WilcoRoger

How do you establish that a person leaving the country is a visitor? By exit passport controll of all exiting persons. Some citizens may take issue, I'm quite sure.

:D!

No, but neither do they fingerprint arriving visitors.

GUWonder

With all the words above, no evidence has been provided to disprove anything I have posted in this thread. Carry on, I am amused by spoon-feeding demands.

About spoon-feeding on demand -- consider that reserved primarily for a subset of those US citizens whose passports expire within five years of issue date (or sooner).

I indicated that an element of your post was a misrepresentation of national interest, and the facts on that are what they are and have been since 1996 and 1997. Apparently not everyone loves to be corrected as much as I would. That's ok by me -- different strokes for different folks.

We already have exit controls of some sort for visitors that are also used for US persons too. It has already been useful for US interdiction of espionage-related and terrorism-related activity. I welcome all efforts to try to disprove this paragraph too.

Hyperacusis

I'm curious whether this would apply to visitors only, or all non-US citizens (including LPRs). Were LPRs subject to US-VISIT exit fingerprinting when it was in force?

WilcoRoger

As a Russian citizen who had committed no crime at the time, of course he was free to enter and exit Russia.

Also - how would exit control from the US indicate in any way where and how any individual is about to spend his time outside the US? (as you seem to imply that it was due to lack of such control that the US had to rely on Russia for such info)

And his flight details were most certainly known - all US-bound passanger's details are relayed to the US before the flight even starts.

Let's face it - the authorities had zilch on the guys, but not due to lack of exit controls.

GUWonder

Suspected extremists are rather often flagged down at Russian ports of entry and exit, at least at the airports, and detained and more -- even when no criminal charges are being applied (again) to such persons.

Due to the way his name was on the Aeroflot passenger manifest, the US did not previously match his departure from the US with his filed re-entry to the US, and the US had to rely upon Russia to inform the FBI about the bomber's travel history to the country and about the duration of his most recent trip to Russia.

Exit controls [Russian-style] from the US would mean the reliance on airline information for tracking and/or exit controls would decline and the name-related miss would be far less likely to occur.
That's not news to me. But given the reliance upon airline information rather than just government information, the US ends up losing track of people and not matching up a flagged person with their travel history. The "blame" for that outcome was a sort of name-mismatch and lack of tighter exit controls from the US.

The principal (since-deceased) Boston Marathon bomber had been interviewed by the FBI before 2013 based on Russia's flagging him down. His communications and travel records examined by the FBI, with contributions from the NSA. A good chunk of this info has been publicly validated by key Congressional leaders, and elements of all of it have been in the press too.

GUWonder

LPRs could enter and exit the country without using US-VISIT.

WilcoRoger

But he wasn't. I'm rather sure that if the Russians would have seen any reason to detain him, they would have. They are not so easily fooled by transcription of non-Latin script names as the yanks seem to be.

But this is all beside the point under discussion - US exit controls.

Sorry, but this still doesn't answer the original issue you brought up - ie. that having a functional exit control would have somehow indicated how long and where the guy had been in Russia. A JFK stamp has not (yet) a GPS chip with satellite upload functionality embedded (now how much such a contract would be worth?)

And this interview resulted in? Exactly - zilch. To refine my wording, the authorities had zilch to stick on the guy.

So I still stick to my opinion, that exit controls would have absolutely no influence on the subsequent Boston bombing. (I can hardly wait when some senator will bring 9/11 in the picture)

GUWonder

http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/poli...ymM/story.html

If we had Russian style exit controls at JFK, he would have been tracked in a way which he wasn't by the US because: his US docs would have been used and relayed more effectively to the relevant systems that are now fed by airlines and driven by airlines' info; or if he was using only Russian docs he would have had to explain himself about his legal presence in the US. His period of time outside of the US would be more reliably tracked and his destination would have been known in a way it wasn't known by the US at the time of his departure from the US.

The FBI thought it didn't have enough to arrest him last year or before. Whether there was some other basis for the US to go after him or not, who knows but I am betting some blowhard like US Rep. Peter King or US Sen. Lindsay Graham wouldn't mind whipping something up.

The Russian government doesn't always detain people that some of their officials may wish to detain.

By the way the Russian government sometimes does mess up things based on differences between Cyrillic alphabet script and Roman alphabet script, just probably way less often than is the case with the US if it involves a manual examination.

I am not making a case for additional exit controls, as I am opposed to their expansion. I am also of the thought that the Boston marathon bombers could have acted even without departure from and re-entry to the US.

WilcoRoger

Are you implying that the US government should keep tabs on how long its citizens/legal aliens are out of the country, where they go? Orwellian is one word to describe this, Brezhnev area SU is another.

Exactly

GUWonder

Did you fail to read my last paragraph in the post of mine from which you quoted? If not, then you ought to know the answer to your own question. Either way, my answer is that I don't fancy it.

The US does try to keep tabs on how long US persons are outside of the US and to where we travel. Can't say I am a fan of that either, but the status quo is what it is.

WilcoRoger

You're right, the last paragraph is clear.

As for the "keeping tabs things" - another nail in the coffin of a once great nation

stifle

I was going to say it was not a case of asking permission, but of tracking who was leaving, but I am not so sure now. How long before you have to tell the government why you want to leave, like Australia does? :/

:D!

What do they actually do with all those cards? Anyway, my plans usually change when I'm abroad...

mfl

In regards to visitors and locals, the cards provide a record of the people leaving and entering Australia and for what reasons..

Information sought on this form is required to administer immigration, customs,quarantine, statistical, health, wildlife and currency laws of Australia and its collection is authorised by legislation. It will be disclosed only to agencies administering these areas and those entitled to receive it under Australian law.

For permanent residents leaving Australia, it is not only a record of travel movements for permanent residents but gives statistics on why people are emigrating from Australia and whether temporarily or permanently.