High tech scan of visitors arriving in US

The US department of Homeland Security has finalized a high technology system for registration of visitors to the country. This system which will help track visitors, has come into effect from January 5, 2003, in 115 airports and will ensure fingerprinting and digitally photographing visitors as they pass through immigration counter. The biometric identifiers will be cross-checked against a watch list of terrorists. The visitors will be asked to place one index finger and another on a glass plate which will electronically capture the two prints; and a digital photograph will be taken while the fingerprinting is taking place. The whole process is expected to last "only seconds in most cases", a fact sheet of the Department says, writes the Washington correspondent of 'The Hindu'. While leaving the US, visitors will again go through the inkless system at exit. The Department is insisting that the travel data will be securely stored and is made available to only authorized officials and selected law enforcement agencies on a need-to-know basis. But the critics have questioned if the new process will deter terrorists or merely be yet another effort by the federal government to gather more data on those coming for tourism, social visits, study or work.

The system is a part of the new US Visitor and Immigration Status Indicator Technology - US VISIT. The US Congress has mandated the Department to put in place the new system in phases. Due to heavy traffic at land crossings and high costs, the system will not be pressed into service there until 2005 and 2006. The program received $380 millions in fiscal 2003 and $330 millions for fiscal in 2004.

Officials have said they expect complaints because the plans could be seen as resorting to a farm of racial and religious profiling, but they said they were necessary. All 19 of the men who hijacked four planes and crashed them deliberately on 11 September entered the US with valid visas. Attorney General John Ashcroft said that if such a system had been in place for in 2001, it might have helped ferret out the terrorists who had overstayed their visit and stayed in the US on expired visas.

Now the Saudis have started a similar policy for Americans traveling to their country, and that has some Americans steaming." This is just a symbolic retaliation by the Saudi government for the new policies that have been imposed by the United States government", Ms. Ira Mehlman, of the federation for American Immigration Reform, said some 30,000 Americans live in the kingdom. If that sounds too small minded for international diplomacy, Saudi Interior Minister Prince Naif admitted in a recent interview with the Arab News: "Our dealings (with other countries) will be reciprocal", he said. "We will deal every country in the same way as they deal with us".