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DHS To Grab Biometric Data From Green Card Holders
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Nextgov:
"The Homeland Security Department has announced plans to expand its biometric data collection program to include foreign permanent residents and refugees. Almost all noncitizens will be required to provide digital fingerprints and a photograph upon entry into the United States as of Jan. 18. A notice (PDF) in Friday's Federal Register said expansion of the US Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology Program (US VISIT) will include 'nearly all aliens,' except Canadian citizens on brief visits. Those categories include permanent residents with green cards, individuals seeking to enter on immigrant visas, and potential refugees. The US VISIT program was developed after the Sept.11, 2001 terrorist attacks to collect fingerprints from foreign visitors and run them against the FBI's terrorist watch list and other criminal databases. Another phase of the project, to develop an exit system to track foreign nationals leaving the country, has run into repeated setbacks."
Reader MirrororriM points out other DHS news that they're thinking about monitoring blogs for information on terrorists.
Give it a couple of years and another homegrown terrorist. The only thing holding them back is that citizens, uh, vote!
This doesn't effect me as I am a citizen. That said, this is getting ridiculous. This data doesn't do DHS any good for terror tracking as there has been research suggesting that the overwhelming amounts of information is a hindrance rather then a benefit. All it's good for is when the DHS, FBI, DEA, ATF, etc. decide they don't like you, they can dig through the data to find any trivial issue to drag you into an interrogation room and work you over.
Thankfully, with Obama becoming president, the odds of you getting Gitmo'd have reduced drastically. But, don't think that the three lettered thugs with badges will let this option be removed from them so easily. Only time will tell. I hope they reduce the base to rubble when we leave so it can't be easily reopened.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
In order to become a resident alien (green card holder), fingerprints and photos are already taken by the DHS (was INS). So how is this going to help? Can't they digitize the existing fingerprints?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Sounds like a good way to poison your monitoring database.
der heutigen Stasi.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
but I'm saying tracking non-citizens is just common sense.
Of course, if it really was "common sense", then it's the kind of thing that would have been in place for decades. Ergo, it is not "common sense", but yet another "security theatre" response.
"She's furniture with a pulse"
these all are the eggs laid by the top management republicans staffed those organizations with. leave aside creating them in the first place.
unbelievable isnt it ? they are 1 month from being fired, yet still try to force their agenda.
actually not. self centered, extremist right groups tend to lose perception of reality after a point. nazis at the closing stages of the war, or nixon still saying he is an honest man, are examples of that.
Read radical news here
Remember the fear of being asked for "Your papers?" in the old USSR?. This is going to be just as bad - this junk needs to stop. How you you feel as an American citizen, when going into another country, and being fingerprinted, retinal scanned, etc.
Lack of privacy, unreasonable search, etc..... I say no way.
der heutigen Stasi.
. . . this means something like, "today's Stasi."
The Stasi were a nasty and creepy bunch of East German secret police: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi.
They ended collecting *so* much information, that they couldn't analyze it all:
The MfS infiltrated almost every aspect of GDR life. In the mid-1980s, a network of civilian informants, Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs, Unofficial Collaborators), began growing in both German states; by the time East Germany collapsed in 1989, the MfS employed an estimated 91,000 employees and 300,000 informants. About one of every 50 East Germans collaborated with the MfS â" one of the most extensive police infiltrations of a society in history. In 2007 an article in BBC stated that "Some calculations have concluded that in East Germany there was one informer to every seven citizens."
The lesson here is that if you are collecting a lot of data, that doesn't necessarily mean that you are collecting the right (and useful) data.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I've been to the US numerous times, all on business trips (I get paid to travel there). Anyway, back in 2003, Dallas, on first trip ever, I was basically waved through...not so bad even coming with an completely empty, unstamped passport.
Unfortunately, ever since then, on multiple trips (Immigration checks at NYC, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston) the fingerprints have been the least annoying part.
When the US-VISIT scheme was introduced, I went through the DHS website and looked into the privacy and data storage implications. Basically the PDF docs on the site showed such a horrendous architecture that I was pretty confident that my fingerprints will be safe in bowels of a system that probably won't ever really work (and I'm not a US taxpayer so I don't care that much where their money goes).
This was confirmed on my arrival to PHL - I thought that since I've been on multiple visits before that the officer probably has all my info on her screen the moment she wipes my (machine-readeable, not yet biometric) passport.
Guess what? I have scandinavian letters in my name (ääääööö). The officer asked me under what name I'd like to enter the US - should she type in my name with ä => ae or ä => a conversion. I gave the ä => a version since that's what everyone is in reality using... but kinda felt a bit let down of the awesome border security procedures...I'm starting to realize where all the Usama/Osama problems stem from. I thought that they'd at least use, say, the passport number if not the "code" field as primary key...At least if on some trip I land in trouble I can just claim "No, it's just a misspelled name, I'm really that other guy..."
Point I'm getting here: Fingerprints are minor piece of annoyance that add a bit to the travelers problems. For me, the privacy implications were pretty well addressed by DHS docs. The guy that interviews you at the border is the first person who you meet in foreign country - it's his behavior that gives the first impression.
The annoying part has been the attitude of almost all occasions I've basically felt that arrogance of "YOU ARE NOTHING, WHY THE HELL SHOULD I LET YOU IN, you pitiful European". Some vindication came on the last time in:
I was recently in Minneapolis IETF, and went through Chicago again (to change planes to Minneapolis). I don't know whether it was "economy is down, this foreign guy might bring in some serious money" or the fact that it was Obama's home town and everyone was still in great post-election mood and they forgot to be jackasses - but the guy at the desk was really nice. He ofc asked all the same questions as every other time - where I'm going and why - but the attitude made me actually feel welcome to the US. He basically apologized that they have to these days take the whole hand (prints from all fingers) but also said how much better the reader is compared to old one, told me that if I'm planning to spend any time in Chicago he could name a couple of good steakhouses - before stamping my passport and sending me on to the baggage carousel.
Now, timewise it wasn't any faster than any previous visits - same 5 minutes to process me - but I actually felt a bit happy after 16-hour flight (with transfers).
Mind you, I've gotten the "I'm welcome" feeling in EVERY other country I've visited, ever. At all borders they've acquired the same information - why I'm there, when I'm leaving and what I'm planning to do - but I'll be glad to visit Canada, UK, Thailand, Japan, Australia, NZ, and even Russia again - as a tourist, spending my own money.
If I'll get the same experience on my subsequent US business trips as I got on my latest one, I might actually come in again as a tourist, bring friends, and spend some of my own money, too.
Might have something to do with we sell you more oil then opec, more forestry products then you farm, more unrefined and in some cases refined goods you produce, more bulk raw minerals including diamonds. That if you want to keep oil flowing from alaska, you play nice, and if you like using our ports you do the same.
We also export people in the winter to the sunny southern US to keep it alive down there. On top of that we don't take anything, we have our own industry that lives on it's own. You decided you wanted cheaper and shipped your jobs to china/mexico and everywhere else. But don't worry! Up here, you can find that we have our own thriving manufacturing jobs that are slowly in decline along with the rest of the world.
Generally you don't go pissing in the guy's cereal when they're the ones supplying you with the goods and providing you with most of your base wealth, along with an entire new generation of brains because your edumucation system is in slow decline.
Om, nomnomnom...
Bad guy A drives a car to target B and leaves his finger prints all over the place. Target B gets destroyed but the biometric evidence is left behind. Law enforcement collects the biometric data from Bad Guy A and runs it through the big data warehouse in the sky. They then presumably know all that there is to know about him. At the very least, they know where he came into the country, where he has been living and from there, perhaps who has been associating with.
I know a guy who works with the Secret Service and very well might be one of the primary agents protecting Obama once he gets into the White House. We've had long conversations about what the government does and what their capabilities are with regards to intelligence gathering. Despite all of the rhetoric about big brother and loss of privacy, I'm quite comfortable knowing that unless I'm actively trying to destablize the government, they don't care about what I am up to.
Every time I read about this kind of thing... more surveillance, finger printing, suspicionless checkpoints, etc, etc...
.. and you know the US border is still pretty open.
I think two things:
1. WTF. I'm not a crimial, and the majority of people aren't either and yet we're all subjected to this kind of BS.
2. Does it even work? Why are countries making all of these efforts and the citizens are the last to hear about it.
Will biometrics really make a difference at the borders? The first thing I think of are ways that a person could get around this
By water or land people cross the borders all the time.
This all started with 9/11 by people who were in the country legally... so ya, this just doesn't make any sense to me and makes me more frustrated with our governments.
Actually, we don't give a shit about your ports, we have plenty of ports of our own and many of them don't get buried in snow five months a year.
It's a two way street there. Don't get too smug, Canada needs the US more than the US needs Canada. And no, you don't provide the US with wealth, goods are only imported because it's cheaper to do so than to manufacture them internally. If ever the dollar returns to parity with the looney for an extended period of time, Canada will start hurting.
The lesson here is that if you are collecting a lot of data, that doesn't necessarily mean that you are collecting the right (and useful) data.
It's like the NSA drinking from a fire hose: they are collecting so much more data than they can analyze in real time! Such data is only useful post factum, to retrace what happened (cf. 9/11). The chance to catch something useful in time and react proactively is extremely slim.
So the question is: is it worth it to undermine informational freedom of citizens (and here non-citizens) and give Government a huge database that could be used to silence opposition by blackmailing or that could leak data to third parties like, say, private investigators, just to facilitate forensic investigations? Some may say yes, others would say no.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
When I applied for (and subsequently received, in 2006) my green card, a photo and fingerprints were taken.
In Liberty, Rene
Actually, we don't give a shit about your ports, we have plenty of ports of our own and many of them don't get buried in snow five months a year.
Actually you do. Our ports don't, vancouver never freezes and halifax is open 10+mo a year. The only ports that freeze are in the great lakes, you know the ones that ship out the majority of the grain to the rest of the world.
It's a two way street there. Don't get too smug, Canada needs the US more than the US needs Canada. And no, you don't provide the US with wealth, goods are only imported because it's cheaper to do so than to manufacture them internally. If ever the dollar returns to parity with the looney for an extended period of time, Canada will start hurting.
We don't need you, as much as you need us. That's the current reality of the world economy. We're a net exporter of finished and unfinished goods. Not a net importer. If you don't understand that, I'll explain. It means that if you throw a hissy fit, we simply say 'our market is now europe' and they buy our goods, or japan, or anyone else. While you're very good at consuming our goods, and tell me something do you even have the manufacturing base left to make anything? Or has it all been bulldozed over or left to rot. While we haven't had the manufacturing decay that you have, it still exists on some levels say textiles.
In the end it doesn't really matter if the Canadian dollar reaches US parity again, when the government already realized that having one free trade agreement doesn't guarantee a steady source of trade, and more are needed. And we can bank against the AUS, Yen and Euro.
Om, nomnomnom...
Reader MirrororriM points out other DHS news that they're thinking about monitoring blogs for information on terrorists.
Dude, I totally saw Bin Laden at the local supermarket yesterday.
Not "were", "are". There's no USSR anymore, but the rules haven't changed in Russia in that regard.
Just because you say there are many people with have no problem with this does not make it true.
The people who "dont have a problem: are most like
illegal immigrant , or people from countries with similarly totalitarian governments anyway, You are right, I am sure Russians and Chinese will be used to such treatment.
I certainly would not consider traveling to the US
whilst such draconian measures are in place.
I would have thought a considerable reduction in tourism would be missed.
In USSR, all citizens were supposed to carry their passports at all times, and show them to the police and other authorities whenever they demanded to see it, or face detention. It's like having to have a driver's license while driving, only for just being there.
No. Who told you that?
For example, my friends who chose to wear their hair long learned to never forget their passport at home.
Your "friends" lived in USSR in early 60's when things like that still bothered cops? Then passports wouldn't help them.
In major cities like Moscow, your passport had to have a stamp permitting you to live in that city, or you had to have papers showing that you are there on business. You could not just come to Moscow and live there, you needed a permission and that stamp.
That's propiska, residence registration, you moron. It means that you have an apartment or house in the city. Government provided apartments for token rent, so when you moved to another city you had to go through official channel exchanging apartments, buying a house or getting employer/school-sponsored one. People didn't have to spend anything significant on rent -- having a place to live was considered a basic right, however having it in, say, center of Moscow, obviously was not.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Americans have "freedom of movement" (actually freedom of not telling the government that they have moved) at the expense of a right to a dwelling, and 30%-50% of their income being eaten by rent or mortgages.
After living in both countries I can assure all of you that "right to a dwelling" alone provides more impact than all your piddly "you have a right if you are rich enough, otherwise you are screwed" rights.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I was travelling with a Canadian passport. I arrived at San Francisco, with a subsequent connecting flight to Toronto. The agent asked me the usual questions, I showed him my ticket etc... He then asked me to look at the camera and place my fingers on the scanner. This was in 2005, and had I had never seen this before and he said that all foreigners travelling in the US had to do this. Why was it that even though I was a Canadian on a short visit (transiting), was forced to get finger printed even before this?
There are conditional green cards which expire after two years. They're for certain circumstances such as when you get your card through marriage to a citizen and you've been married for fewer than two years (guess they don't want people getting hitched just to earn residency status). http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.5af9bb95919f35e66f614176543f6d1a/?vgnextoid=fe17e6b0eb13d010VgnVCM10000048f3d6a1RCRD&vgnextchannel=4f719c7755cb9010VgnVCM10000045f3d6a1RCRD
Part of the problem is that there's little to no accountability in the DHS so assholes get to stay. Another part of the problem is it doesn't pay all that well so they don't get the best and brightest, as it were. So you get a real mixed bag. I've had people who were extremely polite, I've had assholes that were looking for a way to keep me out (I'm a US citizen so they can't).
On the Canadian side of the border (where I usually travel) I've found they are usually politer, but not always and generally not much more competent. One time I was there I had a real nice guy that was clearing me, but the guy in the next lane over was being a complete ass to two girls, who were citizens. Another time I had a girl who asked me a ridiculous number of questions trying to be through because the dual citizenship thing confused her (I have two passports and no stamps).
The US border I think is likely to take a while to get any better. DHS is a total mess and even if Obama's crew wants to clean it up, it'll take time. PLus there's only so good it'll ever get. When you pays low wages, you get low quality workers often.
This issue has bounced back and forth in the courts a few times. I was issued a Green Card in 1978. It was a permanent card -- as in, when I turned 18 in theory I would still be carrying the same card with a picture of me as a child on it. Cards issued even earlier than mine inexplicably had wavy lines printed right over the photograph, like a canceled postage stamp.
Then one day, when I was in high school, my family all got letters saying that our cards were no longer permanent, and that not only would we need to go get new cards ASAP, but we would now need to report to the INS to renew the cards every few years (at our expense, of course -- and it wasn't cheap). Part of getting the new card also meant we needed to be fingerprinted, and I believe the fingerprint was incorporated into the new card.
Several years went by before I dealt with the INS again, but it seemed to me that a pattern of steadily eroding rights of immigrants was not advantageous for me, so I began the process of becoming a U.S. citizen. At that point I was told that citizenship applications were actually being processed faster than Green Card applications, because of the backlog under the new Green Card laws. Presumably there were lots of people whose Green Cards had expired, but who had not yet been given an appointment by the INS, and therefore they had a hard time getting work.
I became a citizen, but after that I heard the original decision had been reversed and that permanent resident alien status was now considered permanent again. I think you might still need to keep the photo up to date on the card, but the process is not as odious as it once was (and doesn't require as much in fees). Though I could be wrong. As a U.S. citizen it is no longer my concern -- until they pass some law that distinguishes between naturalized and God-given citizenship, in which case they'll be able to start taking my rights away all over again.
As a side note, I enjoyed becoming a U.S. citizen so much that I've since become a UK citizen, too. I hear tell they know how to do it over there, these days -- they'll take away your rights no matter what your immigration status is! ;-)
Breakfast served all day!
No, the government does not tell you where to live. Propiska is simply a stamp registering where you live. Without a propiska you can have some problems with buracracy and administration if you need anything, and theoretically im sure the police can give you some hassle over not having it.
Also, I have never been stopped in the street by the police, on the roads by the menty -not sure how to transliterate this... its a bad word for police- a few times... occasionally for speeding, but they are more interested in driving licence, insurance, maybe a bribe, and occasionally want to discuss English football.
One thing for sure. Since coming to Russia i feel a lot more free than i did living in the UK. Could be just the government are a lot more skilled here at giving the illusion of freedom.... the politicians in the west are pure amateurs when compared to Putin and his gang ;-)
The founders did not attempt to destabilize the monarchy, despite their ill will towards- and actions against the crown. They chose to declare independence from the empire and found a just society which avoided the possibility of tyranny. There's a big difference.
The right they fought for was a constitution, ensuring a democratically elected government which worked for the people and did not abuse them. Despite Republican claims they did not chant the "small government" mantra- they sought States' rights, so that people could live according to their own beliefs without an over-arching figure dictating unnecessary laws that were unnecessary for the protection of the union (e.g. federal "marriage protection" and anti-abortion laws).
What has eroded is the ability of a government to be limited in a much more complex world than the one in which our forefathers lived. I would love keep the taxes I pay to the department of transportation, but maintaining airports and highways is a little more important to me. Sure, there's waste, and that should be addressed, but to say government should be "limited" is simply naive acceptance of a cheap electioneering tactic.
Want to make government smaller? Vote out incumbents, demand your representatives pay attention to citizens' lobbying rather than corporate, and go work for it to replace an incompetent bureaucrat with a better one. Posting rhetoric here won't push your agenda far.