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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.
You're not the first to say that. I had considered a few trips this summer to the U.S to visit friends. After all this nonsense, I decided to cancel and to exploring Europe.
I was going to Vegas for a mates 40th birthday celebration. That was scheduled for September, we are now going to Macau.
This came about because one of our mates is of Indian decent and follows the Sikh religion. Apparently in LA that was indistinguishable from Islam and he spent 4 hours being questioned at length. It caused him to miss his connecting flights and he then missed his first day of the project he was to be working on.
Their primary issue, they refused to believe that his job had him travel the amount that he does, he sets up microsoft training conferences all over the world and has previously come close to spending too long in the US and nearly qualified as a US resident for tax. So he's been there many many many times. But apparently no one needs to travel as much as he does unless you're a terrorist. WTF.
That was his last visit.
FTS: "... questions under consideration included... how (visa applicants) view the treatment of women in society".
Methinks VP Pence would fail that test miserably. His anti-abortion stance favours a law that would even prevent even rape victims from aborting the fetuses fathered by their rapists. He made a (thankfully unsuccessful) attempt to enact legislation forcing women to pay for funerals for the blood and tissue ejected when they miscarry. Now that's what I call a positive and respectful attitude towards women in society!
As for the US government becoming an even creepier Peeping Tom when it comes to probing visitors' privacy, I no longer care. I was already saying "No!" when it came to visiting the States, and now I'm saying "Hell no!", so this doesn't represent a very big change. I don't know why Trump is wasting the money that US taxpayers, (not Mexico), will pay to build his damned wall. He's already erecting a pretty effective virtual wall - lots of people around the world are staying away because of the antics of the knuckle-dragging thug that runs the place. If he keeps it up, even the most desperate Mexicans may feel safer with the drug lords, corruption, and abject poverty in their native country than they would in the land of der Trumpenfuhrer.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
In technical terms, the Church of England has been in existence for well over a thousand years. If you're talking about the Church becoming Protestant, it was already beginning to happen in Henry VIII's time, and it was his son, Edward VI, who formally made it a Protestant church. Mary I tried to temporarily reverse it, but Elizabeth I fixed the CofE as a Protestant institution, with a Catholic-lite variant for those that dug that long-winded mass.
And even that era produced its own terrorists; Guy Fawkes and his gang of Catholic rebels who nearly succeeded in blowing Parliament up, and with that act the Catholics in England became the Muslims of the 17th century; distrusted, viewed as would-be traitors of dubious loyalty, with their loyalty towards Rome, practices of an alien faith, and it wasn't until the 19th century that Catholics were politically normalized again (and even then there were some rancor in some quarters about Catholic Emancipation).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.