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

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