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US Government demands direct police access to European biometric data [pdf]

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Re: US Government demands direct police access to European biometric data [pdf]

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would we have to give two damns about American demands, I don't see that having any chance.

Because sovereignty ends at borders. Europeans want to vacation in the US. The US demands biometric authentication upon crossing the border. So you either give them that data or the US stops letting Europeans in. And I doubt Europe is going to be any better at not demanding biometric data than the US is, because Europe has the same underlying incentives to do so (i.e. a restrictive immigration system, a large portion…

I don’t think the EU minds the US having access to EU biometric data as long as citizens choose to give it to the US directly. To have them lift it out of our databases without any manual actions seems ridiculous.

Re: US Government demands direct police access to European biometric data [pdf]

#323

Whether it's good local privacy laws in your country or a good privacy-respecting TOS from a company, both are basically worthless when a bigger entity comes barging into the picture. So your government collects biometric data but passes laws promising not to misuse it... you may very well find that those promises are worth less than dirt when a country with leverage over your own starts making demands that your gove…

Why would we have to give two damns about American demands, I don't see that having any chance.

Because Von der Leyen is deep in America's ass

Re: US Government demands direct police access to European biometric data [pdf]

#325
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is asuming that EU will work in their (our) interest. For me it seems that most of EU works with interests of other actors, especially US, from Ursula downwards, so they might give the US access and ignore their own people... again.

Where is this coming from? The vast majority of what the EU does doesn't concern anyone but the EU, and is sometimes actively hurting non-EU entities like American corporations. Be it the GDPR, the Digital Markets or Services Acts, the Covid recovery funds, farming subsidies, various projects to improve random hyper local infrastructure, etc etc etc.

Idk if you've been asleep the last 10 months regarding the politics of Ukraine, which isn't even an EU member. VdL bends over backwards on anything the US asks of her.

How she even became the head of the EU council can only be explained with corruption.

And that's also the main reason why the right is on the rise on the EU, because they don't want an undemocratic overlord. The irony is real.

Re: US Government demands direct police access to European biometric data [pdf]

#326
post #87

For once, I would expect at least reciprocity. If the US suspends its visa free programme with Shenghen area countries (assuming ESTA isn't a visa, which it really is), I'd expect US travellers to cease to have visa-free access to Schenghen too.

EU is implementing their own version of ESTA in 2023. US citizens will have to register online and pay a fee to enter Europe starting sometime next year, and their biometrics will be collected.

But that's reciprocity for ESTA, 15 years too late...

And they are applying it to everyone, not just US citizens.

Re: US Government demands direct police access to European biometric data [pdf]

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that hyperbole is possible when you're discussing the necessity of having worldwide biometric "terrorist" lists that countries like Saudi Arabia would participate in. ----- edit: How would you code "terrorism through public demonstrations of driving while female" or "terrorism through being Yemen?" "Terrorism though applying for a marriage license after being mildly critical in the WaPo."

Finance background here. All these PEP, sanction lists, ofac monitoring, financial sanction lists already exist and every company with a worthwile monetary turnover ever facing an audit runs these background checks. The laws are there, they are called the aml directives, the lists are there. And most of the entries there are provided by eitjer uk or us entities, youll usually find foreign military personells data the…

Those are blacklists, i.e. known criminals. The US is asking for whitelists, i.e. everyone and without motives

Re: US Government demands direct police access to European biometric data [pdf]

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody in this thread apparently read it. This has turned into a Reddit America-bad thread, it's embarrassing for HN.

Sorry, I did read it and by my reading it looks like a non-reciprocal request for access to a lot of EU data that isn't supposed to leave the EU at all, ever, especially not in bulk. What alternative reading do you have? The problem with the approach outlined in the document is that it tries to break open the EU by approaching member states individually, possibly even to access data from other member states, somethin…

There is no "bulk" access to data. When visitors apply for a visa, they'd send a search request with biometric data (I assume fingerprints). Only if there was a hit - that the person was a known subject of interest such as a terrorist or wanted criminal, would any data be shared. This was outlined quite early in the linked slides.

Re: US Government demands direct police access to European biometric data [pdf]

#329
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These two in conjunction allow you to verify trust. No, they don't. They only allow you to verify that some entity that possessed some private key made some claim about some set of bits. It tells you absolutely nothing about whether any of those claims are actually true, including whether the possessor of the private key is who they claim to be.

I didn’t mention anything about signing? I said encryption. You can do encryption all kinds of ways. In this case, I am talking about encrypting your own data on a client and not allowing a server to see it. This would just require a secret key derived from a password ran through a password hashing algo. You only need asynchronous crypto when you involve another party, so it would play a role in a trustless architect…

> I said encryption.

No, you didn't. You said "modern encryption" which is generally understood to mean public-key encryption.

But even so, your claim is still false because you can't trust your encryption software even if it is open source unless you build (and audit!) your entire tool chain yourself (and nowadays you have to roll your own silicon too if you really want to be sure).

Re: US Government demands direct police access to European biometric data [pdf]

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not thoughtful. Everything is somewhere, so therefore nothing is special as compared to anything? Nevertheless, businesses and dictatorships somehow find value in the information collected and organized in files and databases.

I didn't say anything about "the information collected and organized in files and databases". And I don't think businesses find your fingerprints very helpful in selling you things. Mostly the value in tracking you comes from profiling you, i.e. building relationships between facts, mostly metadata about what you do over time. But biometrics aren't metadata and aren't what you do. I did mention "discrimination" but r…

Fingerprints and DNA are valuable with regard to identifying a particular person (or to place them at a certain location, like the scene of a crime). It's easy to enter a country with someone else's cell phone. It's much harder to enter a country with someone else's fingerprints or DNA. Isn't that the goal here? To have a more reliable method identify who has entered a country?

> People are especially sensitive about their DNA since they think pharma companies can somehow develop new expensive drugs just by looking at it.

That's not why people are sensitive about their DNA. It's more to do with the fact that health insurance companies could know if they are particularly susceptible to a myriad of mendelian (gene-linked) diseases and disorders "just by looking at it". Another reason to be sensitive about DNA- if my brother's DNA was found at a crime scene and my DNA was in a database like 23andMe, police could start going after my family members as suspects. This has happened.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/a-father-took-an-at-ho...

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