I had to translate the report of an "experiment" at airports in Vietnam, Thailand, China and the Philippines if I remember well, sponsored by NTT and Jetro about doing exactly the same in all the experimenting countries.
It looked to me like a huge attempt at doing technological ODA, almost requesting foreign governments to totally update their IT systems to be able to manage millions of passenger's fingerprint and photo info, to check that to automatically sent "blacklist" information etc.
This idea that any traveller is a potential criminal is so f***g old that I am not sure it will ever go away, but as the article says: there is no exception except for under 16 and "special" foreigners (basically Japanese people who still have a Korean citizenship because History is messy). All the rest: long term visa holders etc, are all the same as the guys who will enter the country for less than a week (the huge majority of travellers).
Whatever. Foreigners don't have voting rights so who gives a damn ?
Jean-Christophe Helary
On 2006/05/17, at 23:02, uvj at vsnl.com wrote:
> Reuters.com
>
> Japan passes bill to fingerprint foreigners
> http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?
> type=topNews&storyID=2006-05-17T065051Z_01_T345928_RTRUKOC_0_US-
> JAPAN-FINGERPRINTING.xml&archived=False