261–270 of 376 posts
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That's weird. When I enter France from outside Schengen they don't fingerprint me, and I'm not even a European citizen.
Maybe not at land crossings. I just exited from Portugal and got fingerprinted on exit and entry. Granted I was using my US passport, not my EU
This is a good thing for travellers. In border security there are generally two camps, one that uses data and intelligence to go after the worst, large-scale criminal operations and networks, and generally makes travelling easy for the average person, and the other is like traditional cops using traditional tactics… the kind that will miss the person smuggling a kilogram of cocaine in their suitcase but will go after…
The same can be said about Flock, or other surveillance state mechanisms. It's good for security, it's more convenient than police doing police work. Until it's not. Until it's hacked or abused as powerful mechanisms commonly are.
I fail to understand the distinction between an ESTA and a visa to be honest. You need to do the paperwork in advance, pay, provide all sort of personal information, and it can be denied, and if approved only for a limited amount of time. Given that both the EU and the UK have reciprocated, it is a fiction that there exists some visa free travel between these 3 zones. And the more hassle you create, the less tourism…
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> a national ID number isnt usually publicly available info A couple of counterexamples: Italy's "fiscal code" is generated with a simple algorithm which can be executed manually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_fiscal_code Sweden's "personal identity number" is public information and can be looked up by anyone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identity_number_(Swed...
Belgian National Number is your birth date, then an increment from 1 to 999 for every baby born that day, then a base-97 checksum.
This also means a person’s Belgian RRN can change.
The future is bleak.
The future is bleak if you are attempting to cross borders with a forged or stolen passport. Nobody else is adversely affected by this.
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This all reminds me about how RealID was vital to secure us from terrorism, and it took 20 years to get it in place... with no significant terrorist actions in that timeframe. IMHO this level of tracking ain't worth the safety gained. Seems like safety gain is just the excuse at this point.
Not to mention that to get around RealID with flights, you just have to pay $45 and you're good to go. Since we all know that bad actors don't have access to that sort of money...
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Belgian National Number is your birth date, then an increment from 1 to 999 for every baby born that day, then a base-97 checksum.
Not sure if still the case: odd numbers for males and even numbers for females. This also means a person’s Belgian RRN can change.
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> Whereas in the US you only need to go through fingerprinting only once Once for each arrival.
Not my experience the last time I entered. I travelled with a friend for whom it was his first time visiting the US. He was fingerprinted, I wasn’t (I was fingerprinted a while ago on one of my previous trips.)
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I hate all this biometric scanning on all sides. As an American it makes me not want to visit the EU to avoid being scanned, and I'd understand the other way too if an EU member was visiting the us. In the US there have been notorious mistakes of using biometrics to falsely recognize an unknown criminal. Does this happen in the EU too? It's probably too late but we should try to get rid of this.
I suspect that false imprisonment/recognition cases are lessened with biometrics, not increased. I absolutely believe you can point me to individual cases though.