Recently traveled abroad and was shocked at how dystopian moving through borders is anymore. Scans after scans of passports, fingerprinting, face scans, questions about intentions for visiting, paperwork, cameras throughout airports that are surely doing untold amounts of biometric analysis with some bullshit AI…in some of these places you get laughed at if you ask about opting out. It almost isn’t worth it.
Yes, I’ve had similar experiences recently and similar thoughts. Crossing land borders in Asia is more stressful than it was a few years ago. Lots of redundant security theater and biometrics everywhere. Of course, China is on another level to everyone else. At the immigration booth, your conversation with the official is now translated and subtitled in real time on both sides. And face ID is now so universal in China that I suspect the fingerprinting has become an afterthought. Everyone is being filmed and tracked pretty much everywhere. Not just cash but even ticket numbers are now redundant. Everything is attached to your personal ID and cameras decide whether you enter public buildings, train stations and so on. The day their government decides to really abuse all that power, they’re in deep trouble.
In my experience the border thing is clearly worst in Asia, but with the exception of China it’s mostly just tiresome theater.
By contrast I crossed into the Schengen zone from Turkey this summer and was surprised by how little security there was. But then I noticed the police all but dismantling a bunch of heavy goods vehicles in their search for illicit migrants. That was absolutely not security theater.
PS. This subject got me thinking. I’ve seen a ton of borders because I like to travel by land. Different regions of the world definitely have different priorities at borders. In Asia it’s drugs and contraband. They care what’s in your bag. In Europe and North America, it’s you they care about: why you’re here and when you’re going to leave. In police states like China, borders are a golden opportunity to harvest a ton of data on suspect individuals. In much of the rest of the world, Latin America for example, borders are mainly just an employment scheme, bureaucracy for its own sake.
According to my dad, 9/11 pretty much changed air travel for good. Everything afterwards became extremely strict.
To be clear, 9/11 didn’t change anything. Governments used 9/11 as an excuse to violate our privacy
But you know for the olympics, the government really needed the extra surveillance cameras after all wouldn’t you want everyone to be safe? And who hates the sports? I mean we all love them and its good for us and it’s good for the economy as well. And it will put our country on the world map, and there will be so many tourists, after all we love tourists and diversity, wouldn’t that be nice?
And just imagine oh imagine if one of the terrorists got here pretending to be a tourist, and ruin everything. You wouldn’t want them to ruin all the fun? Would you?
So you see the government really really needs to tighten the security by adding these surveillance cameras, and rest assured it will use all the latest technologies to help YOU be SAFE. /s
it did. in the 90s i was on a plane with my family and a guy sitting near us got drunk and was telling people he had a bomb in his briefcase. all that happened was that he got chewed out by the flight attendant. I could swear she said “we will turn the plane around if we have to!” it was incredibly amusing to watch as someone under 10 years old.
Where are you experiencing this ? I have not experienced personally this in South America or Europe. It is usually just the immigration who look at the passport and let you through once you say you’re visiting or whatever
You are never going to cross a border anonymously. The extra checks are to prevent people crossing borders under a false identity. If you are travelling under your own identity, then you are no less private than you ever were. They’re just taking extra precautions to prevent people from using false identities.
I disagree. I had to scan my passport 3 times in the same room before I could exit it. Shit is insane. I’ve traveled quite a bit and never experienced such things.
Interesting, I didn’t have this experience a couple of years ago. I wonder if they’ve just upped it to try and “automate” things more with the crazy amount of tourism they’re suddenly getting. Also I’d be curious on which airport you went to, Haneda or Narita?
If the scans and such were in the states, I’ve requested opting out and no one really cared, they just said okay. Funny enough, it actually made me go through quicker than it was taking everyone who did the face scans, contradicting the sign claiming it’s quicker.
Seconded. I was just traveling to Japan from the States. While it was more or less painless, it was pretty invasive.
What are they doing these days that is invasive (I have been wanting to go back to visit friends)?
The only time I have visited Japan was back in 2012 and all I remember was just waiting in a line and handing over my passport to a customs/foreign visitors person. I also might have had a paper slip with my dates of arrival and departure, that I wasn’t bringing in more than $9999.99 in cash, and the address I was officially planning to be staying for the bulk of the time there (and name of my friend that was already living there on work visa). I don’t remember ever being stopped to check my bags or answer addition questions. Though I might have just been lucky to have not been picked for additional checks.
Same, though its been two years since my last trip to europe (Spain specifically), it didn’t feel much different than when I went as far back as 20 years ago.
About the only real difference was the EU passports, and how much easier that was for people. Wish I could get one! Would also be a great backup plan for a return of insanity here in the US, but I don’t think I can qualify for any of them. Missed by one generation for citizenship by descent…
Anyway. Seems it was Japan in this case, Europe and South America (though its been maybe a decade or so since I went) dont seem any different to me. The middle east trips used to be kind of wonk, and I bet still are, but I’m not going to that area again anytime soon.
I guess it probably depends on where you’re going. I went to the UK earlier this year, and my experience was mostly painless. Landed in Manchester, and they basically had self-checkout customs. I scanned my passport and looked at a camera once, and that was it. It was actually more of a hassle and more invasive coming back home and getting back into the country.
It might be automated, but OP’s point still stands, you’re being tracked and scanned like never before.
I grew to be mweh about PhylosophyTube, but they did a good entry video into that discourse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyzd_a6vLWY
9\11 and other attacks turned security measures to 11, it’s hard to roll them back and you’d be criticized if you want them to.
I’d call it both. Hassling people for taking sunscreen or water onboard is probably mostly theatre. All of the tracking and scanning is probably what they actually use to find any naughty people.
Generally i don’t think they catch too many people this way. If they had they certainly would have been talking that up during the Bush administration when they were looking for anything they could find to hype up the terrorist threat but they barely ever had anything to show for it. Some shoe bomb thing that didn’t even work, i guess.
Meanwhile, it’s well known that this stuff fails to catch weaponry and other dangerous objects regularly. I could link a story but i, myself, experienced this once: I forgot to take a 4" knife out of my backpack before flying and sure enough, they didn’t find it even though they “randomly selected” me for a manual search. (They were too distracted by the multiple laptops and phones is my only guess, but the knife was buried in there deep and i didn’t find it when packing either.)
I didn’t even notice until i was already at my destination and so i didn’t have much choice but to bring it back through security a second time and hope they didn’t catch it. Sure enough, they missed it the second time.
Fundamentally, the TSA is an organization that tries to replace skill and attention with technocratic rules following but you’ll never have a successful security operation that way. This isn’t the fault of the people doing the work, they’re treated like McDonald’s employees but they’re being asked to hassle everyone safeguard our flights. The primary motivating factor for this appears to be fear–both fear of bad things happening and a desire to instill that fear in others. That is also not an effective organizing principle for a security operation.
Why the tracking, then? That’s simple: it, too, is theater but it’s also a form of control. It gives the state more insight into and control over our personal lives.
