I think I may be emigrating, soon.
Several folks have mused about what the fine citizens of American think about this, generally with the comment that since it doesn't apply to them, they won't care. If anyone else has addressed this, I missed it. Well I do care and I wish I didn't believe it. It reminds me of the requirement for all foreigners to provide fingerprints and be photographed on entry. And the question on the form about whether you intend to violently overthrow the system (or whatever wording they used...). There is no practical justification for all this - there is zero chance it will forward any of their stated or unstated goals. They'll just be deluged with a mass of data that they can't possibly process into information in any meaningful way. The "Bad Guys" they are trying to identify will have no problem circumventing this, and regular people will encounter all sorts of problems and very likely decide to stay away in droves.
And we will all be poorer for it. I feel the root cause stems from the whole "foreign == strange == frightening" equation that has served evolutionarily to protect prey from predators and other threats. This kind of response is latent in all of us. You can't turn it off, you have to face it down like any other fear. What we really need is MORE contact between people, cultures, races not less. If we just get a chance to know each other better perhaps we can behave in a more reasonable manner. We don't all have to love each other, but we could be civil if we gave it a shot.
But just as Brexit seemed to catch everybody by surprise, even those who voted for it, I'm seriously concerned that Don is going to find himself in the Oval Office thinking, "Oh f***, what did I get myself into" after a few days, just a Colin Powell seems to have predicted. So we'll probably look back on this and laugh about it in a few years, given what other new fun regulations are headed our way.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
