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After the Paris attacks, does it make sense to have a worldwide biometric visa?
After the "Mumbai-style" attacks in Paris, every world leader is calling for collaboration to prevent these kind of incidents.
Does it make sense to have a VISA/Mastercard style immigration visa ? Every country is already collecting biometric data for passports. Most countries are already 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.
- kleer001 11y agoNope. 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.
- Someone1234 11y agoHow 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.
- eip 11y agoCan we make Hegel into a verb? For example "You are being Hegeled".
- krapp 11y agoNo. 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.