Cancer Patient Held At Airport For Missing Fingerprints 323
A 62-year-old man visiting his relatives in the US was held for four hours by immigration officials after they could not detect his fingerprints because of a cancer drug he was taking. The man was prescribed capecitabine, a drug used to treat cancers in the head, neck, breast, and stomach. Some of the drug's side-effects include chronic inflammation of the palms or soles of the feet, which can cause the skin to peel or bleed. "This can give rise to eradication of fingerprints with time," explained Tan Eng Huat, senior consultant in the medical oncology department at Singapore's National Cancer Center. "Theoretically, if you stop the drug, it will grow back, but details are scanty. No one knows the frequency of this occurrence among patients taking this drug and nobody knows how long a person must be on this drug before the loss of fingerprints," he added.
Oh, piff (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minutiae [wikipedia.org]
Re:some people just don't have fingerprints (Score:2, Informative)
Re:That's Nothin' (Score:2, Informative)
Saw it last week. The movie is Ernest Saves Christmas [imdb.com].
Been there, done that... (Score:5, Informative)
I was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2005, and after surgery I did the chemotherapy thing. One of my drugs was Xeloda, which is the marketing name for capecitabine, the drug this guy is taking.
The problem mentioned in TFA is Hand-Foot Syndrome (HFS) or palmer-palmer erythrodysesthesia. Capecitabine causes redness, swelling, a rash, and burning pain in the hands and feet - and sometimes elsewhere such as joints and genitals. In bad cases the skin peels and you get blisters, ulcers and sores in the affected areas. This is because some of the drug leaks out of the capillaries and damages the surrounding tissues, and you have a lot of capillaries close to the surface in the hands and feet.
There are drugs (Vitamin B6, corticosteroids, dimethyl sulfoxide) that can help sometimes - but they didn't for me. Walking became extremely painful, and my hands were constantly hot and painful, although I didn't lose my fingerprints as far as I know. Everything returned to normal some months after chemotherapy completed.
I really sympathize with this guy. Dealing with immigration headaches while having bad hand-foot syndrome would have been a total hassle for me. Even standing up for a few minutes was torture.
Re:Well (Score:4, Informative)
What choice do they have? It could take 4hrs to verify someone is on such a drug. It ended well so this is hardly a controversy.
How many flights have you arrived for where a 4-hour delay wouldn't have caused huge problems for you?
Most airlines I know, you lose your flight if you don't get through security on time, and if you can't pay for a much more expensive ticket on the next flight then you might lose your entire holiday
Re:Can't be the first (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Invasive procedure (Score:1, Informative)
When did immigration started fingerprinting visitors in to the US? This person was "visiting relatives" and wouldn't need a green card or work visa, why were they fingerprinting him? Oh, yeah! because they can (invade our privacy).
They started fingerprinting a few years back. EVERYONE is now fingerprinted at the US border, visa or no visa, with a few exceptions:
- US citizens aren't fingerprinted
- Canadian citizens aren't fingerprinted
- I don't know about diplomats, presumably not
Everyone else gets fingerprinted. Don't like it? Then don't visit the USA.
Incidentally, travel & tourism to the US has gone down recently. Could be the recession...
Re:Do they fingerprint everyone?! (Score:4, Informative)
Fingerprint and photograph, yes -- with a few exceptions. The big one is that (most) Canadian citizens are exempt. As well, individuals younger than 14 or older than 79 can skip the ten card and mugshot.
You get the invasion of privacy even if you're just passing through a U.S. airport to make a connection to another country.
Re:Can't be the first (Score:3, Informative)
Re:just doing their job (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The scariest words in the English language (Score:3, Informative)
Nothing sounds good in German. The words "I love you" sound so guttural that most people start thinking back to certain speeches at Nuremberg a few decades ago ;)
If you're saying it gutturally, you're saying it wrong. There are no guttural sounds in "Ich liebe Dich". The "ch" sound in those words is palatal -- this sound [wikipedia.org], not this sound [wikipedia.org].
Of course German is going to sound guttural and violent if all you listen to is people doing Hitler impressions. Real-life German is about as romantic-sounding as a language gets. (Note: I'm not German.)
Re:Best country in the world (Score:4, Informative)
Secondly, he didn't just walk up to them, open his trench coat and say "Pssst, wanna buy some C4 and a Stinger?" They were looking for stuff, so the FBI put forward a supplier.
Actually, the informant, Shahed Hussain, did go around saying things like that, in this case and another one, and federal agents have set up other people like that.
Hussain was a Pakistani immigrant who went undercover for the feds seven years ago to avoid deportation after being convicted of fraud. He was going around to mosques offering people money. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/nyregion/23informant.html [nytimes.com] And by being a government informant, (1) Hussain was getting paid a lot of money (hundreds of thousands of dollars, as I recall) (2) He got out of prosecution and possibly prison for his own crimes (3) Instead of being deported, he was allowed to stay in the country, which for a lot of immigrants is most important of all.
Hussain was responsible for a conviction in another case http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/nyregion/11plot.html [nytimes.com] in which he entrapped two men who never had anything to do with terrorism before, and who never could have gotten such weapons before, by loaning them $50,000.
One of the plotters in the current case needed money because his brother was sick. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2009/05/25/2009-05-25_terror_plotter_did_it_for_me_brother.html [nydailynews.com]
Finally, if an FBI agent *had* walked up and said "Pssst, wanna buy some C4 and a Stinger?" and they said yes, then got busted, that'd stand up in court. Offering an illegal item for sale is not legal entrapment.
Well, depending on the circumstances it can be entrapment. If the person had no predisposition to commit a crime, and the FBI agent entices him by using an unreasonable amount of pressure, such as offering a huge amount of money, it can be entrapment. It's a jury question.
Cf. John Delorean's coke bust.
DeLorean was acquitted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_De_Lorean [wikipedia.org] That's a good example of entrapment, because DeLorean was offered an unreasonable amount of money, in desperate circumstances, to do something he would not otherwise do.
Or anybody who gets busted for soliciting prostitution when the prostitute turns out to be a police officer.
If someone solicits a prostitute, that would show predisposition to commit a crime.
In contrast, a person who has never committed an act of terrorism, and has nothing to do with terrorists, who is enticed to take a large amount of money and then informed that it is for terrorist purposes, is entrapped, under the law.
Unfortunately, it's easy to manipulate juries with prejudicial issues, such as the defendant's race and religion. Right now, many jurors will be prejudiced against Muslim Arabs, and it's relatively easy for a prosecutor to get a conviction against them by using scare tactics.
A good example was Hemant Lakhani, whose case was the subject of a good program on This American LIfe. http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1088 [thislife.org] One of the jurors agreed that he was entrapped, but she felt pressured by the other jurors to go along. Most people who listen to that broadcast would come to the same conclusion. But Lakhani is in jail for the rest of his life.
Next time around, the time will come for them to be prejudiced against another ethnic group or religion.
What was your race and religion again?
Re:The scariest words in the English language (Score:5, Informative)
The US seems to love fingerprinting as a method of ID for some reason. In most countries, the only people that ever have their fingerprints taken are criminals.
I have security clearances to several Australian Federal Government departments (as an IT contractor). No fingerprints required. They just simply aren't used here as a method of ID.
The only people in the world who have my fingerprints, in fact, are the Americans, because I have travelled to the US and they take ALL TEN FINGERPRINTS of all visitors (?!?!!! that's still a serious wtf from me every time I think about it, even though I've gone through it a dozen times now)
Re:The scariest words in the English language (Score:2, Informative)
Because your fingerprints are on file, if anyone ever commits a "physical" crime in which the perpetrator left a fingerprint, and their fingerprint matches yours, you would be suspected, and forced to prove your innocence. If you believe that fingerprints are unique, you have another thing coming. Worldwide, there are going to be plenty of people whose fingerprints are close enough to yours to match. With a small pool of recorded fingerprints, this fact doesn't stand out that much. Fingerprint everyone in the world, and whenever the police check a fingerprint, the computer is going to spit out a book of possible matches.
Re:The scariest words in the English language (Score:5, Informative)
This is exactly my point.
I too am an Aussie, and I find the notion of fingerprinting innocents a gross violation of human rights. It seems the typical response to not wanting to be printed is "if you have nothing to hide you won't mind".
Well, my response is "if I am innocent then why am I being treated like a criminal"?
I know this conversation will go nowhere due to the hard line Americans hijacking it and defending the police state they live in. None are so jaded as the people who fully accept giving up their liberties and rights for the sake of "security"... no, I'm not going to do the full quote, but you get the picture.
Re:just doing their job (Score:3, Informative)