Flying To the US? Pay In Cash 452
pin_gween writes to point us to a report in the Telegraph that British travelers using a credit card to purchase their ticket may now have their credit card and email accounts inspected by US authorities. This has been true since October, when the US and the EU agreed about what information the US could demand from airlines and how this information would be handled. But details of the agreement only recently came to light following a Freedom of Information request. The US says it will "encourage" US carriers to reciprocate to any requests by European governments. From the article: "[T]he Americans are entitled to 34 separate pieces of Passenger Name Record (PNR) data... Initially, such material could be inspected for seven days but a reduced number of US officials could view it for three and a half years. Should any record be inspected during this period, the file could remain open for eight years...'It is pretty horrendous, particularly when you couple it with our one-sided extradition arrangements with the US,' said [a human rights activist]. 'It is making the act of buying a ticket a gateway to a host of personal email and financial information. While there are safeguards, it appears you would have to go to a US court to assert your rights.'"
Re:fly to canada (Score:4, Informative)
as someone who lives on the U.S.-Canadian border. let me offer you some free advice: it ain't that easy. nothing is more likely to end in you spending some quality time with the friendly folks of the Border Patrol.
Still Harmful and Outrageous (Score:3, Informative)
That's a lame excuse for violations of your rights and it does not save you from real harm. When you give government the power to intimidate and harass, they might use it on people who are fighting for your rights.
Some interesting reading:
The list of current issues goes on and on. When you allow government to abuse you, it will.
Europeans: Come to Canada instead (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Midwest votes, not dollars. (Score:3, Informative)
Ever been to the midwest? They have the nicest highways, "community centers", police and fire departments.
Now... I don't live in the midwest, I live in a rural part of NY that is a lot like the midwest (7200ish people over 41 square miles). We have one new fire department, one remodeled fire department and one decrepit fire department. All are volunteer organizations and by virtue of not having a huge paid fire staff, the town can afford to put money into buildings and equipment. Care to guess how much money is saved by having roughly 100 volunteer firefighters vs paying them state prevailing wage + retirement to go to two fires a day? THAT is what pays for the fire house.
My town has no police force of its own, just 15 year old substation. We rely on the county sheriff which we pay for through our property taxes. We don't need a significant police force when you consider there has been two murders since the end of WWII. The chief police action around here is traffic violations and as far as calls go, most are minor domestic disputes or petty vandalism. We have a per capita income of just under $20k and that includes corporate execs from the city who live out here to get privacy they just can't have in the suburbs.
We have nice roads and we have crappy roads. The less traffic a road gets, the better condition they're generally in. We also have seasonal dirt roads.
Our schools seem to be remodeled and extended every 5 years. They're BY FAR the biggest drain on our tax dollars. Between federal and state mandates, piss poor building planning and a teacher's union gone wild, my little community has a $30 million school budget for about 2500 kids. We see a 2-5% increase in school taxes every year and the kids have gone from fairly smart to dirt stupid as more and more parents move out here who don't care what their kids know or what problems they cause as long as they continue to pull in As... They grade on a curve now and a valedictorian I know from 5 years ago graduated with a 102 overall average but can't do basic trig.
As for your comments on farm subsidies, I'll simply say this much. We need to keep a certain amount of agriculture production in our country. If we were to become entirely dependent on outside food sources, you'd see the same problems with food that we see with oil today. You want Mexico or Brazil to have that kind of control over us? If we were cut off from oil tomorrow, we've got a decent reserve built up plus some domestic production to go into an emergency mode while we develop alternatives. It might not be pretty but we'd get through it. Have 80% of our food get cut off, good luck waiting months for the domestic stuff to start ripening again. Of course, you could stock extra food in warehouses and silos but then you're subsidizing foreign farmers. Put tariffs up to protect domestic production and you're still indirectly subsidizing farmers.
Defense Department bases with little or no strategic value keep barely-educated young people "employed".
When did Jon Cary start posting on slashdot? Do you know the military has a 99% high school+ education rate with many soldiers holding a bachelor's degree or better? Can we start doing test flights of new jets over LA? Test new bomb systems in downtown Seattle? Train demolition engineers under Boston? If Canada were to attack us for some reason, can we wait for planes from Las Vegas to get to Detroit? Are you going to pick up arms after the next Pearl Harbor or are you going to hope one of those "barely-educated young people" will protect your ass for you?
Midwesterners get hail that destroys their crops, and Uncle Sam is there to hand them a big fat check. Hail damages my house or destroys the car I need to use to get to work in the northeast, and Uncle Sam says "gee, sorry to hear that."
Hurricane floods New Orleans and Uncle Sam says "here's billions of dollars to rebuild in the same place
Re:Eurowankers worried about wrong things, as usua (Score:3, Informative)