Fingerprinting program unfair, alienating

January 8, 2004

Raise your right finger and repeat after me: I promise I'm not a terrorist. Now press your finger on the scanner and smile for the camera. Thank you. You may claim your luggage now.

We could almost imagine such a monologue happening now at entry points throughout the country. On Jan. 5, the Department of Homeland Security began implementing its US-VISIT program at 115 airports and 14 seaports across the nation.

The program requires all visitors except those from Australia, Canada and 27 other, mostly Western European, countries to have each index finger logged electronically and every face digitally photographed upon entry. That means that, by year's end, approximately 24 million people, mostly from Asia, Africa and Central and South America, will have their personal biometrics fed into a huge database run by the Department of Homeland Security. It is supposed to protect the country from terrorists.

Unfortunately, it's unlikely to do that.

Consider, for example, the case of Richard Reid. Last year, he was convicted of trying to detonate explosives in his shoes while traveling to the United States from Paris in 2001. If he were arriving today, Reid would not be subject to US-VISIT because he is a British citizen and would thus be exempt from its requirements.

Rather than highlighting security, US-VISIT reinforces the assumption that a terrorist is not white and is a foreigner, something we all know is not true (think Timothy McVeigh or the recent letter-bombing campaign in Europe, blamed so far on Italian anarchists). Terrorism has no country of origin, no religion, no race and no gender.

US-VISIT replaces an earlier program, NSEERS (also known as Special Registration). Flawed as it is, US-VISIT is in fact, a slight improvement over its predecessor. NSEERS was an arduous and burdensome program that required men and boys from mostly Muslim countries to be fingerprinted, photographed, interviewed under oath within 30 days upon entry and again after one year in the United States.

Both NSEERS and US-VISIT are unfair because they bluntly discriminate on the basis of nationality. US-VISIT may be directed less explicitly toward Muslim men, but it is more generally applicable to people of color around the world. Fairness is what is required. Either all visitors should get fingerprinted or no one should.

Alienating large segments of the world certainly isn't going to improve security here. In fact, the key to a more secure country lies in winning the trust of the rest of the world. With trust comes improved foreign relations and better intelligence, both between nations and between individuals. And trust is found in a politics based on justice and equity, not on suspicion and aggression.

Brazil has already found the program offensive and, in response, has begun fingerprinting American visitors entering its territory (reciprocity is a long-established principle in immigration proceedings). The State Department is considering issuing a travel advisory for Americans traveling to Brazil.

US-VISIT may be tedious, but what's objectionable about the program is not the inconvenience. What reasonable person wouldn't be willing to suffer a slight delay if it would promote everyone's welfare? But since US-VISIT really won't enhance security, it must serve another purpose.

Like its predecessor NSEERS, like Operation TIPS (which asked us to spy on our neighbors), like the National Guard carrying unarmed rifles in train stations, U.S.-VISIT is a bit of political theater that allows a new bureaucracy (Homeland Security) to parade itself as being hard at work. The public is both the cast and the audience in this play. And while it's acted out, we are propelled into living in an increasingly militarized and surveillance-oriented society.

Under this government, everything about the public must be made fully transparent to it, while the government itself becomes increasingly opaque and secretive from the public it is supposed to serve. This trend began with the USA Patriot Act, which, for example, allows your library records to be secretly subpoenaed and the librarian is forbidden by law from informing you. It continues today.

The latest manifestation, besides US-VISIT, can be found in this year's Intelligence Authorization Bill, which empowers the FBI to grab virtually any business record without court oversight and in almost total secrecy. The Washington Post has called this a "dangerous expansion" of FBI power and "more unchecked power than the agency ought to have."

In our society, the government is supposed to be open and transparent to the public. We, the citizenry, are the ones entitled to a private life. This administration wants us to change places, but it's not a fair trade.

Moustafa Bayoumi is a professor in the English department at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and co-editor of "The Edward Said Reader" (Vintage, 2000). He can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.