Does "Change" include Upgrading Our National Security Methods?
Would Positive Identification of Foreigners Be Too Politically Incorrect to Do?
Would it make Sense to do Hand Scans of all Visa Applicants?
The veins in the hand are totally unique to each individual, and they don’t change. A scan can be digitized. That digital record can then be stored, transmitted, searched, and compared in real time to a newly generated scan.
So here’s a guy who wants to get on a plane. He puts his hand on the scanner. It generates a digitized record, which can then be compared to the hand scan record in his official documents, including his visa.
The stupid US State Department made a spelling error inputting Mr. Abdulmuttalab’s name into their computer, so they did not realize they had given him a visa. That’s why his visa was never cancelled.
With a digitized biometric measurement — you really do know who you are dealing with. You can be sure that the visa applicant is the same person as gets on the plane and is the same person that shows up in court and is the same person as goes to jail. All one person — all one scan — one set of numbers that becomes a part of all official documents generated about that person.
Without biometrics we have no idea who we are dealing with. It’s bad enough that we can’t tell our friends from our enemies, but that problem is greatly compounded if we can’t even identify the same human being two days in a row. We also can’t reliably search databases for a specific human being if we have no way to positively identify that specific human being.
This probably all seems like a detail. Not anything that anyone needs to care about. But if that’s not how you feel, then go ahead and print out this post and send it to your Congressman or Senator. If only a few hundred people on Capitol Hill had knowledge about the requirements of national security, then probably with three of four years there could be some marginal improvements. Within a few decades we could actually have a good system at State and DHS, assuming that 100% of the relevant Committee Chairmen became well-informed.
So, do your part if you think hand vein scans would make sense. Do you?
Note to Synful Visions:
The idea that not all terrorists fall into the Moslem foreigners mode was first proposed to me by Norm Mineta, and later by John English when you were in diapers riding on your tricycle.
Now I learn that no stupid idea ever dies, they always come round and round again, decades later, from the mouths of babes.
Yes, it is true that Tim McVeigh was not a moslem foreigner.
What’s also true is that 95% of the terrorists in the past ten year have been moslem foreigners.
So recognizing that connect is the path of reason.
We give more careful scrutiny to 23 year old males from Jordan than to 83 year old nuns from Australia.
Does this mean that some people get a pass and are not looked at?
No everyone is looked at.
Some with a higher level of detail.
Now comes this Synful person to tell me that if I ever take an interest in security matters maybe I can learn from him or his favorite author.
You see how brash people are today!