New U.S. Travel Restrictions
The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative will require all travelers to and from the Americas, the Caribbean and Bermuda to have a passport or other accepted document to enter or re-enter the United States. The implementation schedule is as follows:
Previously, you didn't need a passport to go on a cruise. You could book one last minute on a great deal and take off with a birth certificate. That will change.
New electronic passports (see next article here) present a whole other issue of problems and privacy. What happens when the electronic machine readers fail while you are in a border line? Do they wait for the system to reboot? New batteries? Will they go back to a human scan of the document? What procedure will they everyone properly trained to follow?
What happens when enterprising individuals scan persons going on a cruise, take your identity and go clean out your house while they know you are gone for 7 days? Far fetched? If you are nervous about being an American in a hostile country (or one we are hostile to), the enemy has a way of finding out who you are for sure. Anyone with a internet connection or a private detective license can find out information on you once they have your name and birth date. And you lose control of that information when it is broadcast to the world.
Encryption? Data security? We've heard the news about hackers and bank information leaks and viruses. Your passport won't be any safer. If a human can code it, someone else can break it.
This doesn't stop anyone from walking through the desert or over a mountain. If you were sneaking into a country with ten relatives and a dirty bomb, would you really go through a security checkpoint? A sort of band-aid, this change only treats a scratch, not the object that caused the scratch in the first place. Changing the way we monitor a boder stop only restricts those that follow the laws from the beginning.
Previously, you didn't need a passport to go on a cruise. You could book one last minute on a great deal and take off with a birth certificate. That will change.
New electronic passports (see next article here) present a whole other issue of problems and privacy. What happens when the electronic machine readers fail while you are in a border line? Do they wait for the system to reboot? New batteries? Will they go back to a human scan of the document? What procedure will they everyone properly trained to follow?
What happens when enterprising individuals scan persons going on a cruise, take your identity and go clean out your house while they know you are gone for 7 days? Far fetched? If you are nervous about being an American in a hostile country (or one we are hostile to), the enemy has a way of finding out who you are for sure. Anyone with a internet connection or a private detective license can find out information on you once they have your name and birth date. And you lose control of that information when it is broadcast to the world.
Encryption? Data security? We've heard the news about hackers and bank information leaks and viruses. Your passport won't be any safer. If a human can code it, someone else can break it.
This doesn't stop anyone from walking through the desert or over a mountain. If you were sneaking into a country with ten relatives and a dirty bomb, would you really go through a security checkpoint? A sort of band-aid, this change only treats a scratch, not the object that caused the scratch in the first place. Changing the way we monitor a boder stop only restricts those that follow the laws from the beginning.
Labels: air travel, news