Citizens' U.S. Border Crossings Tracked

[williesgirl]

Source: Wash Post

The federal government has been using its system of border checkpoints to greatly expand a database on travelers entering the country by collecting information on all U.S. citizens crossing by land, compiling data that will be stored for 15 years and may be used in criminal and intelligence investigations.

Officials say the Border Crossing Information system, disclosed last month by the Department of Homeland Security in a Federal Register notice, is part of a broader effort to guard against terrorist threats. It also reflects the growing number of government systems containing personal information on Americans that can be shared for a broad range of law enforcement and intelligence purposes, some of which are exempt from some Privacy Act protections.

snip

The government states in its notice that the system was authorized by post-Sept. 11 laws, including the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Reform Act of 2002, the Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001, and the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004.

snip

DHS and other agencies are amassing more and more data that they subject to sophisticated analysis. A customs document issued last month stated that the agency does not perform data mining on border crossings to glean relationships and patterns that could signify a terrorist or law enforcement threat. But the Federal Register notice states that information may be shared with federal, state and local governments to test "new technology and systems designed to enhance border security or identify other violations of law." And the Homeland Security Act establishing the department calls for the development of data-mining tools to further the department's objectives.



Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/19/AR2008081902811.html?hpid=topnews

---

More of the same bullshit from our Nazi government and cowardly Congress. This makes me sick. Too angry to comment further.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

1. this is a drop in the bucket

the ultimate goal it full internal immigration controls, the TSA is not only an employer of last resort for the republican entourage and those who couldn't cut it in the fast food industry, it is the embryo of an internal customs service.

[Truth4Justice]

10. Yeah, lots of those TSA personnel look and speak like they didn't get past the 8th grade level.

Needless to say, like many Americans, they don't realize or even seem care that they are
part of the problem, not the solution, at long as that federal check gets cashed.

Its no wonder some of the fast-food outlets are paying their workers somewhat better now:
lots of their former workers are working for the government now.:puke:

[valerief]

35. Check gets cashed

The same can be said for the military or Blackwater. Now don't pounce on me for dissing the military, but they DO support Bush. Don't explain why they have to, but they DO, as does Blackwater. They don't do it with that intent, but that's the net result.

People gotta eat and Bush ain't giving away food.

[ixion]

2. I'm so sick of reading about more fascist crap cropping up...

no words...

:argh: :grr: :puke:

[Truth4Justice]

7. I have words: "Its only going to get worse". I know what has to be done too, but I wont post that...

here. Just read your history books.

[ixion]

26. I've read them...

that's why I'm pissed.

[Newsjock]

3. Off to the Greatest Page you go

I, too, would like to say something relevant and thought-provoking here, but I, too, am just too pissed off to form any coherent analysis.

So a simple "up yours, Chimpy" will have to suffice for now.

[Preening Fop]

15. "Up Yours, chimpy"

Thank You, Newsjock.

[XemaSab]

4. Am I the only one who doesn't have a problem with this?

:shrug:

[pegleg]

5. Yes

[clixtox]

6. Tragically no! Are you familiar with the term...

"Good German"? It refers to those Germans who went along complacently with the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s in their country.

Sadly, there are way too many Americans right now who have the same, I am guessing, cultural predilection for tyranny.

Too many Americans today would have been Tories if we were fighting the American Revolution now.

They do not want to participate in their own governance, they would be happy to be under the thumb of a total dictator, apparently.

That's where we are heading and the connivance and complicity of these complacent wanna-be slaves will be required to control the much less sanguine among us.

Heads up!

[Truth4Justice]

9. Point well made!! Bravo! nt

[bdamomma]

34. these thugs have been conditioning us for us to give up our rights

and there is no way we should ever ever give up our rights, never.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

38. You don't have a right not to have your entry/exit from the country tracked.

You never have.

[Zhade]

42. NICE.

NT!

[Truth4Justice]

8. You have a right to your opinion of course, but I suspect you are in the minority.

The reason why is that one step leads to another, just like the frog in the pot gets boiled slowly until its too late.

[14thColony]

14. Exactly

Taken in insolation, this could be seen as prudent and understandable. Taken along with the aggregate whole, it is yet "another brick in the wall." We are now at the point where the only reasonable course of action really is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[liberation]

11. Ihre papieren bitte!!!!

It is none of the government's business where I chose to go and/or visit or whatever I decide to do with my own time.

If we can't know the whereabouts of Dick Cheney, who is our f*cking employee since we pay his salary with our hard earned taxes... then guess what? Cheney has no right to know where, I, his employer decide to spend my time.


If they want to track me, then by law I should be able to track them with equal or deeper detail.


Never, ever, allow the government to have more power over you than you have over it. If you don't see anything wrong with that... you fail at being citizen of a democratic society. It is our responsibility to not tolerate things like these.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

20. Yes actually, it is.

Within the country? No. Traveling outside of the country? Yes. Try coming into the country and refusing to answer the immigration officer's questions about where you've been and what you were doing there. Let me know how that works out for you.

[Truth4Justice]

46. You are absolutley correct, however its far too late to move back the clock on US tyranny , IMO.

[Crabby Appleton]

16. No

[Crabby Appleton]

17. No

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

22. No.

As is stated in the article, this has been standard practice on air entry for pretty much as long as it's been possible to do so. I don't see how ground entry is any different.

As for the gnashing of teeth about restricting movement within the US, that would be blatantly unconstitutional and nobody has actually been able to point to any evidence that they have the slightest intention of restricting movement within the US.

[sattahipdeep]

24. But why were the arrests made in the first place?

A film editor, Ahmad Shirazi, 70
I could not believe in my country, in my city, I could get arrested for doing absolutely nothing and standing on the sidewalk,” Mr. Shirazi added.

Are there any lessons from the day?

The Law Department said the $2 million payout did not mean the police had done anything wrong.

Mr. Shirazi said that as he was being handcuffed for the first time in his life, he told the officer that the plastic cuffs were squeezing him. “He said, ‘You should have thought about that before you came out this morning.’ It was like a dagger in my heart, that a police officer of my city would come up with anything like that.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/20/nyregion/20about.html?ref=nyregion


But why were the arrests made in the first place?

That morning, two groups gathered on West 56th Street, outside the offices of an affiliate of the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm that has holdings in defense industries and employs many world figures, including the first President Bush.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjALf12PAWc&NR=1

Talk by Naomi Wolf - The End of America

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

25. Is this apropos of something in this thread?

I didn't realize the NYC police department had anything to do with border control.

[Truth4Justice]

47. A dictatorship always depends on the police and snitches to get rid of dissent. The police come to

love the power they have over the People, patting each other on the backs all the while.

[melm00se]

28. ground entry IS different

it allows folks who don't like change they don't agree with to get all worked up into a frothing lather and whip out their "facism is nigh" quotes.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

29. I seriously have to wonder...

...how many of these people have traveled internationally before.

[a la izquierda]

32. I do. Several times a year. Don't assume.

I don't like being asked at the border what my business in Mexico is. It's none of the government's frickin' beeswax. The Mexican government doesn't ask me why I'm ENTERING their country, besides the standard issue tourism/business question (of which my trip is technically neither). Why the hell should the US ask me, a naturally born citizen, why I'm returning HOME?

And besides, I'm sure the government, with it's supercomputers, can easily figure out what I'm doing, without asking me anything...which is disturbing enough.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

33. Try flying internationally.

You will usually be asked questions by immigration officers for that country. They scan your passport and have a record of your arrival. This is nothing new or terrifying. And whether you like it or not, the government *does* have the right to ask you questions upon your departure or arrival, and to keep records of your departures and arrivals. You may not like it, but no right is being violated here.

[a la izquierda]

36. I do that too.

I just landed in Mexico two weeks ago. They didn't ask me anything. They never do.
I get grilled returning to my OWN country. Not when I got to Mexico. Or Canada for that matter. I have less of a hassle going out of the country than I do going home. THAT is ridiculous. Not scary, and I have zero to hide. It's just a giant pain in the ass.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

37. You will have a very different experience if you leave North America. n/t

[liberation]

39. There is a difference between being a citizen and a visitor when entering a country...

Which is the whole point of the outrage.

I have dual nationality.

When I enter the EU with an European Passport, I get a simple "welcome back" and for the most part that is the extent of the interaction with the officer.

When I re-enter the USA with an American Passport, I get the equivalent of a job interview... in which I have to justify to some underpaid prick why I decided that visiting my ailing grandma who lives in a Western European country, should be somehow kosher with the American government's standards and practices.

The thing is this, as a citizen... I have the right to come back to my own damn country without having to justify anything to my own government... unless there was some sort of international search order against me or some crap like that.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

41. No, again, you *don't* have that right.

as a citizen... I have the right to come back to my own damn country without having to justify anything to my own government.

That simply isn't true. There is no such right. You have the right to enter. They have the right to ask you questions (within reason) about where you've been, what you're bringing into the country, etc, and you are obligated to answer truthfully. This is a well established legal principle.

[sentelle]

23. its not so much the ability itself

But the intent of those who would use it.

Would the LEO's sell this information to others (for datamining?) Would they use it to blackmail its citizens?

The answer to those questions, is clear, and its disturbing that we even need to ask these questions.

[UpInArms]

27. They Thought They Were Free

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."

"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. ‘One had no time to think. There was so much going on.’"

"Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

[Truth4Justice]

45. Thanks for posting that. Its been many years since I did but I dont forget.

[specterderrida]

30. Bush does not have a problem with this either. So you and him are two

peas in a pod.

[Swagman]

12. idiots ! the "terrorists have been and gone ( except the ones in the WO)

[JDPriestly]

13. When I took government in high school in the 1950s,

our teacher proudly taught us that one of the most important ways that we are superior to the Russians is that we have freedom to travel. They didn't. Looks like we don't really have that freedom any more.

I just finished watching a movie called "The Tunnel." It tells the story of a group of people who built a tunnel under the Berlin Wall to get their loved ones out of East Germany.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0251447/

It is a German film. I found it to be very gripping, but then I like German films.

[Igel]

40. I've travelled.

Never once had to apply to the US government for an exit visa, list who's going with me, prove that I'll be returning.

I've even travelled a bit in the US. Never had to leave my passport at the hotel or get permission to visit certain cities or towns.

I've moved a bit, too. Never had to get permission to move to a major city, or register with the police there once I showed up. Truly, a fascist, dictatorial state.

Now, I've travelled to Russia--just pre-post-Soviet--and had to say why I was there, get a tourist visa (in duplicate), and show that I was invited. That last bit is till true--you have to wrangle an invitation, if you're not part of an organized group, by and large. Sometimes those are hard to come by, official invitations are rejected by OVIR or whatever the visa-granting authority is called these days. Getting a hotel room without it might be iffy; doable, but iffy. Easier in larger, more open towns than the hinterland. Exchange students that want to just drop in for a summer course have to work at it for months, and I've seen exchange programs flop because of a chill over Russian/US relations (but only those that let the kids leave Moscow or Petersburg, or maybe Tver').

I hear many of the internal restrictions for citizens are dropped, and haven't heard about restrictions for leaving Russia as a tourist or immigrant. (Apart from items you can't take out--national rarities, like dictionaries printed in the last few years). That's an improvement, at least.

Now, going to France, Sweden, Finland, Netherlands, Britain, Poland (post-communist), Denmark, Czech Republic, even Slovakia ... *that* was nerve wracking. Presenting passport, saying "pleasure" when asked "business or pleasure?", and then just wheeling things through customs. No invites, no intrusion, no pre-prepared visas. They stamp your passport, that's your invite and visa. Talk about shock and awe. Fascists. (Of course, when I overstayed my visa in the Czech Republic, officially I was there illegally. For 2 days. Lived in terror for 48 hours.)

[JDPriestly]

44. I'm very familiar with what went on East of the Austrian border.

I traveled in Hungary and Yugoslavia before 1988, even got stopped and held once for going too close to the Hungarian border while visiting a cemetery. We have family in Eastern Europe. Certainly, the restrictions and control of travel was much greater there and then than it is here and now. But, I traveled in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, and what I see today is a very rapid movement in our system toward exactly what I experienced in Eastern Europe. We are even building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, ostensibly to keep illegals out. There are better ways to keep illegals out than keeping records on where Americans go.

What is the point in surveillance of the travel of Americans at all? I believe it is a huge waste of time and money.

Have you seen the movie, the Tunnel? We are moving toward a very repressive system, a system of snooping, surveillance and no civil rights. We have to stop this now or we will end up like Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were before 1988. I agree we are not there yet. But having seen it and even experienced some of it, I do not want to go there.

[Lifetimedem]

18. This does not surprise me

I cross the border by land several times a month. They spend several minutes on the computer reading and entering data each time. Nothing logged by the government is ever "discarded". The fact they keep it in my " government folder" is anything but reassuring for a citizen of the home of the "free"

I am just waiting for the gov to install cameras in every home so we are all REALLY "protected"

[14thColony]

19. I recall about ten years ago

LONG before the current insanity, my wife-at-the-time was visiting family in the US (we lived in Germany), and the immigration officer demanded to know why she was living outside the United States! Her only response was "because that's where my stuff is."

[Indenturedebtor]

21. Lalalala nothing to see here - just the march of facism lalala what's on tv? n/t k+r

[blondeatlast]

31. Senior citizens routinely visti Nogales, Sonora and Tijuana to get AFFORDABLE

meds--better keep an eye on those busloads of people whose only agenda is their (gasp! HEALTH.

This is just ridiculous; this Arizonan has been to the Sonora side of Nogales dozens of times to shop and vist Puerto Penasco.

[treestar]

43. What good does it do?

Why do they even claim they need this information? I thought the terra-ists were all furriners??!!

Are they more suspicious of frequent international travelers? And for what reason. In fact it would include the rich more than any other such tracking.

Stupid and useless. If there's a crime investigate it. Enough with this warehousing of too much information for anyone to meaningfully use with regard to any real threat.