As of May 2023, the EU is to start demanding holidaymakers’ biometric data at its borders, greatly increasing both the level of surveillance in the bloc and the length of delays at transport terminals. Silkie Carlo sounds the warning in the Telegraph.
Brits hopping across the Channel will first have their fingerprints and photos taken. The new mass data-gathering scheme, which will go live in May, is part of the evolution of a so-called ‘Smart Border’.
But there is nothing ‘smart’ about the plans. The data grab has been justified by the aim of improving detection of dangerous travellers, finding vulnerable people, and reducing fraud, but it comes at an eye-watering cost to liberty and logistics. The border plans have been rightly described by civil society groups as “disproportionate and unnecessary”, while the Port of Dover’s boss has warned of “significant and continued disruption for a very long time”.
All travellers aged over 12 will need to be biometrically logged, creating an EU datastore loaded with hundreds of millions of people’s unique personal data. The EU is demanding not only a U.S.-style set of four fingerprints, but facial images too. Holiday-makers’ personal information will be mixed in with eventually billions of pieces of data, spanning photographs, palm prints, DNA records and facial biometrics, to which controversial recognition algorithms can be applied. This may be the biggest biometric data collection operation in European history. What could possibly go wrong?
Too many of our European friends have an indifferent attitude to the emergence of a data-hungry superstate – over 1.7 billion EU Digital Covid Certificates were issued during the pandemic – but even those falling out of love with liberté must be concerned about the disastrous impact on tourism and transport. The Big Brother-style EU border checks are estimated to take seven times longer than checks today and the tailback at Dover could grow by 19 miles – roughly the distance of the Channel crossing itself.
Worth reading in full.
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This is of course chilling and disgraceful. But I have to report, things in Asia are well ahead of this. We flew from Thailand to Vietnam on Saturday and were asked to provide fingerprints routinely on our way through customs, including the children. That was bad enough but get this: Watching as my wife went though, I saw on the customs officer’s monitor that four images of her came up on screen all taken by CCTV in the UK in various locations. Dystopian and nightmarish; the public are now routinely treated like criminals. Guilty until proven innocent and sick until proven healthy.
And it’s the indifference noted in the article that is so galling. Why do we accept this. People seem to have been successfully conditioned to believe that they do not deserve any privacy.
To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin —-Those who would trade privacy for a bit of security deserve neither privacy nor security.
Yet in the UK the police can catch almost no one who commits burglary, rape and other serious offences.
That’s true, but the purpose of this is to intimidate law-abiding people, not to catch real criminals. British police gave up on solving real crime1 when they discovered twitter.. You can bet your bottom dollar they won’t be finger-printing anybody getting into an inflatable either.
Yep I have just been caught up in an online scam whereby the scum robbers pretended they were my daughter wanting a loan. Yes I was gullible and stupid enough to fall for it. Taking money out of someone’s bank account under false pretences has to be a crime, but according to “Home Office Counting Rules” it’s not. So what are the Police going to do about it? F all is the answer. Presumably they are too busy knocking on people’s doors because someone’s offended a member of LGBTQ+MGBGT or whatever these disgusting people call themselves. Come on arrest me then.
So they’re ahead of where I thought they were. I really shouldn’t be surprised, but they have been proactively collecting images of the general population just going about their business, and just waiting for the biometric data to piece it all together. The biometric data allows them to put an ID to a face. Now they have a historical and present record of your movements they can check that you’ve been a good citizen e.g. going on a protest rally, using too much fuel, visiting that pub too often, and your card is marked; they now know you’re a problem to the state and they know your soft points and where you live. This was always the final piece of the jigsaw. Absolutely chilling.
I doubt CBDC isn’t far behind.
Judging by this comment, it seems likely that you are male (to use an old fashioned word) and old enough to have children. Probably “white”. So obviously part of “the problem” category.
It is pleasing to note that it is most unlikely that those thousands of excitable bearded child “refugees” swarming into the UK will be required to go through this undignified procedure.
I can’t imagine why I should travel anywhere any more, save for the beneficial effect of dispersing more CO2 into the atmosphere for the plants.
Better fight back soon unless you want to end up with a world government.
As if things couldn’t get any more creepy and Orwellian.
Foreign travel is finally confirmed as finished for me. We haven’t been abroad since February 2020 and clearly now never will.
The outcry from Parliament will be…err…
……oh, forget it.
Hux, my friend: use it or lose it.
We (my wife, kids and I) haven’t stopped travelling all over Europe throughout this entire time, and not one of us is jabbed (nor had sticks stuck into our heads). Don’t let them have their way with you, they’re terrorising you into submission.
I have had to wear a mask for a couple of moments (both times in planes where I could feel the entire planeload of people turning against me for not complying – very scary, but I made my point by immediately taking the rag off, once airborne).
Their ridiculous plans are completely impractical and unnecessary and will fail – and anyway, “success” depends on an army of functionaries, and functionaries are famously incompetent and just want to feel big.
“The weakness of all dictatorships is that they are vast bureaucracies – what does not exist on paper does not exist.”
I understand your viewpoint Joe but I have to think of my health, physical and mental. I was usually at simmering point when travelling and before all this shyte. Stuck in an airport and then being herded about by goons would raise me to boiling point and inevitably I would come off worse. The only solution for me is refuse to go abroad.
This is just the start anyway. Further horrors on the way and PDQ.
Of course, do what is right for you. I get it, friend. Horrible times, but believe me – they will not succeed. Something bigger and REAL will come along and the whole system will fall flat on its face.
Just look at how fractured the EU already is – has always been.
They even say there’s no back office system ready yet – as a data engineer/scientist that tells me it isn’t even off the drawing board and the whole thing is just some idiot’s wet dream.
So many people thought (and still think) that the EU had/has a unified, bloc-wide, digital vaccine and negative test verification system. Nothing could be further from the truth. The whole thing is/was a total, complete, utter charade.
A friend of mine who lives on his boat (currently moored in Portugal) has been travelling around using a PHOTOGRAPH on his smartphone of an APPOINTMENT CARD for a jab! It even has SOMEONE ELSE’S NAME on it!
But time, as always, will tell.
I wish I had your confidence, but my experience is that they do not fail as such, just mismanage. So you will still be fingerprinted, scanned, matched and numbered … but with errors. However, this time, not as inefficiently as usual because computers will be doing the work and by and large they do not fail. We have only one way to get out of this dystopian future: it is not by stopping any of this technology being used, but by having strong privacy laws that stop abuse. I know – fat chance, but it is our only chance.
They will of course utterly fail at the goals they use to get people onboard, such as handling the “climate crisis”, but history suggests that tyranny is one thing governments like that are rather good at.
I’ve travelled, only when and where there were either no restrictions or so loose that I could get away with not complying or just managing a few drones.
Ill probably go to the EU to say my goodbyes before this May technoauthoritarian measure goes in place.
Ive never submitted to these things before and never will. I sympathise with your feelings on travel preCovid. I can’t tell you how often I raised my fellow travelers ire by rejecting the body scans and waited to go to a little room and be searched…
Its clever really they pick on foreigners like the US to stop or limit their own people from rallying against these things. Then one by one all the countries will do this, share their days snd its checkmate. You will only be able to travel if you are a good drone.
If things get too bad, I may make a break for Africa. I’d rather live in a lawless country than one filled with unending laws.
Unending laws, it’s true.
But the problem (or advantage, depending on your POV!) is that the more laws you have, the sooner they all start to contradict each other, and then it all starts to get totally absurd, and it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to nobody knowing what the heck is going on, anywhere. And the nasty ones and their functionaries are then blind, deaf and dumb and the normal folk are once more left alone to get on with useful things.
People like Gates will never appreciate the glorious mess that is human nature. He has ZERO humanity and will never comprehend that society cannot be managed like a computer program.
Be the fly in their ointment. Be ungovernable. Sounds like that’s the way you already are! Cheers!
Me too Hux – last time was June 2020. Didn’t even need a bug or terrorising into submission, lack of funds has seen to that.
Every time something like this is brought in my heart sinks a little deeper into my stomach.
I always ask myself the same questions. What is the problem that supposedly needs resolving and why is this the best solution?
It was the same when the US introduced similar rubbish after 9/11. Pointless bureaucratic expansion.
Bureaucrats are the most dangerous people on earth. Their sole purpose is to control. And they never seem to have enough control.
“I always ask myself the same questions. What is the problem that supposedly needs resolving and why is this the best solution?”
Same here Stewart. What problems warrant such interferences?
The answer of course is none. When has international travel been safer?
The reality is that Agenda 2030 is being played out per the script. And 9/11 was of course implemented in order to test our compliance. They tested it and found we were malleable and subservient and look where we are.
This clearly is the start of phase two.
I’ve hit the booze. Apologies to all, in advance, if further posts go too far off piste (
).
i don’t blame you mate. This dark possible future just gets validated every fucking week.
Hi Stewart – I think you will find lots of your “friends” will welcome this initiative. They think the future is a chip in your arm which will allow you to go wherever they want without queuing or paying as everything will be taken care of automatically. Even going to the shops (if such a thing still exists in the future) will be without check-outs as each item will be packaged with an rfid chip / barcode which means you can walk out and have your entire shopping basket registered and charged to your account in seconds. It all makes such good sense. What can possibly go wrong?
All these “solutions” are introduced as “temporary” and of course when a bureaucrat gets any power, it is never “temporary” and they are loathe to let it go.
So then , this is similar to us having lockdowns and letting unknown rubber rafters up the beach while us with mortgages, kids , driving licences, passports etc couldn’t go anywhere !! The rafts still come day after day but now we will have to be fingerprinted & face checked !! Well how about applying the same rules to the boat people first you fuc ing utter tossers !! Pandemic my ARSE !!!!….
The US has been doing this for years. And of course, they still require a vaccine passport.
The ETIAS – European Travel Information and Authorisation System – programme to screen travellers to Europe, is due to be introduced in 2023.
https://www.etiasvisa.com/etias-countries
Some more information here:
https://www.etias.info/
“…The online application will only take a matter of minutes to complete…Once approved, the ETIAS visa waiver will be sent to the applicant electronically.”
“Applicants will need to answer a series of questions by entering basic information such as their name, address, date of birth, and passport details. There will also be some questions regarding health and security.”
I suspect jab status will be required, with the ETIAS having the ability to incorporate a vax passport – no current jab details, travel not authorised.
edit to add: UK citizens:
https://www.etias.info/visa-requirements/uk-citizens/
‘The Spartans do not ask how many are the enemy but where are they’ – Plutarch
How’s this Stasi **** going down in former Eastern bloc countries? Not great I’m guessing apart from Lithuania mafia dystopia?
Glad I travelled to europe over the past thirty years. No need to return there.
Does that include Dinghy Divers? Just asking for a refugee friend?
Why exactly does coop shops have a screen and camera, showing my face at check out. I have written to them, now I notice the screens are still there, but turned off. What is going on?
Asda have them too. Another reason not to use self serve checkouts.
That’s them off the holiday list then. They’re not having my biometric data.
Will it work without electricity? Or internet ? Or 5G towers?
Huge protests around Europe at the weekend not that you would know unless you look.
Those horrendous 5G towers are breeding. More and more are appearing…and more and more ‘boxes’ are affixed to the towers as time goes by.
I found reports of the delayed kick off of the match between Leeds and Arsenal while they plugged in the match officials oddly reassuring.
Lately, I had imagined myself in the Aegean, basking in that turquoise sea and the balmy airs, eating good Greek fare etc BUT…this although this is what I want, I’m not playing their games to get there. I guess I’m now stuck here, like an Ancient Briton, and will have to explore my native land until they start having checks on the motorway or county borders. The fact that these things are becoming normalised is because no one questions them. It’s disgusting what CG said about seeing his wife in various images in the UK on the custom officer’s monitor while entering Vietnam. What do they expect to see? Her launching a brick at a window? What possible benefit is it to the customs officer? I guess they are in the first phases of a larger project whereby they can see other data on the screen – health data, financial data, social media data and so on. Then they can make an assessment whether you’re a person of interest or not. I really hope the EU implodes. It’s become too dictatorial and open to abuse by the likes of all the UNELECTED officials who parasitically feast on the corpse of democracy and who make plans to control and enslave us. We must resist and, at the same time, ridicule these little tinpot dictator types like Ursula von der Leyen, they deserve nothing less.
It is interesting that some MEPs are beginning to ask questions. Is this the corpse twitching or the beginnings of something more significant? Democratically elected representatives wresting back power from the bureaucrats at the European Commission. Perhaps, even the arrest of Ursula von der Leyen on fraud charges.
It’s so obvious at this point that our so called democracies have long been dead. Elected politicians are powerless to stop, change or control these massive bureaucracies and non governmental agencies as the relentlessly increase their mechanisms of power and control.
Somebody should remind them…LOL!
“Free movement of people – alongside free movement of goods, services and capital – is one of the four founding principles of the European Union. It gives all citizens of EU countries the right to travel, live and work wherever they wish within the EU.”
The EU ( and Europe as a whole) is currently collapsing both economically and socially as far as I can see..politically, the EU don’t agree on very much, and unelected officials such as Von Der Liar seem to be despised by one and all…
it will be lucky if it survives….
I can’t know of course, but this is pie in the sky as far as I’m concerned…piss-up and brewery come to mind!!
Don’t. Go. There.
The best regulators are consumers.
Unfortunately, JXB, one of the intentions behind this wholly unnecessary and Orwellian data collection is to stop people travelling. Our understanding of economics is about to be completely overhauled. Wealth will be measured by some sort of carbon credit and we will be allowed so little that holidays and travel will not be possible.
I fear hell on earth.