Umberto's Blog

Hands Off My Hands! (1)

I read these days that if the second version of the US Patriot Act is not amended, this will mean that American citizens can have their personal data raided by the FBI without even knowing it, let alone opposing this considerable limitation of their privacy rights. When it comes to personal freedom and privacy, things look even bleaker for foreigners who get caught in security measures of post 9/11 America. To begin with, if you want access to the US you must submit your fingerprints, with all the expected and unexpected consequences, all of them unpleasant.

Just the other day, even the UK, where identity cards didn't exist at all, passed a bill for compulsory ID cards with fingerprints and other biometrics.
This blog, in its English version, will be also devoted to problems of Freedom vs Security, and Security vs Freedom. Both essential, but sometimes conflicting, from the citizen's point of view. I will then start with a story that could have the following  title: "How I denied my fingerprints to the US Immigration and got away with it" or, curtly: "Hands off my hands!" which is precisely what I blurted out when they last tried to seize my hand, put my fingers on ink and print them for eternity.
This happened a few days before Christmas, back in 1998...I was flying from Milan to Los Angeles via New York: the idea was to spend Christmas with my family - wife and two children - in Venice Beach. It was night when I took my place in a long line at the New York Immigration. When my passport was electronically screened they took me out of the line, directed me to an office and asked me to wait there.
I had become used to this procedure so I wasn't worried for having been singled out. A consequence of the outstanding amount of information that has been collected by assorted US agencies about me over the years - information whose content I have been , as it came printed  - I once glimpsed - in line after line of encrypted codes. Usually the Immigration officer asked a few questions - some of them made sense to me, other less - then let me through the gate.
My passport was well equipped with a perfectly valid visa complete with my picture, courtesy of the US consular offices at the Rome Embassy. But it was known to me that the State Department is one thing and Immigration another. More than that: if the Immigration people, who felt they were being snubbed by those blokes at the Department, could show how much smarter they were, they would jump at the occasion. Frankly, I had turned this intra-bureaucratic rivalry - perfectly comprehensible to an Italian - to my advantage three times during the previous ten years: at the US consulate in Sao Paulo, and at the Immigration offices in Washington and Los Angeles. That is what I was thinking while waiting for my turn sitting on a wooden bench in the Immigration office while a young black female in uniform was interrogating other applicants, and while a couple of family groups, possibly Iranians, were showing clear signs of preoccupation in the first row.
I was soon to find out how suddenly things can change in the tricky world of bureaucracy.
I was reading a newspaper, almost unaware of the occasional cold glances the young woman officer standing behind a long desk at the other side of the large room was directing toward me, while asking questions to other applicants. I am now convinced that she thought I looked just too relaxed, unlike most people who were passing in front of her, day and night.
I actually was relaxed, but that, I later discovered, may have been the problem. Or rather: I wasn't worried enough. Worse, in her eyes I looked like a white smart-ass.
"Sir - she asked me as soon as it was my turn to get close to her desk, while perusing a very long print-out  obviously concerning me - it says here that you committed a crime in France, back in 1968. Would you decsribe it as a felony?" "Not at all", I answered immediately, without even pointing out that I could only grossly imagine what was written on her printout. Then again: how can you possibly answer if you don't have the same data in front of you as the person asking the question? (All this happening long before 9/11..)
She looked defiantly at me straight in the eyes and said: "Sir, I don't believe you".
Now this was really kafkian. I didn't know what I was accused of, I was being asked fa question, I answered it and they didn't believe me. What was the point of all this? I was getting dangerously angry. "Madam! I told you what I think. Period. And you may notice that I have a perfectly valid US visa". This was a bad mistake: it just provoked this Immigration officer into showing that they didn't give a damn about the US visa and the State Department's stamp on it. They had the authority to refuse my entry in the US and, given a chance, they would  use it if I only gave them a pretext. Which I had just done.
I suddenly realized that this was getting bad, and that I was seriously risking of  being deported. Probably this black girl suspected - quite wrongly indeed - that my relaxed attitude half an hour before was intended as a slight against her, an Immigration officer, a black female officer... "We are putting you on the next plane back to Malpensa, Sir", I heard her say. "You must be kidding!" was my reaction. But she had already called two uniformed officers so they could get my fingerprints.
"Hands off my hands!" I growled, as  a last-minute mitigation of the "fuck off!" that would have landed me in a County jail. "Don't you try to get my fingerprints!" I threatened. The idea of being deported in mid-flight was infuriating enough, and the only thing I could do at that point do was to deny them my biometrics. A defence of last resort of my freedom and privacy rights.
"Easy, man" said the older of the two black offcers. He knew as well as I did that you need four men to force any able-bodied adult into submission: two in order to hold him, one to make him open his hand, one to force his fingers in the inkpad. There was only two of them. "Ok, then - he concluded -You can't force a man, can you". The female officer didn't look happy at all - we had become sworn enemies by then - and clearly showed her displeasure. It was as if I had waved my middle finger at her, which was precisely what I had intended to do with my refusal - and the unexpected, heaven-sent complicity of the elderly black officer.
I wasn't allowed to call L.A. and warn my family, so they were left in the dark about my whereabouts until I reached Milan, many hours later. Worse than that,the Immigration used my own return ticket for my flight back, which is unheard of in case of deportation. In other words: I paid for being deported. I swore there and then to myself that that black girl should be punished for what she had done to me, and that I would never, never let a US agency get at my biometrics, fingerprints or other.
On the first point I had it my way. On the second, I think I will start a Europe-wide campaign that I would like to call HOMH.
Meaning: Hands Off My Hands - and eyes,and DNA...