Now I’m On The Record US-VISIT Style

Every foreigner in Japan has heard of Japan’s new United States inspired (or, better put… driven) US-VISIT style fingerprint and photograph system to inventory foreigners as they enter the country. The program is sometimes referred to as Japan’s version of the US-VISIT program and started in November last year. I hear that similar program will start in England shortly.

Foreigners here are generally quite upset with the new system. I have yet to mention anything about it in a blog entry. It’s not that I have been avoiding the subject, but I didn’t feel that I had anything to add to the conversation that hadn’t already been said. I mean, there are entire blogs devoted to the issue, and JapanProbe has covered it frequently in the past. Unfortunately, the passage of time has taken its toll and the clamor seems to have died down. Maybe this post will start it up again?

Again, it’s not that I don’t care. In an attempt to validate myself, let me say that I was one of only two foreigners in attendance at a lecture given by Barry Steinhardt (the head of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Program) in Osaka in early November pointing out the failures of the US-VISIT system as a warning to the then soon to be released Japanese version. I am also currently translating an article for IMADR’s (International Movement Against All forms of Discrimination and Racism) newsletter which denounces the new system as discriminatory. As you can see, I’m not a fan of the new system.

So why am I finally writing now? I recently popped out to take a trip to India, so on the way back into Japan I was fingerprinted for the first time.

I’ve been filed! At Kansai International Airport.

I have heard a lot of talk about being held up at the line and the finger print readers and camera slowing people down. I don’t care what anybody says. The process was painless.

Maybe it’s because I arrived during the middle of a day on a workday, but the line was incredibly short,  and I was whisked through because I had a re-entry permit, and the entire fingerprinting and camera ordeal must have taken all of 20 seconds. It was easy. I flinched just as the photo was taken the first time, and the system prompted me to hold still for a second shot, but it was very intuitive and I knew exactly what was going on.

Don’t get me wrong, the fact that the technology was able to record my biometric data quickly and painlessly does not make the system right.

The system is terrible.

Blanket targeting all foreigners , excluding those with special status (i.e., Japan-born Koreans who still carry Korean passports) and collecting their biometric data is discriminatory, and does little to make foreigners feel welcome in Japan.  The system also has an unpleasant emotional impact as well. Even if a foreigner gains permanent resident status they still must be fingerprinted and photographed each time they re-enter the country. Even if I stay here for 50 years, when coming home from a family vacation overseas I’ll still have to line up separately from the rest of my family and be fingerprinted and photographed. Welcome home indeed! It’s bad enough that even long-term foreigners have to endure  compliments on their ability to use chopsticks once every few months… and now this. And how is this system supposed to catch the Japanese terrorists?

Not to mention that the system is based on the US-VISIT system… which doesn’t work.

So far personalities including Nelson Mandela, Tariq Ramadan (a Swiss scholar of the Muslim world who was coming to the US to accept a tenured professor position he was offered at Notre Dame – the ACLU flied a lawsuit on his behalf in 2006, info here), and Yusuf Islam (a.k.a. Cat Stevens, author of the Peace Train song, the entry denial incident is documented on Wikipedia) have been flagged as terroists and denied entry into the United States at some point.

Of course, no system is perfect, but the US system currently has something exceeding 720,000 people registered on the terrorist list. That’s roughly 1 in every 500 Americans. It doesn’t make sense. If there are that many potential terrorists we have got a problem… and the database never stops growing.

Some may say… so the US-VISIT system is broken – you’re not registered in US-VISIT, you’re registered in Japan’s system. Why do you care? Well, The database of entries will be shared between countries. So now my biometric data is forever in the hands of the US and Japanese government.

Hopefully I’ll never be flagged as a terroist.

Wouldn’t it be funny if one day when flying from the US to Japan, flagged as a terroist in Japan, and sent back to America only to be refused entry there as well?

Where would I go?

Some dark prison somewhere probably…

Anyway. The technology at the gate works fine. The process gets you through the gate quickly. However, the concept is broken and something needs to be done so that our data is not abused.

- Harvey