Travel Post 2 - Are you a terrorist?

It is was interesting to observe the different amounts of paperwork required when going through immigration at the various countries we travelled through.


Arriving in Paris I dutifully filled out a short list of questions that were pretty straight forward and seemed fairly reasonable. How long are you staying in France? Where are you staying? etc. Going through immigration the only thing we were asked for was our passports. I still have the filled out forms. Our passports were processed without any questions and off we went to collect our luggage. Having collected our luggage we walked straight out of the airport not seeing any hint of customs personnel.


The next test was America. One immigration form for each family member and one customs form for the whole family. A question on the form was, "Have you ever been or are you now involved in espionage or sabotage; or in terrorist activities; or genocide; or between 1933 and 1945 were involved, in any way, in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies?" I wonder how many yes answers they get to this question?


Another question starts 'Have you ever been arrested or convicted for an offence or crime involving moral turpitude..." (this question is referred to in Wikipedia's explanation of moral turpitude)

Upon arrival we were all photographed and fingerprinted. The camera looked like a web cam bought at circuit city, blu-tacked to the glass divider. To help take our fingerprints we had to first place them on a wet towel which was sitting on the bench. All in all it looked like a pretty make shift job. The immigration officer was much friendlier than we remembered and processed us without fuss. The feeling I got was that they were a bit more relaxed because they were relying on the technology to do their job. I wasn't sure that was such a good idea. As a security friend once told me that if you are relying on technology as a gate keeper, like a logon password, and it is broken, the intruder suddenly gains a higher level of trust because they are assumed to know the password and therefore are trustworthy.

Japan also photographed and fingerprinted us but this time the technology looked purposed built. A combined camera and fingerprint device with a screen so that you could see what the camera saw.

Having filled in all these forms I couldn't help but think about the waste of the whole exercise. I wondered what happened to the filled in forms. What poor keyboard operator was sitting there typing them in. Or do they sit in a giant warehouse waiting for someone to break the law, you know like committing genocide, and their answers can be and will be used in a court of law against them. "Ah ha, you wrote that you have never committed genocide therefore you are even more guilty...."