Private Schmivate
July 6th, 2005As I will probably have to visit the US some time in the coming year, I have been looking into the new requirements for people travelling into the country. You'll probably be aware that since 2002 everyone entering US borders needs a machine-readable passport and/or a visa which involves the collection of your fingerprints by the embassy that processes your application. You'll also probably be aware that most of the world – including a large number of Americans – does not trust the US Government and its agents one little bit, especially with such personal or stigmatic information as fingerprints. It makes people feel like criminals for one: Discussing e-Passports for US Citizens, Barry Kevauver formerly of the State Department says of biometric data, "…that's further off because it would require fingerprinting the general public, something that may not go down too well with people because of the criminal taint of being fingerprinted". Yet foreigners won't mind? Of course, all this is supposedly in the good cause of protecting the United States from terrorists, without mentioning the fact that before 2001, the only terrorist attacks on US soil had been made by US Citizens like the Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh against their own people. Ninety percent of Americans don't actually have a passport, so cannot be traced using these new laws… But without any choice, we have to give up our personal information in order to enter the country. How will they look after this huge store of data and ensure the wrong people cannot access it? Well don't worry. According to the Department of State (penultimate paragraph, try to ignore that they've written everything twice), "The electronic fingerprint data is associated with an issued visa for verification and the privacy of the data is protected by storage in the database." That's OK then, all safe and secure. No privacy worries, because my information's stored in a database by an organisation with such IT skills that it publishes all its webpages in duplicate and can't even protect the private data of their own soldiers in Iraq. Sarcasm aside however, it's still not very reassuring. So what am I going to do? I want to go visit some friends, but that means giving a permanent and not-very-secure record of my personal identification information to one of the most right-wing and aggressive countries in the world. Luckily for me, Britain, of which I am a citizen, is eligible for the Visa Waiver Program, which will save me going through the rigmarole of getting a visa so long as my passport's issued after a certain date and is machine readable. On close inpection it turns out that, "hurrah!" I do indeed have a machine readable passport (2 lines of funny characters at the bottom of my info page) but of course, no digital photo as the passport was issued way back in 1997 before I even had a digicam myself. But wait, "double hurrah" because now the Visa Waiver program has been extended for another year so as far as I can tell, I can visit the USA with my scruffy old analogue passport until 26 October 2006 without having to give them the two fingers.