All US Border Crossings Now Require A 'Terrorist Risk Profile' 710
conlaw writes with a somewhat intimidating Washington Post article. "The federal government disclosed details yesterday of a border-security program to screen all people who enter and leave the United States, create a terrorism risk profile of each individual and retain that information for up to 40 years ... The risk assessment is created by analysts at the National Targeting Center, a high-tech facility opened in November 2001 and now run by Customs and Border Protection. In a round-the-clock operation, targeters match names against terrorist watch lists and a host of other data to determine whether a person's background or behavior indicates a terrorist threat, a risk to border security or the potential for illegal activity. They also assess cargo."
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Delusional (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Awesome! (Score:4, Interesting)
I have come to the conclusion that the current plan is to make visiting the US such a privacy-invading, presumption-of-innocence-reversing, bureaucratic ordeal that the number of legitimate visitors gradually diminishes towards zero. At that point it will be safe to assume that anyone who actually wants to come to the country despite all of the above is a freedom hater with murder on his/her mind, and should be 'processed' accordingly.
Seriously though, to a non-American there is such a phenomenal... arrogance to all of this. It's not quite the right word. But there's a presumption that the US is fabulous and sacred and utterly superior and different to all other nations, and that people will accept whatever probing and scanning and recording Washington decides to impose simply for the honour and privilege of visiting.
It might be the case now, but let's see how things stand in 20-30 years.
Rendition (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds like the collapse of the US to me.
Re:plenty of people come in that way, too (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only that, but we now have some sort of government-manufactured rule-based system that assigns risk to 'potential terrorists'. Just wait for the inevitable leak of their methodology (via stolen laptops, incompetence, etc.) and you just gave real terrorists a way to evade suspicion. That's the problem with any "model" for suspicious behavior -- once its known, it's easily exploited.
Re:Holy False Positives, Batman! (Score:3, Interesting)
My concern isn't that they are running people's ID through a database. That is fine. A government probably should be checking who is coming in and out of the country and doing a quick computer check to see if a person throws up any red flags.
My problem is that database they are using. The "watch list" is a piece of shit, as has been shown with the nightmare it has created for some airline passengers. The real crime is the database in question, not the fact that a government checks your ID and checks to see if you are a criminal.
Re:Awesome! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Brilliant. (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you kidding? Those guys will keep a low profile and obey every immigration rule, speed limit and traffic sign
A system totally gone berserk! (Score:5, Interesting)
"According to yesterday's notice, the program is exempt from certain requirements of the Privacy Act of 1974 that allow, for instance, people to access records to determine "if the system contains a record pertaining to a particular individual" and "for the purpose of contesting the content of the record."
Who is going to rein back those idiots?
America has no dream - only a nightmare.
How it's working today (Score:3, Interesting)
"...they were detained, questioned and denied entry...The women were questioned at Canadian customs about their participation in anti-war efforts and informed that they had an FBI file indicating they had been arrested in acts of non-violent civil disobedience." [commondreams.org]
Time to Leave (Score:5, Interesting)
Every day it seems I get more confirmation that I was right in deciding I should leave this country as soon as I can. A few generations ago my family came to America to escape communism in East Germany after the war, and now I'll be leaving the USA to escape the encroachment of my rights. Things aren't that bad here yet compared to many places in the world, but my family already made the mistake of waiting too long to leave once, I'm not going to make that mistake too. Better to get out early than not at all.
The Republicans are authoritarians and religious zealots, the sane ones either left their party or are such a small voice that they're completely drowned out by the chorus of insanity from the party at large. Ron Paul, who is a real Rep. and not a Neocon, doesn't look like he will be popular enough among the wealthy, the war-hawks, and the religious--or as they call it "the Republican base"--to win. The Democrats are too spineless to stand up for their core values, favoring a centrist stance to garner support from the left leaning Republicans, Independents, and various minorities and they end up acting like Republican-Light(TM). There is virtually no minority party voice in this country that anyone takes seriously. Both sides spend outrageous amount of money, although one actually attempts to pay for it by increasing taxes where the other just spends and passes the debt off to their kids and grandkids. Meanwhile no one is willing to put a stop to America's current adventure in the desert even though we're spending enough money on the war to fund what could be the best health care system in the world, even after you account for typical government waste and inefficiency. The soldiers that come back maimed, crippled, or psychologically scarred are given a standard of care that we should all be ashamed of. And then there are the ones who only come back draped in an American flag.
I would recommend everyone take a serious look at the idea of leaving the US. Figure out what it would take to leave, and how fast you could do it in. There may be a time soon when you have to put that plan into action.
It pains me way too much (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:So (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course not, that would be counterproductive to the goals of the administration that's pushing for all of this. People of today equate physical barriers to the Cold War and that's exactly what this administration doesn't want -- transparency about what's going on. What they would much prefer, is a veil of secrecy that is as impenetrable as the walls of years passed.
What they can accomplish now is far more evil and devastating to our way of life, Constitution and national identity because the majority of people will blindly continue their daily routines by choosing to ignore the random media news stories and pointless discussions in Congress while their favorite TV shows are playing.
Confronting the Central Issue (Score:5, Interesting)
This reminds me of encryption key escrow, where some bright guy thought we'd all be safer if there was just a big list of passwords all in one place so that the guy with the master root password could get anything he wanted when he wanted. It's the superficially appealing but should-be-scary notion that government would be better if more efficient.
It's as if we think the entire world is scary but the one thing we know is a universal constant is that whoever holds the keys will not be compromised. And yet, to listen to radio DJ's, if Hillary takes office it will be as if a coup had taken place. Whatever you think of that claim--legitimate or ridiculous--the one thing that should not be in dispute is that whatever information is amassed against The People is available for use by anyone who has the keys even if a hostile regime change happens. Some people think electing the other party is such a thing, and others don't. But even if you believe an election is benign, there are potential events in the world that are not neutral and that would be bad. We all draw lines in different places, but we all draw lines. I have my own political biases but they are not relevant here--people on both sides of the present political divides should be equally concerned on this one.
What if someone manipulated an election? What if the value of the dollar fell so low that the only people who could fund an electable candidate were foreigners? What if someone successfully attacked the center of government? What if someone bribed a politician? What if a hacker or a worm/virus/whatever snuck in and found all this data? Surely everyone has some scenario they can think of in which the person sitting in the White House might not be someone they wanted to trust with the kind of data being collected here.
Although many people are made nervous about abuse of information, the scenarios discussed usually seem to focus on an isolated individual doing a little inappropriate peeking or a bit of overzealous prosecution or menacing. But that's not the worst case. The worst case is someone getting past the safeguards of the nation and getting to the seat of power and then having at their fingertips the knowledge of who is a threat and who is not, so they can't be re-taken because they have defensive knowledge on everyone who might oppose them.
The government seems obsessed with the notion that centralization is the key to success, but it doesn't realize that the designers of the original republic did a brilliant job of coming up with a distributed structure that made us all safe--the notion of each state having its own way of doing things, and having all of those states be relatively autonomous. Even to the point of allowing state militias, which as I understand it had the potential duty to protect the state from the federal government if it got uppity. In effect, what they implemented was genetic diversity, which makes it harder to attack the US because there are a variety of defenses in play unevenly and it's hard to devise a uniform plan of attack that will take down every state at the same time. But one by one, we're turning our states into clones of one another, so that a single plan of attack will be more likely to succeed on everything at once. That won't make us safer.
Profiling for the masses... (Score:2, Interesting)
Al Qaeda must be laughing their asses off (Score:3, Interesting)
Didn't do this already? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Time to Leave (Score:4, Interesting)
You're right that I never saw the horrible conditions of the communist Deutsche Demokratische Republik first hand, but I did hear of them directly from family members who did. One thing that always surprised me was how they all said the same thing about leaving; by the time they new they needed to get out it was too late to do so easily. They had friends and even relatives that called them unpatriotic, deserters, and cowards when they left. I'm not going to pay much attention to the people saying the same things to me.
Your Cuba tirade was a bit strange, I don't know what would make you think that was my intended destination. Pretty silly to assume really seeing as Cuba is a communist dictatorship and a step down in freedoms compared to the USA. But trying to show that the US is a free and prosperous country by comparing it to Cuba...do I really need to point out how sad that seems? "Yay! We're doing better than Cuba!" As a troll you're not really doing a good job, it's like you're not even trying.
Maybe I shouldn't have insulted both the Democrats AND Republicans, there's no one left to mod me up!
Best wishes to you, AC. Pity you didn't even think enough of your own words to sign them.
Re:no-one else has stated it outright, so I shall (Score:2, Interesting)
Most of the commentators on this thread seem to feel that this policy is aimed at foreign visitors entering the US. I think that's not the point at all - the point is to keep the US population in line.
In this case, one might also argue that it's meant to chill Americans' desire to travel abroad where they might find out that life in other countries (particularly Europe and Canada, but also in other places) might actually be better in certain respects than life in America, because they might return home and demand that Americans, as members of what's still the richest nation on earth, get the same advantages as people in some other countries.
Re:Soviet Vespucciland (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah..... right.
-Red
Re:So (Score:5, Interesting)
And our current "security theater" is as absurd as the "tollbooth scene" in "Blazing Saddles".
Re:plenty of people come in that way, too (Score:5, Interesting)
Er, how many times do you want to punish people? I had a DUI conviction over 7 years ago in Canada; my license was suspended for 15 months, I paid a large fine (and legal fees), and my insurance rates tripled when I got my license back. I had to take a remedial course on DUI, at my own expense.
So if I want to go skiing in western NY later this year, should I be "punished" again by being denied entry? Even if my wife is driving? Even if I have zero BAC? I thought the deal was you served your time, and then you weren't punished for that particular crime again. Now you're telling me that any border guard can deny me entry for the next 40 years because I have a "criminal record"? Thanks.
Re:Soviet Vespucciland (Score:4, Interesting)
With all the violence against the English language I've seen here, most of it coming from 'native' speakers, I wouldn't be so sure about that.
For example, I've never seen any of my non-American friends mistake "your" for "you're", something that seems to be very common, but makes the text very difficult to read. Possibly even more difficult for us non-natives since we, at least I, tend to read English a lot more than we hear or speak it.
Re:Awesome! (Score:3, Interesting)
Gladly... (Score:5, Interesting)
The funny thing about these profiling things is that they can be used for so much more. For example one of my treehugging hippie political activist friends is on some kind of a terrorist watchlist to the US, and the funny thing is she wouldn't resort to violence to defend her own life, not to mention she's a small woman in a wheelchair... Another activist friend of hers always gets his book shipments from Amazon crudely opened along the way and then resealed. Mine always arrive untouched.
suitecases w/firearms *do* get lost (Score:2, Interesting)
'The TSA told NBC 10 that "gun theft from checked baggage is an issue TSA is tackling head-on".'
Losing guns from checked baggage happens often enough that TSA considers at an "issue"!
Re:So (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:So (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Time to Leave (Score:3, Interesting)
That neighbor who always claims you've failed to return his garden hose umpteen years ago? He'll report on you the first chance he gets. The friendly postman? He's paid minimum wage or thereabouts, so bounties for ratting on people who receive "suspicious" mail always come in handy. The parish priest? Had his confession booth wired for sound "voluntarily" years ago.
Nowhere is perfectly safe but zero stable social connections, a sub-let shithole of a flat that you move out of once a year and a string of low-profile, non-unionized jobs in the big city will keep you much safer than any amount of friendship you may have with the locals of Smallville, USA who, collectively, know everything there is to know about you.
Just be sure to have your papers ever-so-slightly out of order for when the police checks them - and they will, often; citizens with papers in perfect order and squeaky clean slates are suspicious, as the system is designed to make everyone break some little law at some point.
That way, if you're unlucky or you forget to grease the right palms, you'll be picked up at some point, you'll get a fine, a bitchslap and maybe get recruited as an informant, but you'll stay out of the camps. If some random joe fingers you for an enemy of the state, you're screwed. Your best bet is to try and make sure that no random joe will think to name your name while being waterboarded.
Re:plenty of people come in that way, too (Score:3, Interesting)
Because making you wait 5 days *might* stop a Va Tech type massacre from happening. I would suggest that anyone who asks this sort of question is putting their own selfish self-gratification before the safety of others.
2) A woman's death - could've happened with a gun as well. The key to this problem might not lie in guns but other means, such as speeding up the restraining orders, better police protection, increased funding for safe houses, etc... I would argue the solution shouldn't lie in the "let's populate our town with huge wolves to fight the man-eating bats we used to solve an earlier small problem" approach. What's next? Battered wives getting permits to carry M-16s around?
3) The black market doesn't enforce wait periods, but going to the black market means you're putting yourself at a risk of sting operations and such. If your argument is that the black market exists, and you can get a gun there anyway, so why not just let anybody buy any gun they please, instantly, (in a nutshell, adjust the real market to what the black market offers), then why not extend that to drugs as well? You can buy any kind of a drug on the black market, why don't we just legalize all the drugs?
It's the risk of getting caught that is supposed to be a real deterrent. In your case, I imagine they might strip you of all your other precious guns if they caught you. Why don't YOU buy your guns on the black market if it's so quick and cheap and easy?
4) Cars and guns are not the same thing. Objects that have one purpose, and one purpose only, to kill living things, should not be mentioned in the same breath as modes of transportation, or kitchen utensiles, etc.
And no, target practice isn't "another purpose," it's just practice for the killing of living things.
5) Oh, and also, if you're so poor that you can't afford to take a day off from work, why are you buying weapons that cost hundreds of dollars?
There's you, and then there's the rest of America. Not everybody is you, the safe benign gun collector.
Re:well, at least you can still be our President! (Score:3, Interesting)
A 5'10", 185lbs coach is assaulted by his 16 year old, 6'3", 280lbs football player. The coach defends himself and drops the glass-jawed student. The account is supported by all that witnessed the event. The coach is fired and arrested. He is prosecuted for felony assault on a minor. He now has a criminal record and is completely unable to coach as he can no longer pass his background check. He is forced to change vocation. The student received in school suspension for 90 days. Result, one life ruined and the one at fault gets to laugh about it with no long term effect.
An 17 year old is assaulted by a 14 year old where the older defends himself. The younger is physically the same size as the older. The older is arrested, as an adult, for felony assault on a minor because the age difference is more than three years and one party is 17 years of age or older. I don't know what happened after his arrest. The younger student received no punishment.
If there is proof the system is completely broken, I believe you just read it. The courts clearly need compassion, intelligence, and wisdom. Right now, predominately, all seem to be lacking.
Re:plenty of people come in that way, too (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, most people don't go hunting with the
Importing ought to drive up the cost, especially if they have to be imported illegally, as customs will still catch quite a few. Guns have a significant bulk/cost ratio difference from drugs, that I should think would make them an unattractive import candidate.
Guns aren't detectable by drug dogs either. They might be a sideline, but they'd still come in.
Thanks for bringing up Britain, who in 2002 had
I'll fully admit that the USA has issues. For one thing, our murder rate without firearms is higher than the UK's total rate. So it's not just firearms. It's not politically correct, but if you were to remove murders committed by african americans the US crime rate would drop drastically. Of course, I think that this is caused more by the drug war combined with entitlement politics, combined with the earlier discrimination. However, today it's inner city culture that's causing much of the problem. How to fix that, I can't entirely be sure of.
On the other hand, the Swiss actually have a higher firearm ownership rate than the USA and even lower amounts of crime. Not to mention oddities like if you look at legal gun ownership, areas with high ownership rates generally have lower crime rates.
how do they typically deal with the waiting period? Do they mail you the gun later?
Mailing is generally illegal(a few exceptions exist for servicing/mailing to self). The purchaser has to take possession in person. Still, that's part of the problem with waiting periods. Generally you end up going to the dealer's physical store, if the show doesn't extend beyond the waiting period. It's not a big deal in states without waiting periods.
I know I'm not going to convince you of anything, but guns are not good. They are dangerous, deadly weapons. Gun control and Border control are a really really bad analogy for any number of reasons.
Ah yes, the gun household 'safety' study. You are aware that they included illegal gun possession as well? That they didn't include self defense that didn't result in a fatality? That studies have shown that, while a popular choice for suicide, the substitution rate is high enough that suicide rates are pretty much static despite firearm possession rates?
I don't know where the border control thing came from.
Anyways, I think we'd do better to try to fix poverty than spend all this effort trying to ban guns, generally by going after guns not used in crimes. For example, the brady bunch was founded on the basis of a CIA agent killed by a handgun, yet when in power pushed the AWB(Assault Weapon Ban), which regulated rifles, not handguns of the type used in the assassination attempt. Then there's California's inclusion of