
After the Paris attacks, does it make sense to have a worldwide biometric visa? - sandGorgon
After the &quot;Mumbai-style&quot; attacks in Paris, every world leader is calling for collaboration to prevent these kind of incidents.<p>Does it make sense to have a VISA&#x2F;Mastercard style immigration visa ? Every country is <i>already</i> collecting biometric data for passports. Most countries are <i>already</i> making biometric visas. So an international traveler already has no privacy. Does it not make sense to take steps towards paperless passports and visas ... and hopefully towards better information sharing.
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krapp
No.

A state has the right and responsibility to fight criminal activity, so one
could argue that surveillance, data-sharing between intelligence agencies and
policing are necessary for governments to fulfill the obligation that their
monopoly on violence entails. No sane person, not even the most die-hard anti-
statist anarchist, wants to live in a world where something like the Paris
attacks go unpunished.

But, after Snowden, we've observed that scaling the surveillance power of the
state doesn't apparently lead to greater security, only the desire for greater
and greater power. How many credible terrorist attacks have actually been
foiled by the apparent global panopticon the world has been living under? The
truth is, we don't really know, and the answer is probably n > 0, but there
are obvious cases where the system has failed, despite that.

The implication hidden in questions like this is that the latest attacks could
only have been prevented if governments had _more_ surveillance power, more
control over autonomy, more ability to project arbitrary force around the
world, regardless of sovereignty. Yet no amount of power will allow a
government to be right in preventing crime 100% of the time, it's impossible.
Even if systems like Tor and cryptocurrencies allow some criminal activity to
thrive (and are arguably intended to do so,) it's better for the sake of free
society and civil liberty to have the state be half-blind than all-seeing.

I don't know what a proper balance looks like, but I am certain it's weighted
too far on the side of government power as it is. We should continue working
to interfere with and to reduce the surveillance powers of governments,
support pervasive encryption, and to oppose greater collaboration between
government agencies, particularly across national lines. Doing otherwise only
further legitimizes the violations of human rights that have already come with
global surveillance, rendition camps, drone strikes against civilians, etc.
The actual threat from terrorism throughout much of the Western world doesn't
appear to be commensurate to the degree of power that the governments of the
world are demanding to be able to fight it.

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kleer001
Nope. I'm pretty sure the solution to terrorist attacks is not More Security,
be it Theatre or otherwise. Any security is only as good as the weakest link
in the chain of trust. And that always comes down to us poor fallible humans.

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Someone1234
How would this stop terrorism? "Because Paris" is no answer at all. It wasn't
like the French authorities didn't know who the bad guys were, they just
didn't know about the plan.

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eip
Can we make Hegel into a verb? For example "You are being Hegeled".

