantings and, when you look particularly at the traditional Kennedy conspiracy nonsense so typical of sites that have completely fallen off their rocker.
This isn't a news site. There's no good sourcing (yes, I followed the URL at the end, see below). The reference stated to this document mentions no such restrictions as those found in the Slashdot summary or the article.
There are certainly privacy issues at stake, but nothing near what this ridiculous article or the Slashdot summary make it out to be.
This is just piss poor. I know Slashdot isn't a news site, so I don't expect it to research things as thoroughly as a journalist would (granted, I expect little of journalists as well).
The most pertinent part of the executive summary of the regulation proposal in question reads as follows:
The primary purpose of this proposed rule is to prevent passengers that have been
identified as high-risk on government watchlists from boarding aircraft bound for or
departing from the United States and to prevent passengers and crew so identified
from departing on vessels leaving the Unites States. On April 7, 2005, the Bureau of
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) published requirements for the transmission of
passenger and crew manifests for aircraft and vessels arriving from foreign
destinations or departing to foreign destinations (70 FR 17820). Implementation of the
"2005 APIS Rule" (named for the Advance Passenger Information System, the CBP
electronic system used to obtain electronic manifest information from carriers)
required that information on passengers and crew to be transmitted: no later than 15
minutes after departure for arriving aircraft passengers; no later than 15 minutes prior
to departure for departing aircraft passengers; at least 60 minutes prior to departure
for arriving and departing aircraft crew; at least 24 hours and as much as 96 hours
prior to a vessel's entry at a US port for arriving passengers and crew, depending on
the length of the voyage; and 15 minutes prior to departure for departing vessel
passengers and crew.
Are there privacy issues here? You betcha. And they've been discussed here at length. Do they approach what the article and its summary here state they approach? Not at all. Read the rest of the proposed regulation.
Come on, slashdot. Treat us like adults. Give us primary source materials and avoid the conspiracy mumbo-jumbo.
I will say this, though - If I'm wrong, and you find some nuance in the document I missed, please post and inform me.
They're also supposed to be in favor of balanced budgets, realistic foreign policy and strong defense. Not long ago they were all of the above. Today, they are not the party for people who used to support Republicans.
This is a letter to the editor of a major newspaper, not from me:
I have to tell you that I agree with a lot of what you are saying. I'm a 2nd generation immigrant who was raised on lectures about how wonderful America was and anecdotes outlining the superiority of American government and culture. Honestly I found the changes in America so repellent I moved and in doing so I learned a few interesting things.
Americans have no idea what communism or socialism is... or if they do they do not use this knowledge when exhorting the evils of these systems. Nor do they have an tangible idea about what police states or totalitarian states are.
The failure of unions is that they are abused by those people who profit by people being in them, if everyone was in a union of some sort (or none at all) this would not be possible or at least more difficult to pull off.
The US dollar sucks.
The US by many metrics isn't the best place in the world to live. A notable exception is making buckets of cash.
US Foreign policy is nothing short of evil.
Racism is more of a problem in America than people want to admit.
Xenophobia is a significant problem in America.
The American system of government is broken and given the behavior of Americans it appears altogether beyond their capacity to fix it.
You can not live in a "nice" society without paying for it... via taxes.
It's in all of our interests to do what we can to raise everyone we can to a certain level (I mean a level above Henry Ford's auto assemblers and Ray Kroc's fast food workers). This means public schooling, accessible health care, &tc...
You cannot create a better society by legislating morality but you sure as hell can make it worse.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
I recently came across this quote about exploiting nationalism, and it disturbed me for two reasons. First, it is a very accurate description of the post 9/11 political situation, which has resulted in the loss of civil liberties, the disastrous occupation of Iraq, secret prisons, torture, and the dismantling of the government's system of checks and balances. Second, the author is Hermann Goering.
Godwin's Law, I know, but there are some eerie parallels, and that's scary as hell. I am truly afraid for my country's future. These are dark times; it's the worst I've ever seen the United States of America. We've got the monkeys running the zoo... these are small, foolish, and dangerous little men- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld. And they are tearing the country apart. They've got the left hating the right and the right hating the left. They've got us caught up in an eternal war against terror (as if you can wage war on a military tactic, that's as nonsensical as a "war against flanking maneuvers"). In their war, in order to save our freedoms from the terrorists, they've got to take our freedoms away. Meanwhile, our executive branch is obsessed with using torture to the point that it starts to seem creepily sadistic, running secret prisons and shipping people off to be tortured in foreign countries. Finally, we've got to keep fighting endlessly in Iraq as it spirals into civil war, and I still haven't heard something that even vaguely resembles a strategy for success, or a convincing explanation of why we even went in, and killed thousands of our own men and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
I've always criticized America, not because I hate her, but because I love her and want her to be better. I thought there was a lot wrong with the country, but I believed it was basically a good country, and that other nations had a lot to learn from us. But now, when I travel through foreign countries, I am ashamed to show my American passport. I actually tell people I'm "coming from Canada" (misleading but true, because that's where I study). Living abroad, I now realize that deep down, I still do love America. But not the America of George Bush. That America is an America of constant fear, divisive hate, endless war, domestic spying, and torture. And we can do better than George Bush's America.