U.S. Customs and Border Protection: Forcing You to Check Your Dignity at the Gate Since 2007

(This was supposed to be posted shortly after I arrived home from Turkey last week, but the vagaries of my college schedule conspired against me)

So it's about 2:15 p.m. in the afternoon the Saturday before last, and I've just landed at Logan International Airport (that's in Boston, for those of you from outside the New England area) after a seven-hour flight from Frankfurt. At this point I've been traveling for 18 hours, so I don't really feel like I'm in any condition to get riled up about anything. Once my family and I finally get off the plane (good lord, 747s take a LONG time to empty out), we head to Customs, where I am greeted by the sight of non-US citizens waiting in line not only to have their passports checked, but to be fingerprinted.

Yes, that's right. EVERY SINGLE NON-US CITIZEN had to get fingerprinted - all four fingers and the thumb on both hands, using some little gadget installed at the little Customs booth where the guy in the uniform sits. I nearly blew a gasket when I realized what was going on; it's probably a good thing that I didn't, because my doing so probably wouldn't have gone over too well with the Customs officers.

But this new "security measure" (read: procedure by which civil liberties get further curtailed) has continued to gall me ever since I saw it. First of all, is this really a good time to make America seem even more paranoid to all of the 5.5+ billion humans who don't happen to hold one of our passports? We're not going to negotiate with the U.N., we're not going to sign global warming treaties, and now we're going to fingerprint everyone who wants to come to our country? This is sure going to help our image in the Middle East, guys. Although, to be fair, at least we can't be accused of racial profiling if we subject everyone to this nonsense.

I expect that most rebuttals to my indignation would be something along the lines of, "Adam, you're being ridiculous - September 11 changed everything." Whether it did or not is neither here nor there (it didn't, by the way). Even if it did, what possible purpose does fingerprinting everyone who enters the country serve? Someone should inform the Bush administration that, much as it might surprise the denizens of the White House, terrorists aren't actually stupid. The vast majority of the plotters either have no criminal record or have taken the necessary precautions to make sure that they won't be caught on a cursory background check. And an even vaster majority of the actual bombers/hijackers/operatives who carry out the attacks are recruited from madrassas, slums, or rural villages - bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and unencumbered by any criminal history. So the likelihood that fingerprinting will actually catch any of the fish that the police are presumably looking for is, quite frankly, astronomically small.

What about the few terrorists (be they masterminds or operatives) who do have existing criminal records? Or what about the theory that we should get everyone's prints on file so that, while they may not be heading for a car-bomb appointment this time, they'll be caught when and if they attempt to do so in the future? To both of these questions, my response is simple: are our neighbors doing this, too? If a terrorist wants to set off a bomb in America, he's not going to mind flying to Guadalajara or Toronto or even Buenos Aires, hopping an appropriately stealthy means of ground transportation, and entering the country overland. Unless everyone starts checking all incoming passengers, all we've done is add a little detour to the travel plans of the terrorists from whom we are trying to protect ourselves.

Yet again, the American government has proven its ability to adopt comparatively ineffective defense mechanisms in the most egregiously offensive way possible. In the modern world, terrorist operatives are extremely hard to pick out of a crowd, and terrorist masterminds never need to leave the comfort of their home half a world away from their target(s). And while America is protected by two rather large oceans, it's not as if the only way to get to America is to fly into an American airport and pass through Customs. But despite these glaring flaws in their strategy, the Bush administration continues to beat on, a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.