bubosquared | (no subject)

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Not that I think I won't get into the country, but this is likely going to delay my actually getting out of the airport, and to be honest, if I'd known of this before I booked my tickets (Virgin's website doesn't have any info on this) I don't know that I would've gone. (Yeah, call me paranoid, but dude, I'm from a country with mandatory ID cards, and yet I can't help feel weird about this.)

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You can get around it if your country issues biometric passports, IIRC. I hadn't realised it was expanded to the visa wavier program, though.

Looks like I'm not going to be meeting the in-laws, then, unless they come here.

It was expanded last September, apparently, which is why I was unaware of it. (I wouldn't know if I had a biometric passport, but I'm going to assume, no. Heh.) To be honest, I'm more annoyed about the lines and delays this will undoubtably cause more than about them getting my fingerprints, because if I was going to be tracked by the US govt., they're already on me anyway. (I'm either very naive or very cynical, or both.)

Biometric passports have biometric data (fingerprints, iris patterns, and anything else they can get) encoded electronically on a smart chip. You almost certainly don't have one. :o)

Still, though, I'm not going to be tagged like that. I won't get a biometric ID card or passport, and I'm not going to give a foreign government something I don't trust my own one with.

Fair 'nough. I know this is something I'll usually diagree on with UK and US people, simply because I've grown up with mandatory ID cards, so the concept, at least, isn't strange to me. I'm still a bit leery about the US govt. having that info, but as long as it is only fingerprints and photos, I suppose I can live with it. (Certainly not worth the £350 in tickets I've already spent, sigh.)

You can get around it if your country issues biometric passports, IIRC.

Yes, but no one in the world has biometric passports, apart from the US.

Yet. *grumbles*

Actually, IIRC (this was around/after I moved to the UK), there's some biometric stuff in the new Belgian ID cards. I may have that wrong, though, and they're not passports, anyway, but still.

Melissa has one, they have a chip, but that's about it. She didn't have to have her fingerprints taken or any of that crap. They did take a very demanding passport-photo, probably for some kind of weird "Spooks" type face-mapping purposes.
No idea what they want to store on the chips in future though ...
actually I have no idea what's on them now, apart from probably her address

I didn't vote for the bastard.

I've heard a lot of (valid) complaints about this from the privacy angle, but as far as I know, it hasn't been a hassle in terms of the time it takes. So worry only about the US government having your data, and not about getting out of the airport.

I didn't vote for the bastard.

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to stop him from claiming 51% majority as a "mandate". *grumbles something about monkeys, maths, and pies*

Good to know about the lines, and while I'm a wee bit apprehensive about the whole thing, it's too late to back out now, and as long as it's just a photo and fingerprints, the cynical part of me points out that that's nothing they couldn't get without my knowledge, anyway.

wait, wait. countries (like yours and mine) whose nationals can normally ravel on the visa waiver program can enter w/o biometric passport, IF they have a (different thing) Machine readable passport. Presumably, I thnk, you do have one.

I went with mine and entered the country in SFO and the US Visit system was there (I saw it and saw it being used) but I didn't have to go through it because I was part of the visa-waived travelers-- did that change already?

One other thing, though: the system went really fast and didn't hold up *any one*. Seriously. The pace for the entrance queuing was the same as it's ever been.

oops *reads better with clean glasses* okay, so the system expands to cover us both now, yeah. Hm. Still, I wouldn't worry about the queues.

Was that before or after last September? Because on that site I linked, the announced the expansion of the programme to include visa waiver countries (the fuckers) from September 2004 onwards.

Anyway, I'm not too bothered, but it was a bit of a shock cause no one'd told me.

it was on sep. 19th, and i think the new system applies to us now, since sep. 30th.

Yep. We Canadians are now the only evil furriners who can enter the US without being fingerprinted, scanned, etc. -- and honestly, I doubt that'll last long. Personally, I think all the visa waiver countries (like yours) should decide that turnabout is fair play, and start collecting this sort of personal information from every American tourist who passes through one of their airports. They're so pathological about their right to privacy, it might be nice to see what they think of being treated as guilty until proven innocent.

o_O I'm not sure what that link is about -- I scanned it fairly quickly, had no idea what it was supposed to be about (when I saw 'visa' I thought it was about the bankcards… *g*) -- but from the comments I gather you need to have your fingerprints taken. Iris prints, too, or is that just those biometric passports (what countries even have those??)? Big Brother, here we come. It reminds me freakily of Minority Report.

On the one hand, I suppose the fact that they take fingerprints shouldn't be too bad. After all, it's not like you, or I should I ever go there, are up to anything. And it would certainly help tracking down criminals. Yet the sheer thought of having my fingerprints taken makes me become queasy. It means that from now on, they can check whether you've been anywhere, if they really want to. I wonder if this'll create a trend of people wearing gloves everywhere. :p

It just seems like such a… suspicious thing to do. It's like

stellated says -- like you're guilty until proven innocent. Are they taking the prints of every American, too? Because otherwise it just feels like they're discriminating foreigners and assuming everyone who isn't American is potentially evil. Way to increase the feeling of insecurity.

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