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| US screening nets 30 criminals in 3 days |
| 2004-01-09 |
| Link via Tim Blair. EFL. America’s controversial foreign visitor screening program has nabbed 30 criminals in its first three days of operation, an official said yesterday. In Washington, a senior US Homeland Security official said that during the first three days after US Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology - or US-VISIT - was installed at 115 US airports, more than 83,000 international passengers had been photographed and fingerprinted. "Among those we have had 30 criminal hits," Undersecretary for Border and Transportation Security Asa Hutchinson said. Mr Hutchison cited one case, that of a Salvadoran national stopped late yesterday at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. "When he presented his travel documents everything seemed fine but the biometric identification sounded a warning," he said. "Turned out he had used false documents to enter the United States illegally 12 times in the past year and had committed some minor offences." |
| Posted by:seafarious |
| #6 I've got an FBI dossier at LEAST three inches thick, if not larger. That's the price you pay for working for Uncle in a classified environment. It's never kept me from doing anything I wanted to do. Most people who want to cry foul are those that have something to hide - or think they do. |
| Posted by: Old Patriot 2004-1-9 11:30:52 PM |
| #5 I don't see what privacy I lose by having my fingerprints taken. I'm sure Miss Cleo needs at least a palm print to discern anything useful about my personal life. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2004-1-9 11:21:07 PM |
| #4 Of course this is good news and encouraging, but only as long as we're content to catch the idiot-level types. Just as the Air France announcement of that cancelled flight cost us an opportunity to "interview" certain people, this being shouted from the rooftops will eventually cause the smarter-than-a-rock variety of asshat to seek alternatives... So how are the Friendship and Amigo fences coming along? |
| Posted by: .com 2004-1-9 6:43:50 PM |
| #3 We could also use this system to check fingerprints swept from known terrorist sites and camps to help stop people that have been to those places from entering the country... we wouldn't neccesarily know who they were but we'd know they were someplace they shouldn't have been... |
| Posted by: Damn_Proud_American 2004-1-9 6:23:54 PM |
| #2 Many civil libertarians equate the anonymity with privacy and privacy with liberty itself. Some of this, I think, stems from the belief that disapproval is oppression. Similar, again IMHO, to the squeals of "censorship" that follow a leftist being criticized. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2004-1-9 6:05:27 PM |
| #1 I have ranted about this on a number of occasions over at samizadata. If you want better security, then you have to have stronger identities and identity checks. This is unavoidable. The civil libertarian types get hot under the collar about this and start the 1984 type arguments, but speaking as a libertarian. I see no necessary connection between loss of privacy (which results from stronger identities)and loss of personal liberty, unless of course I have done something illegal. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2004-1-9 5:06:59 PM |