The longer I live I'm more inclined to view countries very similar to prisons. I wonder if some day people will be free of the being born into one social/psychological experiment compared to another and that's just the result of a different coordinate on what we named earth. I was lucky enough to have dual citizenship and leave the horror show of the US. I'm doubtful I would have been able to do the same if it wasn't for being born elsewhere. Facial recognition of citizens show a decline in the values that made the country great.
“ANDRÉ: . . . And when I was at Findhorn I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted himself to saving trees, and he’d just got back from Washington lobbying to save the Redwoods. And he was eighty-four years old, and he always travels with a backpack because he never knows where he’s going to be tomorrow. And when I met him at Findhorn he said to me, “Where are you from?” And I said, “New York.” And he said, “Ah, New York, yes, that’s a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?” And I said, “Oh, yes.” And he said, “Why do you think they don’t leave?” And I gave him different banal theories. And he said, “Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all.” He said, “I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built—they’ve built their own prison—and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have—having been lobotomized—the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or even to see it as a prison.” And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said, “This is a pine tree.” And he put it in my hand. And he said, “Escape before it’s too late.”
I suppose to some that NYC would seem like a prison but to others they find it invigorating. The important thing is not to project your own preferences onto others. People see the world in different ways and one man's prison is another man's paradise.
This seems excessive. Prisons don't benefit you the same way your national or state governments do. It sounds like you're saying any kind of government or societal control is equivalent to control exerted by prisons on the prisoners. I don't disagree that the direction seems problematic but this exceptionally dramatic way of unbalanced discussion about it is just not useful (or fun).
What's the difficulty in having outbound passport control as exists in Schengen area in the EU and in Australia, and much of Asia? What am I missing here?
EU has facial recognition at passport control in every airport, that’s the whole point of only having biometric passports and legislating “smart border” laws.
Interesting link, but I think you misunderstand my question. There are both automated and manual queues at most EU airports (the airport where I live doesn't have automated queues which I must say is quite annoying) but when departing Shengen, you have to show your passport to verify your identity - either to a facial recognition machine or to a human.
That's not what happens at US airports presently, and from the article it doesn't read like they're going to start doing that. It reads like they're going to put cameras up and search a database of photos collected from passports on entry, which I must say makes zero sense. Why not check the person presented against the document they are carrying?
In many EU airports it's a mix of both, you have to give a passport to a human then you have a silly spot on the ground where you stand and have your picture taken.
The human is there to verify non biometric passports but the picture is taken anyhow and is likely compared against a DB as well.
This is because the full effect of the legislation hasn't been implemented yet, IIRC all Schengen entry visas will require a biometric passport after 2020 or 2022.
Once that happens there is little reason to keep humans in place other than for assistance.
That would in no way replace most humans. That's not how visas work in virtually every country. Humans are there not just to verify identity but to verify that a person should enter. For example, if they sound like they may work on a visitor visa, or may overstay their visa, they may not be granted entry.
Furthermore, for verifying entry, I fail to see how face detection biometric devices could ensure that the person walking through is the one being photographed, unless there are other humans in place or far more intelligent systems. Someone could hold up a sufficiently well-crafted picture, bring someone else to be photographed instead of them, etc.
UK is an authoritarian state, though. The US, for the moment, is at least in theory supposed to have a different set of value judgements in regards to liberty.
