US Citizens To Require ''Clearance'' To Leave? 987
jo7hs2 writes "The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has proposed a system which will in essence make it mandatory for you to have permission before leaving or entering the country, effectively putting everyone on a no-fly list unless the government says otherwise. Interestingly, the proposal does not seem to cover personal travel, only that on some sort of carrier like an airline or cruise vessel. While this certainly is concerning, it isn't exactly new, as a passport is already required for circumstances covered under the proposal."
In Soviet States... (Score:3, Insightful)
How can these laws pass at all? So, is it a matter of time before they pass a law against some religion, and invade alternative of Poland?
Oh wait, the invasion happened already. Nevermind...
Foreign Schools (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not "like a passport" that we already use... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is nothing like the fact that we already are required to use a passport for a number of these same reasons.
A passport is documentation to foreign countries that you are a documented U.S. citizen.
Being required to "check out" of the country with DHS, despite all the calls of "Godwin rule" invocations, is exactly like Soviet Russia, Communist Cuba and China, and Nazi Germany, in recent history.
Seriously, if you people don't get out and vote these facists out of office, you're going to be just like the guy from WWII who wrote the poem about how, when there was no one else left, they came for him, and there was no one left to stop them. Enough with the "But I don't have anything to hide". When are you going to realize it's not about, and never has been about, "hunting the terrorists" and "making us safe", it's about "controlling the people", through fear, and travel restrictions, and spying? The more people say "But I dont have anything to hide, let them go ahead", the more they win.
Hunt for Red October Ob Quote (Score:5, Insightful)
Capt. Vasili Borodin: I will live in Montana. And I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits, and she will cook them for me. And I will have a pickup truck... maybe even a "recreational vehicle." And drive from state to state. Do they let you do that?
Captain Ramius: I suppose.
Capt. Vasili Borodin: No papers?
Captain Ramius: No papers, state to state.
Capt. Vasili Borodin: Well then, in winter I will live in... Arizona. Actually, I think I will need two wives.
Captain Ramius: Oh, at least.
Stop this Criminal Act (Score:2, Insightful)
Torture, shredded Habeas Corpus, thousands of kidnapped people in CIA prisons around the world, "signing statements" vowing to break the law he just signed, martial law powers, leaving the country only by his permission... Bush has turned himself into the king of a fascist kingdom,
If you know one of these monsters voting for the Republican Congress in collusion with Bush, do everything you can to get them to vote people into Congress on Tuesday who will stop this destruction of America.
Re:nothing to hide, no reason to worry? (Score:2, Insightful)
While this certainly is concerning, it isn't exactly new, as a passport is already required for circumstances covered under the proposal."
This is ratcheting up the control of the citizenry - and it is exactly like the Soviet system. Anyone who disagrees with this assessment is both ignorant and uneducated - there is no middle ground on this, period!
I am once again struck by the 2004 presidential election. At that time I lived in Seattle, and the young, seemingly educated women I spoke with amazed me in that they were going to vote for Bushski. After extolling them with all the negative legislation he had signed into law (that is, stuff that was negative against American workers' rights, women's rights, unions' right to exist, etc.) they were still adamant to vote for him. Likewise, the incredible stupid number of union workers I spoke with.
This is an especially sore point with me as an ancestor of mine gave his life on behalf of the union movement. When I was back in Seattle for several weeks awhile ago, I did a amateur survey and found that 10 out of 10 union members didn't know jack about the NAFTA Super Highway, nor about the DHS-Maritime Infrastructure Recovery Program, nor about the union-busting regs set forth by the US Labor Relations Board! This populace is truly screwed.....
Re:Polish passports... (Score:2, Insightful)
Issues you have with other people should not become the job of a third party. If you want to kill Osama, go get him yourself or stop whining about your irrelevant wishes.
B.
Uh, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you look at this "news site's" front page [sianews.com], you'll see a lot of the traditional conspiracy rantings and, when you look particularly at the traditional Kennedy [sianews.com] conspiracy [sianews.com] nonsense so typical of sites that have completely fallen off their rocker.
This isn't a news site. There's no good sourcing (yes, I followed the URL at the end, see below). The reference stated to this document [regulations.gov] mentions no such restrictions as those found in the Slashdot summary or the article.
There are certainly privacy issues at stake, but nothing near what this ridiculous article or the Slashdot summary make it out to be.
This is just piss poor. I know Slashdot isn't a news site, so I don't expect it to research things as thoroughly as a journalist would (granted, I expect little of journalists as well).
The most pertinent part of the executive summary of the regulation proposal in question reads as follows:
The primary purpose of this proposed rule is to prevent passengers that have been
identified as high-risk on government watchlists from boarding aircraft bound for or
departing from the United States and to prevent passengers and crew so identified
from departing on vessels leaving the Unites States. On April 7, 2005, the Bureau of
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) published requirements for the transmission of
passenger and crew manifests for aircraft and vessels arriving from foreign
destinations or departing to foreign destinations (70 FR 17820). Implementation of the
"2005 APIS Rule" (named for the Advance Passenger Information System, the CBP
electronic system used to obtain electronic manifest information from carriers)
required that information on passengers and crew to be transmitted: no later than 15
minutes after departure for arriving aircraft passengers; no later than 15 minutes prior
to departure for departing aircraft passengers; at least 60 minutes prior to departure
for arriving and departing aircraft crew; at least 24 hours and as much as 96 hours
prior to a vessel's entry at a US port for arriving passengers and crew, depending on
the length of the voyage; and 15 minutes prior to departure for departing vessel
passengers and crew.
Are there privacy issues here? You betcha. And they've been discussed here at length. Do they approach what the article and its summary here state they approach? Not at all. Read the rest of the proposed regulation.
Come on, slashdot. Treat us like adults. Give us primary source materials and avoid the conspiracy mumbo-jumbo.
I will say this, though - If I'm wrong, and you find some nuance in the document I missed, please post and inform me.
Re:Economic effects (Score:5, Insightful)
They're also supposed to be in favor of balanced budgets, realistic foreign policy and strong defense. Not long ago they were all of the above. Today, they are not the party for people who used to support Republicans.
This is a letter to the editor of a major newspaper, not from me:
Re:It's not "like a passport" that we already use. (Score:1, Insightful)
Let us not mention the fact that this economy is close to the breaking point with our lack of exports and accruing debt... the fact that our standing overseas is severely tarnished thanks to our aggressive imperial foreign policy... and now we have "proposed legislation" such as this? The fact that it has gone this far already only means the state could give three shits about our vote. The electoral process only exists today to placate us and convince us we are still "free". Have you all heard of the Civilian Inmate Labor program? The PATRIOT Act? The Domestic Wiretapping Program? The North American Union? The Military Commissions Act of 2006? The Defense Authorization act of 2007? Every freedom we have has already been eroded and these thugs only wish to go on decimating these fundamental liberties right in front of us. Have the democrats offered to repeal all of this legislation if they are elected? No. Have they offered to restore our liberties to exactly what was laid out in the Constitution? No. Hell, some of them even supported this usurping of liberty! It's the same bag of shit with a slightly different odor. Even the Nazi government was split into a few political parties... but they were still Nazi's none the less.
But I digress... This is just crazy talk! America is the greatest country in the world! We have freedom for which "Islamo-Fascist" terrorists hate us! Oh, and the American Dream! Yeah, we've got that, too! I'd better go back to sleep before the sheep think I hate America. They might start bleating at me!
Re:Polish passports... (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2704stoc
People don't do things for no reason at all. They have a reason, even if its made up or wrongly borrowed.
But there is no organization of terrorist or any other type that can build such a suicidal distructive following
without some real base line to use as a enlistment and motivational sales tool.
9/11 happened for real reasons, even if borrowed by lunitic extreamist.
Winners of the Trillion dollar bet shared with the dot com and cause a boom.
Losers of the bet have been named in teh media such as Worldcom, enron, etc..
You don't fight terrorism to defeat it by giving it more excuses. You defeat it by removing its excuses so to let it expose itself to any potential enlistments so to NOT be able to sale. To give terrorism more excuses is to support it, perhaps creating an excuse for yourself to commit wrong.
Thou shall not kill.....is supposed to be a christian belief, and Bush is suppose to be a Christian.... yeh right....
Does he have his passport to heaven paper work to prove it?
Where is the court room to put on trial those who injured the economy of south east asia and the reset of the world stockmarket playing world?
Osama is on trial under the name of Sadam......or is that another borrowed excuse?
Re:Pre-election FUD (Score:2, Insightful)
What, you expected something else?
Re:Lobbying power? (Score:5, Insightful)
Americans have no idea what communism or socialism is... or if they do they do not use this knowledge when exhorting the evils of these systems. Nor do they have an tangible idea about what police states or totalitarian states are.
The failure of unions is that they are abused by those people who profit by people being in them, if everyone was in a union of some sort (or none at all) this would not be possible or at least more difficult to pull off.
The US dollar sucks.
The US by many metrics isn't the best place in the world to live. A notable exception is making buckets of cash.
US Foreign policy is nothing short of evil.
Racism is more of a problem in America than people want to admit.
Xenophobia is a significant problem in America.
The American system of government is broken and given the behavior of Americans it appears altogether beyond their capacity to fix it.
You can not live in a "nice" society without paying for it... via taxes.
It's in all of our interests to do what we can to raise everyone we can to a certain level (I mean a level above Henry Ford's auto assemblers and Ray Kroc's fast food workers). This means public schooling, accessible health care, &tc...
You cannot create a better society by legislating morality but you sure as hell can make it worse.
Re:Lobbying power? (Score:3, Insightful)
There are those of us who would leave, too, were it not for family and friends. Those connections keep people in even far more repellent places.
Re:Tuesday (Score:3, Insightful)
It won't. There aren't enough Libertarians on the ballots to
make that happen, even if they all won; which won't happen
either.
I just hope you aren't counting on either branch of the
Demopublican Party to end this madness... if you are, you're
going to be sadly disappointed.
Re:nothing to hide, no reason to worry? (Score:5, Insightful)
I recently came across this quote about exploiting nationalism, and it disturbed me for two reasons. First, it is a very accurate description of the post 9/11 political situation, which has resulted in the loss of civil liberties, the disastrous occupation of Iraq, secret prisons, torture, and the dismantling of the government's system of checks and balances. Second, the author is Hermann Goering.
Godwin's Law, I know, but there are some eerie parallels, and that's scary as hell. I am truly afraid for my country's future. These are dark times; it's the worst I've ever seen the United States of America. We've got the monkeys running the zoo... these are small, foolish, and dangerous little men- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld. And they are tearing the country apart. They've got the left hating the right and the right hating the left. They've got us caught up in an eternal war against terror (as if you can wage war on a military tactic, that's as nonsensical as a "war against flanking maneuvers"). In their war, in order to save our freedoms from the terrorists, they've got to take our freedoms away. Meanwhile, our executive branch is obsessed with using torture to the point that it starts to seem creepily sadistic, running secret prisons and shipping people off to be tortured in foreign countries. Finally, we've got to keep fighting endlessly in Iraq as it spirals into civil war, and I still haven't heard something that even vaguely resembles a strategy for success, or a convincing explanation of why we even went in, and killed thousands of our own men and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
I've always criticized America, not because I hate her, but because I love her and want her to be better. I thought there was a lot wrong with the country, but I believed it was basically a good country, and that other nations had a lot to learn from us. But now, when I travel through foreign countries, I am ashamed to show my American passport. I actually tell people I'm "coming from Canada" (misleading but true, because that's where I study). Living abroad, I now realize that deep down, I still do love America. But not the America of George Bush. That America is an America of constant fear, divisive hate, endless war, domestic spying, and torture. And we can do better than George Bush's America.
In Soviet Russia (Score:2, Insightful)
I know, its not even the slightest bit funny anymore...
Re:nothing to hide, no reason to worry? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And what would our founding fathers say? (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, it takes a turning event to make significant change.
I doubt voting will be the solution. I'm still hopeful, but......
Fortunately, the armed forces are made up of humans (for now), and those humans have family and friends in the civilian sector. When they're ordered to turn on American civilians, it won't be the revolutionaries against the military, it will be the revolutionaries AND a good portion of the military against the remainder of the government's military.
It won't be a good day in American history, but it will definitely make the history books. But remember, history is written by the victors. If the revolutionaries win, it will be the birth of a new America, taken from the tyranny. If the government stops the uprising, it will be the strong government stopping a disillusioned band of malcontents.
The military is already planning for such an event to occur.
http://www.google.com/search?q=domestic+civil+dis
Without significant planning and organization, any civilian unrest will not go over well. Sure, there are plenty of guns in the hands of Joe-Citizen, but in a situation of a single individual versus a squad who have the tactical advantage, the individual will never win. There will never be enough order without a random figure inside that organization realizing the potential for failure, and reporting to the government, and without a driving factor to encourage it, there will never be an organized group.
This administration is running on it's own agenda, and not listening to the people that they represent. The majority are very unhappy with their actions. An armed revolution could happen, but like I said, it won't be pretty, and in the first days (or years?) of it, the majority of losses will be on the revolutionaries side.
At very best, the administration will make a significant series of choices which drive the military to a coup. There, an organized and trained group will have the tactical advantage.
I feel this administration WILL continue it's tradition of making bad choices, and something will come of that. I'm not much of a fortune teller, so I'll continue pretending that voting does count, and voicing my opinion means something.