U.S. Customs and Border Protection have put out a notice of a proposal to collect significantly more information from travellers from visa waiver countries, in order to comply with an Executive Order from US President Donald Trump, signed the day he was returned to office in January.
The executive order, entitled “Protecting the United States From Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats” specifies that it aims to, amongst other things, ensure that foreign nationals entering the US “do not bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles”.
This week’s proposal from U.S. Customs and Border Protection includes collecting five years’ worth of social media history, business and personal phone numbers used in the past five years, business and personal email addresses used in the last 10 years, and names, dates and places of birth for family members alongside any phone numbers they have used in the past five years.
It is being suggested that this information will be collected as part of the ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorization) application, which citizens from visa waiver countries fill out instead of obtaining a visa.
Alongside this data, the proposal also includes the collection of biometric data: face, fingerprint, iris and DNA.
The border protection notice does contain something of a feasibility caveat to all that is proposed to be collected – whether something like DNA can be workably collected from all travellers remains to be seen.
