personally I think that if Rinox lets 'the man' control his ability to move around the world freely, the man has already won.

I'm not sure how the Man (in this case, the NSA and Homeland Security) is going to benefit from me not spending my tourist money in the US, but hey. But you do have a point. Still, as long as I can travel to other places without the same BS, I don't think my life will be completely empty without having visited the US once, no matter how shitty that thought is.

@ Derf...WHO TOLD YOU THAT?!

Unfortunately, the rest of the world is following suit. I'm sure England is already crazy about people visiting... they're worse than the US in most ways. Enjoy your freedom until the revolution, comrade!

England is bad, but if I go there by Eurostar train I just have to make an online (or at a station) purchase of a ticket, print it out, go to the train station, scan the ticket at the gates, go in, go through a metal detector (luggage through X-ray), and show/flash passport at border control. That's it. No photos, no fingerprints, no body scanners, no verification of your ticket+identity, no nothing, and 2 hours later you're standing in central London. There are cameras everywhere, of course, but they can't do much without linking my picture to some existing one that would prove my identity.

The rest of Europe is easier though. When travelling to Paris, Amsterdam or Berlin there's no passport controls or detectors whatsoever. I'll try to hold on to it as long as I possibly can. But there may definitely come a time when I'm gonna have to give someone my biometric data...

Did you not have to provide your fingerprints and picture for your passport?

Yes, since a while new European passports contain fingerprint data, and your picture since always.
Off course, that's not enough for our repressive government, so they also have plans to store all fingerprints in a central database, accessible to the police anyone who claims to combat kiddie porn.

BECAUSE WE'RE ALL AGAINST PAEDOPHILES AREN'T WE? SO YOU HAVE TO AGREE WITH EVERY REPRESSIVE MEASURE WE CAN COME UP WITH!

Ok I'm off to shoot someone.

I didn't have to put my fingerprints down for my identity card, no. It has my picture on it, but I doubt that is connected to a database somewhere. You just bring in a (non-digital) picture yourself which is then fashioned into a passport.

Passport is something else, but you only need that to travel outside of the EU. Yay for no travels.

In ten years Ox will be living in a shack somewhere in eastern europe... but he'll be happy, because no government knows he exists.

I'm as fed up with government and scare tactics as you are, Arathorn. Tired of the lying and the bullshit and the eroding of freedoms. I do what I can to fight it... which is damned little so far. Stupid democracies are run by the hordes of idiots that populate the world.

heh, sorry for the double post, but I saw this shortly after and immediately thought of Arathorn's post.


http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/12/16/ ... t?from=rss