Sorry, no money for that... hey... is that liquid soap?
From the "Oh-So-Efficient Use of Our Money" department:
Administration to Drop Effort to Track if Visitors Leave
In a major blow to the Bush administration’s efforts to secure borders, domestic security officials have for now given up on plans to develop a facial or fingerprint recognition system to determine whether a vast majority of foreign visitors leave the country, officials say.
Domestic security officials had described the system, known as U.S. Visit, as critical to security and important in efforts to curb illegal immigration. Similarly, one-third of the overall total of illegal immigrants are believed to have overstayed their visas, a Congressional report says.
Tracking visitors took on particular urgency after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when it became clear that some of the hijackers had remained in the country after their visas had expired.
But in recent days, officials at the Homeland Security Department have conceded that they lack the financing and technology to meet their deadline to have exit-monitoring systems at the 50 busiest land border crossings by next December. A vast majority of foreign visitors enter and exit by land from Mexico and Canada, and the policy shift means that officials will remain unable to track the departures.
A report released on Thursday by the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, restated those findings, reporting that the administration believes that it will take 5 to 10 years to develop technology that might allow for a cost-effective departure system.
Domestic security officials, who have allocated $1.7 billion since the 2003 fiscal year to track arrivals and departures, argue that creating the program with the existing technology would be prohibitively expensive.
If it could be pulled off in a sensible manner, this would be the one program that's been proposed that I think actually would do something worthwhile. It would be infinitely more useful than the poorly implemented and generally pointless "safety" measures that have been put in place--at quite a cost, both to our pocketbooks and to our freedoms--at airports and all around here in the D.C.
The trick, of course, is doing it in a sensible way that doesn't violate people's rights.
They say the technology isn't there. Their trials with RFID, the article says, yielded a whopping 14 percent success rate. So that's obviously not going to work. (And it kind of makes you wonder why they think RFID chips in our passports will help all that much when it comes to identity protection--they've obviously done their research with the thinks and should know how comparatively easy it is to hack/duplicate them.)
Perhaps the biggest question, though, would be: Is this really necessary to begin with?
Illegal immigration is a hot topic these days (and, honestly, has been for years in some areas). Of course it has been linked to the whole national security panic we have going so well. "That undocumented ferinner may not just be after your jorb... he may be lookin' ta keel ya, too!" It's outright xenophobia in some ways.
There is no easy answer, but a good start would probably would have been taking all the money spent on this program, the even more ridiculous idea of building a fence between us and Mexico and the cash wasted (in my opinion) on most of the "security upgrades" in our cities and airports and putting it toward fixing the systems that are already in place. Even better--and I know that this thinking is way too sensible--put some of it toward helping out our neighbor to the south. If the Mexican economy was better, there'd be fewer illegal immigrants willing to die to make it to the U.S. Same holds true for most of the other countries that have high numbers of undocumented workers in this country.
If we help make their homelands safer, they'll stay there and we won't have as bad of an illegal immigration problem. Plus, if you're publicly and actively contributing to the actual betterment of other nations--not just the ones that you get an immediate economic of political return from--you build good will and have fewer people trying to blow you up. Or at least you have more people willing to let you know when someone who's trying to blow you up is getting close to doing it.
Administration to Drop Effort to Track if Visitors Leave
In a major blow to the Bush administration’s efforts to secure borders, domestic security officials have for now given up on plans to develop a facial or fingerprint recognition system to determine whether a vast majority of foreign visitors leave the country, officials say.
Domestic security officials had described the system, known as U.S. Visit, as critical to security and important in efforts to curb illegal immigration. Similarly, one-third of the overall total of illegal immigrants are believed to have overstayed their visas, a Congressional report says.
Tracking visitors took on particular urgency after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when it became clear that some of the hijackers had remained in the country after their visas had expired.
But in recent days, officials at the Homeland Security Department have conceded that they lack the financing and technology to meet their deadline to have exit-monitoring systems at the 50 busiest land border crossings by next December. A vast majority of foreign visitors enter and exit by land from Mexico and Canada, and the policy shift means that officials will remain unable to track the departures.
A report released on Thursday by the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, restated those findings, reporting that the administration believes that it will take 5 to 10 years to develop technology that might allow for a cost-effective departure system.
Domestic security officials, who have allocated $1.7 billion since the 2003 fiscal year to track arrivals and departures, argue that creating the program with the existing technology would be prohibitively expensive.
If it could be pulled off in a sensible manner, this would be the one program that's been proposed that I think actually would do something worthwhile. It would be infinitely more useful than the poorly implemented and generally pointless "safety" measures that have been put in place--at quite a cost, both to our pocketbooks and to our freedoms--at airports and all around here in the D.C.
The trick, of course, is doing it in a sensible way that doesn't violate people's rights.
They say the technology isn't there. Their trials with RFID, the article says, yielded a whopping 14 percent success rate. So that's obviously not going to work. (And it kind of makes you wonder why they think RFID chips in our passports will help all that much when it comes to identity protection--they've obviously done their research with the thinks and should know how comparatively easy it is to hack/duplicate them.)
Perhaps the biggest question, though, would be: Is this really necessary to begin with?
Illegal immigration is a hot topic these days (and, honestly, has been for years in some areas). Of course it has been linked to the whole national security panic we have going so well. "That undocumented ferinner may not just be after your jorb... he may be lookin' ta keel ya, too!" It's outright xenophobia in some ways.
There is no easy answer, but a good start would probably would have been taking all the money spent on this program, the even more ridiculous idea of building a fence between us and Mexico and the cash wasted (in my opinion) on most of the "security upgrades" in our cities and airports and putting it toward fixing the systems that are already in place. Even better--and I know that this thinking is way too sensible--put some of it toward helping out our neighbor to the south. If the Mexican economy was better, there'd be fewer illegal immigrants willing to die to make it to the U.S. Same holds true for most of the other countries that have high numbers of undocumented workers in this country.
If we help make their homelands safer, they'll stay there and we won't have as bad of an illegal immigration problem. Plus, if you're publicly and actively contributing to the actual betterment of other nations--not just the ones that you get an immediate economic of political return from--you build good will and have fewer people trying to blow you up. Or at least you have more people willing to let you know when someone who's trying to blow you up is getting close to doing it.