More on that fingerprinting proposal

[redbird]

(This is a duplicate of what I just posted to my Weblog, because yonmei and brisingamen have had discussions of this in their journals)

Bruce Schneier explains why
fingerprinting visitors to the US will not make us safe.

Security is a trade-off. When deciding whether to implement a security measure, we must balance the costs against the benefits. Large-scale fingerprinting is something that doesn't add much to our security against terrorism and costs an enormous amount of money that could be better spent elsewhere. Allocating the funds on compiling, sharing and enforcing the terrorist watch list would be a far better security investment. As a security consumer, I'm getting swindled....

It's bad civic hygiene to build an infrastructure that can be used to facilitate a police state.

Comments

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

From what I understand, they get fingerprinted before they enter the US by the nation of origin. The US based fingerprinting is for comparison purposes to prevent forged passports.

Of course, as far as I know the visas of the 9-11 were legit.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

The US has announced that only people with biometric passports (which include a magnetic strip that can store info like fingerprints, plus anything else the government feels like putting on it) will be allowed into the country past the fingerprint machines - so effectively the long-term choice will be between being fingerprinted by your country of origin, or being fingerprinted by the US. But not both.

No country in the world does biometric passports right now, so the US is still letting people from the 28 countries on the visa waiver scheme in without being fingerprinted, unless they had to get a new passport after October 2004, because that's the biometric passport deadline.

A new passport after October 2004, or any visa at all, means (in the UK) a visit to the US Embassy in London, which is warranted to take up half a day (let alone the time/cost of getting there and back for those of us who live outside the SE of England - which is most of us) and will cost £67. ($122.68 in US money) That is actually more than the airport tax costs of a ticket to the US... plus the fact that all travellers who do this end up on a ginormous database the ultimate purpose of which is not in the least clear, and the information on which is not guaranteed by the Data Protection Act.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

No - I have a US visa (issued in 98), and thus had to be fingerprinted when i entered the US last week. Since I'll be entering the US again on Monday, on my way back from seeing purplejavatroll in Canada, I'll get a fairly quick check on how repeatable their fingerprint systems are.

If they're not reliable, I hope I won't be disappeared into the anti-terrorist camps...