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US Government To Release Electronic Passport
XueCast writes "The federal government has announced that they will release new electronic Passport cards in either April or May 2008. The cards could be read wirelessly from up to 20 feet away, which could reduce the waiting time at border checkpoints. Deputy Assistant Secretary Of State For Passport Services, Ann Barrett said, "As people are approaching a port of inspection, they can show the card to the reader, and by the time they get to the inspector, all the information will have been verified and they can be waved on through.""
From TFA:
"As people are approaching a port of inspection, they can show the card to the reader, and by the time they get to the inspector, all the information will have been verified and they can be waved on through," said Ann Barrett, deputy assistant secretary of state for passport services, commenting on the final rule on passport cards published yesterday in the Federal Register.
Hahahahaha. You have got to be fucking kidding me. I have been the United States on two separate occasions via air in the last few years and in both cases neither myself nor any of my fellow passengers were ever "waved on through" inspection. Everybody got the royal ass raping treatment and this comment by Ann Barrett is just a bureaucratic pie-in-the-sky sales job for the new passports.
How could you leave out this little detail from your story?
I know the universal ID/RFIDs are legitimate stories, but this card story is non-story turned into a potential page churner ONLY because of the single detail left out of the write-up.
Shoddy editing job.
Oh wonderful. Now when I'm overseas, the terrorists can identify me as an American in a crowd from 20 feet away.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
What nonsense. If they could be "verified" by machine, they wouldn't need to stand in line in the first place. Travelers stand in line for physical inspection and crowd control, and the card can't help with that process. Unless it can count the books of matches in my backpack and measure my lithium battery, all it will do is save a few seconds of pulling out my wallet. Sounds neat, I guess.
I always mod up spelling trolls.
It makes a lot more sense if you think of it in terms of total number of trips and not total number of countries. Many major U.S. cities are located along the border (San Diego, Detroit, and Buffalo to name a few). Also, ever been on a cruise? It takes 2-3 hours to get everyone off one of those big cruise ships because of the need to get 2000 people through customs at once. This sounds like it could speed that process up.
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
100+ Yen to the Dollar, yet the Japanese aren't considered particularly poor...
The ones, who are walking around in Paris, are still quite rich — by the standards of a lowlife robber, anyway.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Because the senator's buddies aren't interested in a mark up reselling barcode readers ($80), when they can markup RFID readers.($1700) Besides RFID is so much more tech heavy it's gotta be better. Better security theater that is. Joe Sixpack will be terribly impressed that there is a computer-thingy in his passport.
We are all just people.
It takes 2-3 hours to get everyone off one of those big cruise ships because of the need to get 2000 people through customs at once. This sounds like it could speed that process up. About as helpful as a band-aid on a sucking chest wound.
The root cause of the problem isn't the number of people, i'ts the lame-ass system in the first place. It's a lot like DRM. People who want to enter the country for nefarious purposes will always have a variety of methods of entry that completely bypass these systems. But thosewho wish to enter legally have to jump through all the hoops. Essentially it punishes the law-abiding citizens and ignores the law breakers. Sure, the system will occasionally catch someone with a felony conviction in their home country who didn't know that would disqualify them from entry. But chances are, those people weren't up to no good, they were just on a trip like any other regular joe and denying them entry doesn't improve the situation at all.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Wouldn't it be almost as fast, and WAY more secure to just have passport 'reading' machines placed before the examiners, where you either swipe or place the passport in the device in some way. That gives the 'system' extra time retrieve any information for the passport examiner, but there is NEVER going to be this mythical 'wave-through'.
There always has to be a delay for the immigration officer to a) verify that the physical person matches the person described by the passport and b) why they are coming and going and whether to extract money from them [duties or whatever].
I don't know why governments have such a hard-on for passports and other identifiers [like drivers licenses] to be accessible wirelessly. Hell, they'll still probably swipe it to match the 'wireless data' with the physical card [because did the system read your passport, or the passport for the 20 people around you].
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Can you name a single example of an American abroad being killed by terrorists (or by a dude in an alley in Paris) where the motive was the victim being from America, as compared to any wealthy nation?
And the Americans, who go through the trouble of trying to disguise themselves, will wrap their passports in foil, or something.
Who wants to lay odds on the chances of the US government making such "obstruction and/or obfuscation, or possession of such obstruction or obfuscation device(s) or material(s)" at any time by such a passport holder highly illegal? It would follow with the rest of the brain-dead security theater "logic" we've seen so far.
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Actually the reason there are bottlenecks is to allow immigration to look for people acting suspiciously. If you weren't forced to queue you wouldn't feel nearly as stressed when travelling on that fake passport.