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'Extreme Vetting' Would Require Visitors To US To Share Contacts, Passwords (theguardian.com)
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration is considering whether or not to deploy "extreme vetting" practices at airports around the world, which could force tourists from Britain and other countries visiting the U.S. to reveal their mobile phone contacts, social media passwords and financial data. "Travelers who want to enter the U.S. could also face questioning over their ideology, as Washington moves away from a default position of allowing people in to a more skeptical approach to visitors," reports The Guardian. From the report: Trump made the "extreme vetting" of foreign nationals to combat terrorism a major theme of his presidential election campaign. But his executive order imposing a travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries has twice been blocked in court. Media reports suggest it has already hurt the tourism industry. The changes might include visitors from the 38 countries -- the UK, France, Australia and Japan among them -- that participate in the visa waiver program, which requires adherence to strict U.S. standards in data sharing, passport control and other factors, one senior official told the Journal. This could require people to hand over their phones so officials can study their stored contacts and possibly other information. The aim is to "figure out who you are communicating with," a senior Department of Homeland Security official was quoted as saying. "What you can get on the average person's phone can be invaluable." A second change would ask applicants for their social media handles and passwords, so that officials could see information posted privately in addition to public posts, the Journal said. The Journal report said the DHS official working on the review said questions under consideration included whether visa applicants believe in so-called honor killings, how they view the treatment of women in society, whether they value the "sanctity of human life" and who they view as a legitimate target in a military operation.
People will just stop coming to the U.S., or doing business there. Problem solved.
Sharing your password is against the ToS of every single social media platform out there, including but not limited to Facebook, Twitter, every forum ever, etc. Share your password to your account when you go to the US and kiss that account goodbye.
And that list? Yes, I believe there are honor killings (DING). I believe women need more power in society (DING from any anti-feminist) or I believe genders are not equal because each gender has strengths and weaknesses different from each other (DING from a lot of people). I do not value the "sanctity of human life" in that I believe assisted suicide, under a lot of scrutiny and supervision, should be legal - we have mortally sick pets put down to spare them the suffering, but grandma HAS to be kept alive no matter what! I also believe abortion should not be illegal, so that's TWO dings in one question.
Just ... what are they expecting with this? HONESTY? Or a well-rehearsed regurgitation of the correct answers?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
We can't even get Asshole M'Gunt to share his tax returns. Fuck that guy.
The United States has done off the deep end. I will never be visiting such a douche bag country that would pull this shit. If the States wants less "Terrorists" then stop pissing every one off. Stop stealing from every one and killing innocent people.
"Land of the free, home of the BRAVE"? NOT! Brave people don't fear their world, and free people don't ask others to give up their freedom...
Tourism is a $1.5 trillion industry in the US. I don't know what exactly the split is between domestic and foreign but foreign is definitely a significant chunk (one site claimed $21 billion from foreign tourists in April 2016) and if you're worried about trade deficits then that chunk is especially important.
There are already concerns that foreign tourism revenue is starting to dry up after Trump's election and the (attempted) Muslim bans. If it's actually put into effect this "extreme vetting" will only accelerate that process.
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Ah yes, but the IRA were good clean Christian terrorists, so it was totally okay to allow them to enter the US to evade arrest and raise money for the "struggle" (which amounted as often as not to blowing up informants and random people for effect).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The cost to personal liberty, the flagrant unconstitutionality, and the chilling effect on US international relations and tourism aside, this is ALSO a bad idea because it will have zero effect on the real bad guys.
If you are a bad guy, why would you bring a phone loaded with contacts? Why would you provide a real, rather than a fake social media account? For a real bad guy, it is trivially easy to circumvent this new check. For the rest of us, it's a massive inconvenience, invasion of privacy, and an almost certain invitation to both systematic abuse and abuse by bad-apple agents.
(BTW, topic drift... I was quite surprised to see financial data disclosure requirements described as "new". Unlike the phone search and social media stuff, the financial data part is _not_ new. It's been a requirement for certain visa applicants for at least 40 years. It doesn't currently happen at the border, but rather at visa application time. Perhaps the reason it's listed as being new is because it now includes visa-waiver-program countries too?)
Yes. That's kind of the point.
How will this stop anyone besides the absolute dumbest terrorists? Won't they just start lying?
Almost anyone can lie convincingly given enough practice. Look at Congress.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Given the high number of Murders/Prison population in the USA compared to other 1st world countries it would make just as much sense to bar US citizens from travelling to those countries.
But what is happening is that Tourists are now avoiding the USA and thats going to cost tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in lost income.
Feel free to start a trade war, the US is only 4% of the worlds population and 20% of the worlds GDP.
Asia is where all the real growth is, China is the biggest economy and growing, US firms could see themselves locked out of the Asian market. "Friends" of the USA have seen how Trump treats them, countries if they have any sense will be planning on what to do if the US is no longer there as a trading partner. Sure its going to hurt for a wee while, but everyone will recover. It will open opportunities for the likes of Airbus and Boeing gets sidelined, it will open up opportunities for EU companies to replace Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, HP, etc etc etc etc etc.
Peak USA was the 1960/1970s , it has been slowly slipping since then. Trump will simply increase the rate of fall.
So keep being scared, Keep being paranoid, Build your walls, alienate the rest of the world, the world will learn to get on just fine without the USA. We can go back to sane copyright laws, sane patent laws, sane gun laws , etc etc etc etc
Yep, our family has written off the USA as a place to visit (I have been about 6 times, family twice)
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We are also encouraged at work not to go the Europe via the USA, or attend conferences/training in the USA, risks are too high.
Dropping tourist numbers is already removing billions from the US economy, and the fall is only going to accelerate
So just remember as you shout USA first, 96% of the worlds population and 80% of the worlds GDP is saying USA last.
The world has become a lost more accessible, countries have modernised , tourism is easier and cheaper than ever before, there are more flights to more destinations than ever before, so choosing "not the USA" is no longer a problem, people are missing out on less and less each year.
Because its better than where they were.
Perhaps you want to compare those figure to the millions who have recently ended up in Europe
They would prefer to been at home, but home is full of war, death and destruction.
We have a lot of Americans who have taken up citizenship in New Zealand, if its so good there why did they leave ?
Now YOU dont care, but the people whose job depends on tourists do, tour guides do, hotels do, airlines do, tourist attractions do.
Its not OUR attitude, its the US attitude that making the difference, and tourists are now voting with their wallets.
I was dismayed the last time I visited the United States, when after the indignity of being treated like a criminal by having my fingerprints taken for the first time, the border official said to me, "Now that wasn't such a big deal was it". Border officials have absolute power. Being on business, I was in no position to offer an alternative opinion and run the risk of being sent home.
Your tourism industry will be suffering. I stopped travelling for pleasure to the US long ago. If I should visit Canada for a holiday you can be sure I will travel via Auckland or Asia and not LA.
Fuck you guys, I'm tired of your shit.
The USA has lost its damn mind.
We lost it about a decade ago, when we elected the Junior senator for Illinois president, largely because of his skin color. You remember him, the guy who got the Nobel prize his first year in office?
We seem to be getting it back since January 20th, though pockets of craziness still remain.
With an attitude like that you wonder why we don't want you here. Just stay home. We don't care.
Your choice of words betrays your belief that the US is still the center of the universe. It is less and less so, and that's a shame.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
We have people literally dying to come across our borders to get here. If the US is THAT bad, why are they coming?
You are mixing apples and oranges. The people dying to get to the US are dirt poor folk from third world countries. The US happens to be an advanced, rich, first-world country next door. You are the closest rich place. Thus they come to you. If Mexico shared a border with Canada, and not the US, Mexicans would try to illegally cross into Canada. If they shared a border with Germany, they'd try to cross over into Germany. Why aren't there a lot of Syrian asylum seekers in the US? They think the US is crap and don't want to come there? Or is it maybe because they are tens of thousands of kilometres away from the nearest US border? There do happen to be millions of them in Turkey though....I guess Turkey being next door to Syria has something to do with it.
What GP is trying to tell you is that "extreme vetting" and the like will do little to discourage desperate illegals (one, they are desperate, two, they are already trying to cross the border without bothering with such things as visas and passports and ETAs) but will do much to annoy legitimate travellers from rich countries, coming temporarily to spend money in the US. You will soon see that yes, you indeed care (as a nation, as an economy), because you will be losing out. On tourism dollars first, and then on business opportunities and investment after that. Treat every passenger as a potential terrorist and piss them off by subjecting them to ridiculous procedures, and guess what, you'll end up pissing off the 99,999...99% of passengers that aren't terrorists. Why would I want to go to a place where I might have my phone searched at the border? Why would I want to be submitted to the humiliation of explaining what every photo in my phone is about to some stranger trained to see a potential deadly threat in every person he comes across? So I can see the Grand Canyon? I can look at pictures of the canyon instead. Better that than some inane border guard looking over all my personal pictures.
Foreign tourists spent $216B in America last year, making tourism one of our biggest "exports". This reduces our trade deficit and provides jobs for millions of Americans, maybe even some ex-coalminers. Trump should be doing everything possible to encourage more people to come here, rather than pushing them away. Sad.
So you never heard of the IRA, ETA, RAF? Terrorism isn't new to Europe.
Also, I think blaming Islam as a whole even for the Islamic terrorism is mischaracterizing the problem. If you read about the background of the terrorists, many of them are people who were violent for a long time and turned to fundamentalism as short as 1 or 2 years before they did their attack. So they're not deeply religious Muslims becoming violent, they're angry people given a cause by religious extremists.
Bzzt. Access denied. Wait over there for the next plane home - at your expense.
216 billion is not chump change.
America has become an authoritarian shit hole, land of the free and home of the brave no more.
Land of the opressed home of the coward is far more apt for the stinking shithole the US has become.
Yep you are hundreds to times more likely to be murdered by a family member, work college, neighbour , or friend than you are to be involved in a terrorist act.
The "Scareware" terrorism has nothing to do about keeping Americans safe, it is all about removing right and freedoms.
Scared people are only too happy for someone else to make the decisions for them if they think it will "keep them safe".
Over the last 20 years I think more people have been killed by vending machines falling on them than by terrorists
I know some like to present the US as a fascist boogieman, however many nations wishing to preserve their sovereignty take similar measures
You haven't done much international travel have you?
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Of course you're correct about all that. But let me add some perspective to the America-firsters position, because it is, in its horrible way, at least partly consistent.
The majority of tourism dollars and employment go to the coastal, well-to-do, cosmopolitan, educated, liberal cities. The fact that alt-right anti-visitor policies are going to cripple the tourism industry isn't a bug to our regressive political thinkers; it's a feature. The fact that the coastal cities, the educated people, the cosmopolitan culture, the LBGTQ-friendly places, the colleges that receive foreign students, will be in a shambles is expressly among the things that they desire. Arguing that fact will not dissuade them; it will actually reinforce how wonderful these policies are.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Do some research, and look up the meaning of Sectarian Violence. The Troubles were catholic vs protestant at the base line.The IRA were nationalistic in that they wanted a Catholic Republic.
I doubt, that justifies their actions, but it does make them distinctly different.
It makes them distinctly similar. A bunch of murdering bastards.
Yeah, it's totally a coincidence that the IRA were all Catholics. Nothing to do with religion whatsoever...
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It seems having a Breitbart account should be a reason not to let people into the U.S., if you want to avoid to import terrorism.
"borrowed from us in the first place"
Like you, we all borrow from China now.
As a European I agree with this with one exception: it doesn't necessarily mean said companies will be 'replaced' by others. Multinational companies can re-locate themselves just as people can. If a trade war is started and Google & Co do the math and figure staying in the US will hurt their bottom line too much they'll move out and become European for example.
This is one of the main reasons why trade wars are stupid and counter--productive in this day and age. Capital and corporations can move across borders rapidly, and they will do so the moment said trade war will start hurting them too much. Trumpsters seem to be under the illusion there's some magical property making american companies forever american. Right now they are because currently the american stock market and environment is still the best place to do business from but if that changes these guys are not going to stay because they're patriots or some such nonsense. They care about money and making it, not the color of the flag waving atop their headquarter.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
This is enough to genuinely stop me from travelling to or via the US. I doubt I'm alone.
Also, there is only one other country in the world that does this currently, and this isn't hyperbole, that country is North Korea.
People in the US voted for Trump because they were desperate for change, but the reality is that they're merely voting to speed up America's fall. America is teetering on the brink with it's phenomenal debt and that has to be managed careful, sending a bull into the china shop who is willing to satisfy petty nationalism at the cost of economic health.
The West has gained an entitlement culture fed by decades of economic growth and time at the top. When that ground to a halt in 2007 people decided they still wanted more and have turned to the extremes who promise them more (but can't provide it). What people don't consider is that despite the slow down, things were probably about as good as they get. The result? The far right and far left populist extremes, the Farages, the Trumps, the Corbyns, the Le Penns make wonderful claims, but inevitably they can't deliver, people accept racism, xenophobia, hatred, in return for the promise of that continued rapid growth in living standards they've seen since World War II, and then seem surprised when it isn't delivered, and all they're left with is the hatred, without the promised gain, except, the hatred has a cost, so not only do they not gain, they outright lose.
That's what's happening here, people accepted hatred for the promise of gain, but the gain ain't happening, and the hatred has the cost of drastically cutting back tourism income.
People need to learn to accept reduced increases in wealth for a while, and to stop being so greedy and entitled until tweaks in the existing complex system that is the global economy filter through and correct. If they don't, the hatred will grow, and history has shown us time and time again that that never ends well.
The US is resembling Russia more and more. Once a superpower, now going gradually downhill socially and politically. Whenever anyone points this out they get huffy and isolate themselves from anyone who criticizes them in any way. Which only further contributes to their problems.
The USA has lost its damn mind.
Has not. Non American citizens are not guaranteed the same rights as American citizens. Always been that way across the world. Take a vacation to North Korea or Iran and see if you get the same rights as in your own country and report back.
I think that using the argument that the US is only doing the same thing as the insane dictatorship that is North Korea is not a good way of proving your country's sanity.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it