Happy holidays -- not.

I really wonder what kind of crack the Department of "Homeland Security" (is it just me, or is that name very reminiscent of 1930's Germany) in the US is smoking these days. The latest scheme is to now fingerprint all  fingers of those of us wanting to travel to the US from furrin parts. When they brought in the requirement to fingerprint two fingers last year, I reluctantly travelled to Hawaii as I had already bought my travel tickets and the person I was visiting had already made arrangements. That was irksome enough.

As a reward for paying off my copious debts sometime this year, I was planning to travel to the UK, probably via San Francisco (since I like that town). I was even going to suck up being treated like a minor criminal, as I was already in the Immigration database. However, this latest scenario is waaaay different.

• Not only are all your fingers going to be printed, a copy of the information is going to be given to the FBI.
  
• Not only does the FBI have access to it, but they will allow access to the information by other "international agencies".
• Not only does every Tom, Dick and Harry "agency" have access to the info, in the EU all transactions on the credit card used to book flights to the US may be traced.
• Not only can they trace your credit card transactions in the EU, they can also trace all email traffic going to or from the email address that you gave to the airline when booking.
• It's unclear whether the latter two apply to Australia or NZ - that information about the EU was only released under a Freedom of Information request. I imagine that the US government would certainly have requested similar "undertakings" from our governments, which may or may not have been fulfilled (who knows?).

Since I won't be able to travel anywhere before mid-year, I won't be able to get in before the gates are effectively shut. I wonder if they'd go in for the whole fingerprinting routine if you travelled by road? Say, flying to Vancouver (the flights that don't stop off in Honolulu, since it doesn't matter if you're "in transit": you still go through the entire immigration/customs routine in the US), and then driving over the border to Seattle (haven't been there yet, so that might be cool)?

Anyways, you can read about the latest great idea here (Observer), here (NZ Herald - and yeah, apparently us kiwis just loooove travelling to America so much, we won't care), and here (and what a crap report from the SMH that is too).