US Expands Airport Biometric Data Collection

athloi sends word of an expansion of the US-VISIT program that now requires two fingerprints from foreign visitors arriving at scores of airports. Beginning later this year the US will be testing a system that collects 10 digital fingerprints, at 10 major points of entry. A US Homeland Security director assured EU officials that the program would operate under strict privacy rules. But he noted that the FBI and CIA will have access to the biometric data, which over time may expand beyond fingerprints.

Comments

Re:If I lived abroad,

[Fred_A]

I don't live in the USA, and have already come to the conclusion that I'm not going to visit*. My tourist ££s will go to France, Italy, Spain, Thailand etc. instead. The USA needs tourism; tourists don't need the USA, there's a big wide world that's not the USA still to visit. So, to the US government I say this: "it's your loss".

As far as I can tell, more or less 3 out of 4 of my fellow Europeans feel that way. I went to the US before, found that it had some gorgeous scenery, lots of nice people (and quite a few weird ones, but I guess that's part of the charm of the country, sortof), but no longer. Especially while carrying a French passport, I'm not going to subject myself to the antics of room temperature IQ security goons (and that's in Celsius, thank you very much).

I even avoid long flights that have a connection there, simply because a lot of euro travellers I know have been hassled by the security drones to the point of missing their flight.

I'll probably reconsider in a few years when this lunacy is behind us, but for now, South America, the rest of Europe, Asia, the Pacific and Africa offer lots of travel opportunities for me (except that for some reason I still regularly have to point out that I'm not from the US in a lot of places before people get friendly, comes with English still being the world's ligua franca).

Quite sad really.