Visa-Free Travel Expanded by Homeland Security

The Department of Homeland Security announced proudly on March 17 that three former Eastern bloc nations - Slovakia, Hungary, and Lithuania - have entered into a memorandum of understanding allowing visa-free travel to and from those countries and the United States. Which would be cool for international travelers - if the electronic measures to be employed are light years ahead of the United States' own system for monitoring who comes and goes on airplanes and who the potential terrorists are.

Is there some irony in the fact that the following day, the Inspector General's office announced that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) - the internal agency for keeping track of potential terrorists - was doing a poor job of keeping its electronic system up to date? And that the Border Patrol Service (BPS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were poorly coordinating their efforts?

Wasn't it just a year ago that the Border Patrol Service allowed Andrew Speaker to enter the country via Canada - another nation with visa-free travel - a man who was known to be a tuberculosis carrier, suspected to be the drug resistant variety (afterward found not to be the case), even when there was a direct order to place that person into custody if they tried to cross?

And another agency under the DHS umbrella - the Transportation Security Agency - routinely and continuously strip searches select individuals - without explanation - and getting your name off their potential threat list is nearly impossible for a citizen unless they get their Senator or Congressman involved. This is a personal experience - the last eight times I have attempted to board a plane, I was taken to a small room, and made to disrobe down to socks and underwear. (Okay, maybe I am a threat, since I refuse to toe the line in my political thinking.) No one at the TSA, FBI, or DHS could explain why I was being targeted, nor could they tell me how to get my name off their list.

Now the great part - there are 27 other nations on this list in Asia and Europe. Let's just hope the DHS doesn't open up the borders to Libya, Saudi Arabia, or Jordan, too.

Okay, sure, people holding passports from those nations still have to go through customs. They still had to register *cough* their location within the United States. So did the guys who knocked down the World Trade Center. Of course, they seemed to miss keeping that pesky location registration thing up to date.

And shades of "1984" - about the only way I can think of to actually employ an effective means of monitoring the movements of legal aliens within the borders is to embed them with a geolocation device, so every movement they make could be monitored. And I'd sooner have my head cut off than allow a government - including my own - to monitor me that closely.