[extropy-chat] FWD (SK)[Risks} Pointless Security

[Charlie Stross]

On 31 Dec 2003, at 06:57, Terry W. Colvin wrote:
> In short, what is the point of this? Other than make-work for 
> Government
> employees. Still, at least the website works with Mozilla. I guess I 
> should
> be thankful for small mercies.
>
> "Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we will do it."

Ahem.

I travel to the USA on business/pleasure (hey, I *enjoy* my work :) 
about twice a year, and I'm planning on increasing that to three or 
four times a year shortly. The UK is one of those countries nationals 
of which are allowed to travel under the visa waiver scheme, by filling 
out a form. There's always an insane queue whenever a 747 arrives, so 
yesterday I looked into the pros and cons of applying for a B-1 visa.

After about thirty minutes I came to the conclusion that sticking to 
the visa waiver scheme was going to be much, *much* less hostile: less 
queuing and it only asks if you were a member of the Nazi party during 
1939-45.

It's not just the three-month wait, the requirement for the US embassy 
to examine my passport and post it back to me -- stopping me travelling 
*anywhere* while they've got it -- the interview, or the fee. Just look 
at the form DS-157, required as a supplementary submission for males 
aged 18-45, wherever they come from! It's
online at http://travel.state.gov/DS-0157.pdf and it says (ho bloody 
ho) that it should take about an hour to fill out. "List all countries 
you have entered in the past ten years", "not including current 
employer list your last two employers" (including phone number -- 
great, if you exclude contract work at least one of those companies 
ceased trading and laid everybody off but never went into 
liquidation!), and "List all professional sociable and charitable 
organizations to which you belong/contribute/have worked with (now or 
ever)". Not to mention "list all educational institutions you've ever 
attended (not including primary schools)" -- again, one of the 
university colleges I attended in the 1980's has merged, twice, with 
other bodies since that time.

Oh yeah. The box for "list all professional sociable and charitable 
organizations ..." is half a line wide and one line deep. Just big 
enough to write in "See Appendix B" when you staple the fifty-page 
attachment to the form. (My best guess for time to fill out the form -- 
including the necessary research -- is roughly two to three days. I 
mean, my old school is several hundred miles away and moved to new 
premises a few years ago -- and they want a telephone contact?)

I can understand this information being needed *sometimes* -- 
specifically, if you're doing a security clearance for someone who's 
about to apply for a job working in the Pentagon -- but as a routine 
check on business travellers it doesn't achieve much. The level of 
bureaucratic insanity is so high that only people who can't use the 
visa waiver scheme (i.e. they *must* be inside the USA for more than 90 
consecutive days, they can't just fly home for a weekend at the end of 
the twelvth week) will bother; meanwhile the deluge of data produced by 
it will end up in a filing cabinet somewhere. It's not structured in 
any useful manner so unless there are hordes of clerks copy-typing 
stuff into a database it's not being used. And making it this difficult 
to apply for a simple non-resident visitor's business visa means that 
those queues at immigration will continue to grow longer because the 
clerks have to validate the visa waiver forms for every incoming 
passenger rather than ID'ing and waving through visa holders.

It's insane! I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that American 
bureaucracy is like the worst possible combination of German and 
British bureaucracy -- officious and intrusive on the one part combined 
with bumbling and inefficient on the other.


-- Charlie