Originally Posted by original article
Oct. 25: Travelers from 27 mostly European nations that do not need visas to enter the United States will be required to carry passports with tamper- proof digital photographs of themselves.
Jan. 1: American citizens re-entering this country after visits to Caribbean nations will be required to carry U.S. passports to get back in. Currently, a driver's license or birth certificate will do.
Oct. 26, 2006: Citizens of 27 nations who do not need visas to enter the United States will be required to carry machine-readable passports from their home countries, embedded with biometric data such as their digital fingerprints and iris scans. (This requirement has been postponed twice, most recently last week.)
Jan. 1, 2008: American citizens re-entering this country from Canada and Mexico will be required to carry U.S. passports.
So Basically the people from countries who don't need visas are the ones that need the biometric passports. The visa waiver program was created because the people from these countries are our friends. So lets make it even more ostly for them to visit. As someone else mentioned the countries that visas are required for examin all sorts of stuff including work and family history, owned assets including bank accounts, almost anything short of a rectal probe.
Personally I love to travel and would hate to have the limits and difficulties that others have to visit the US. That being said I think other nations should require the same from us that we require of them. If Europeans need biometric passports to visit here, then Americans should need them to visit there. If other people are required to take a rectal exam, then we should be required to do the same. I mean what the heck, we're going to make it tougher for Americans even to return home. Maybe one of these days I'll head out and not bother coming back.
As long as these changes are seen as a minor inconvenience to 'them derned furners' John Q. Public isn't going to care. If we are treated the same when we go abroad maybe it will wake a few people up. Of course the stat I usually hear is that only 7% of us Yanks even have passports so why should we care.