U.S. Department Of Homeland Security
Cruise Ship Passengers Will Be Fingerprinted
April 24, 2008
The United States Department Of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced plans to begin a policy of fingerprinting cruise ship passengers at U.S. cruise ship terminals before they board.
The loophole in the new policy excludes American citizens from the policy, making it easy for criminals on the run, known sex offenders and others posing a threat to the cruise ship passenger population to board the ships and continue to elude law enforcement.
With only a fraction of passengers embarking from U.S. ports required to submit to fingerprinting, the delays and cost to passengers is still thought to be extensive.
The proposal calls for cruise lines and airlines, not the U.S. government to pay for the cost of fingerprinting and processing is due to the fact that the U.S. government will be outsourcing the process.
DHS says the new regulations are a "quantum leap" in homeland security. I agree. It is a quantum leap back to the past, not to the future.
Currently, U.S. government agents collect visitors' fingerprints as they enter the U.S., and it was anticipated that government agents, not private sector employees, would collect the fingerprints when the program expands to include people leaving the country. This puts fingerprints in the hands of common citizens working in the travel industry.
The new requirement is suppose to go into effect in June of 2009. There is a sixty day period for the airlines and cruise company's to protest the new policy and the protests are flooding in.
Given the biggest threat to passengers and ship safety, for cruises embarking at U.S. ports, has been U.S. citizens, this half-baked policy will do very little to protect passengers from those who pose the largest risk.
A browse of Cruise Bruise confirms, that nearly all the cases of crimes aboard ships embarking from U.S. ports, where the crimes were committed by passengers, were all Americans or legal American residents.
The crimes committed by non-Americans were almost always by crew who had already been fingerprinted and given C1D1 work visas. They from a minority of the cases compared to passenger crimes.
Other crimes committed by passengers who were not American, were mostly from ships embarking from foreign ports, to non-American destinations. DHS has no control over those passengers.
While I'd love to see the cruise lines pay for crime prevention, this new DHS policy does nothing to really protect Americans aboard ships embarking from our cities. It is a toothless policy aimed at given a false sense of security.
