Sunday, December 23, 2007

Watching Us

This pisses me off. I'm in the Department of Homeland Security database because I adopted a kid overseas 11 years ago? Bullshit. Don't I get a say in this? Who has access?

 To get cleared for a foreign adoption, potential adoptive parents have to have their prints checked by the FBI--it used to be it was done at the local police station and turned over to the FBI, though apparently that's not allowed anymore. Why would anyone want to keep this information? And why wouldn't anyone be told? I used to get stopped ALL THE TIME, well before Sept.11 when I went through airport security--someone always had to poke around in my bags, though I never got an explanation other than a BS claim that it was completely random (though when I protested finally one day at JFK Airport, I was told no, it really wasn't random, that I must be on some sort of list, though no one could tell me why. And of course, if it happened all the time, it was no longer random.

Anyway, this is becoming a creepy surveilled country we're living in.
The DHS already has a database of millions of sets of fingerprints, which includes records collected from U.S. and foreign travelers stopped at borders for criminal violations, from U.S. citizens adopting children overseas, and from visa applicants abroad. There could be multiple records of one person's prints.

1 comment:

squirrelmama said...

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. An administration that touts the supposedly sacred "Family Values" is now making motherhood by adoption as close to a criminal act as anything.

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