[Infowarrior] - Airlines to be forced to fingerprint departing visitors

[Richard Forno]

Airlines to be forced to fingerprint departing visitors
By Michael Hampton
Posted: May 10, 2007 3:08 am
http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2007/05/10/airlines-to-be-forced-to-fingerpr
int-departing-visitors/

If you¹re planning a visit to the U.S., you already have to give up your
fingerprints and retinal scans to the Department of Homeland Security in
order to enter the country. Now the department wants to require every
visitor to go through the same procedure in order to leave the country.

And they want to force the airlines to collect your biometric information,
rather than do it themselves.

³They are apoplectic² about the proposal, Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) said.

DHS has been testing self-service exit kiosks where international travelers
could fingerprint themselves and officially check out as they left the
country, but found that almost no departing travelers actually used the
kiosks when departing.

Most foreign visitors already have to give up their fingerprints to obtain a
visa or upon entry to the U.S. under the US-VISIT program. DHS officials
said that an effective exit tracking system would allow them to determine
who might be overstaying their visas.

    ³We are hopeful that they will provide us with enough information so
that we can start considering a response,² [said Bob Davidson, the manager
of facilitation services for the International Air Transport Association].
³At present, the industry does not have a clear enough picture to enable us
to begin thinking through the ramifications.²

    Angelo Amador, the director of Immigration policy for the U.S. Chamber
of Commerce, told UPI that industry concerns centered on the issues of
infrastructure ‹ the cost and practicalities of installing fingerprint
readers connected to U.S.-VISIT databases at thousands of check-in desks ‹
and contingency plans in case of equipment failure.

    ³What will happen if there are technological problems?² he asked. ³Will
they prevent people from boarding? Make them miss their flights?² ‹ United
Press International

Don¹t forget cost. If you force the airlines to do government work and don¹t
pay them, then ticket prices will rise. Tourism and international business
travel to the U.S. are already significantly down, primarily because of
potential visitors¹ concerns about clearing Customs. Higher ticket prices
and more complicated exit procedures will cut international travel even
more.

For most of human history, international travel was not much of a big deal.
In the past few decades, the rise of computers and networks has enabled
governments to track people more closely, and being governments, they have
done exactly that. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing depends
largely on whether you have access to the government databases. But the U.S.
has already used this capability to deny entry to people for political
reasons entirely unconnected to any potential threat of terrorism.

Maybe it makes us safer, but at what cost? The society which would result
from this endless drive to make us safe from all potential threats, no
matter how remote, resembles nothing more than a police state where every
behavior is strictly regulated. Sure, we¹d all be perfectly safe and
wouldn¹t have to deal with the government if we never left our rubber rooms.
But that¹s not a society worth living in. It¹s certainly not a society worth
working toward.