This hare-brained US-VISIT program has just been enacted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to fingerprint and photograph visitors to the United States. Ridiculous! How did the terrorists kill 3000 people? By killing themselves. They're not gonna care about being finger-printed - especially if they're ignorant stooges who haven't even fallen under the radar of the intelligence agencies. I mean how many of the terrorists on those 9/11 jets were *known* terrorists? (Many of them apparently didn't even know what they were in for when they got on those planes - in case, they decided to chicken out. Which doesn't justify their participation, of course.)

Aren't most of the guys actually on any terrorist list usually pulling the trigger from the other side of the pond? Isn't publicizing this program just going to ensure that? OK, so it's a possible deterrant to their setting foot on U.S. soil. But I'm still guessing it's the unknown stooges we've really gotta worry about anyway.

The program's euphemistic label US-VISIT stands for United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology. Sigh.

Remember those three questions they used to ask you at the airport (did you pack your own bags? have your bags been out of your sight? blah, blah, blah?), which they ditched after 9/111, admitting that asking them had never conclusively prevented a crime? Same idea here.

Only thousands of good folks are now going to take that much longer to get into the United States when all they wanna do is spend a few hundred dollars (grand?) at Disneyworld. Well, what's betting that some of 'em just don't come now.

Update (010603): Officals claim false hits on the system amount to less than 0.1 percent in trial runs. OK, I'm no mathematician, but sounds like that means that every 1000 visitors or so there's an error. Any idea how many visitors enter the United States *every day*? Gotta be tens of thousands, right? And what exactly does one of these "false hits" entail? Are they people arrested? Detained? What?