The logistics of travel and immigration

kzt wrote:

Fox2! wrote:Assuming that the Peeps gave them anything near Victor's actual biometrics.

Welcome to Earth! Can I please have your passport and please place your hand on this plate and look into that camera there?

With how inept the League Navy, and it's diplomats are, are you really suggesting the League's law enforcement is any less inept?

Plus it's the League, corruption and bribery is even more rampant than it was in Silesia, and that's a pretty easy place to disappear, judging by Steilman's plan to jump ship.

Somtaaw wrote: SNIP

With how inept the League Navy, and it's diplomats are, are you really suggesting the League's law enforcement is any less inept?

Plus it's the League, corruption and bribery is even more rampant than it was in Silesia, and that's a pretty easy place to disappear, judging by Steilman's plan to jump ship.

Not sure thats necessarily true - at least the first para. The Navy - esp Battle Fleet - lost it's way because it had no real challenge for centuries, whereas law enforcement would have had daily practise down on the streets!

kzt wrote:

Fox2! wrote:Assuming that the Peeps gave them anything near Victor's actual biometrics.

Welcome to Earth! Can I please have your passport and please place your hand on this plate and look into that camera there?

That's assuming he wasn't already wearing countermeasures. He could have had skin tight gloves with different prints and DNA and contacts to discise his retnas, which would match his passport. State Security was paranoid enough that such could be standard kit, designed for long term wear, and quick removal when you need to alter your id.

isaac_newton wrote:

Somtaaw wrote: SNIP

With how inept the League Navy, and it's diplomats are, are you really suggesting the League's law enforcement is any less inept?

Plus it's the League, corruption and bribery is even more rampant than it was in Silesia, and that's a pretty easy place to disappear, judging by Steilman's plan to jump ship.

Not sure thats necessarily true - at least the first para. The Navy - esp Battle Fleet - lost it's way because it had no real challenge for centuries, whereas law enforcement would have had daily practise down on the streets!

Then the whole event involving Helen Zilwicki, Anton Zilwicki, and Cachet not to mention Manpower and a few dozen scags, and all that never would have happened. The police in, wasnt it Chicago, were pretty damn inept if they totally ignored a full out kidnapping. And since Old Terra has that whole issue, very similar to Mesa, where they have full citizens and then second-class citizens, plus an entire unregistered tier?

Nah, I cannot see Solly police on any core world being very efficient. Now Verge and Shell worlds, police forces are probably slightly better. On the good end of the spectrum, the police from Meyers were both highly efficient and not brutal. On the other end of the spectrum, we have examples from all the worlds Firebrand was stirring up revolution pretending to be a Manty.

Lots of brutal, and lazy police forces, who were clearly taking their example from OFS/Gendarme, who should be the hardest working, most experienced law enforcement in the League. Because when you introduce entire new planets into a realm, like Talbott Quadrant into SEM, those new citizens are going to need considerably more hand holding, than a Core World operating under those same laws for centuries.


So the OFS/Gendarmes are totally corrupt and mostly inept (evidence from Saltash boarding action), the Solarian League Navy is mostly corrupt and inept, the Solarian diplomats and Mandarins are mostly corrupt and inept, and the Solly police forces are mostly corrupt and inept. Exceptions obviously apply, again Meyers police force, Daud al-Fanudahi, Luis Rozsak and the rest of the Sepoy Plan, but the vast majority of Solly officials have been shown over and over, the inability to pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel.

I assumed the Chicago police were very corrupt like most of the rest of the Solly capital institutions.

I would also expect that most core world police would be fairly well trained and efficient as most of them are stable states with all that entails.

As for faked biometric data and immigration this is a classic big numbers problem. Yes you can get hair/dna/biometrics etc but you then have to compare it to a database of hundreds of BILLIONS of entry. It is clear that this is a processing issue for Honorverse computers which seem to be significantly less capable than those Abby uses in NCIS. NCIS also shows the very real problem of multiple overlapping jurisictions and databases that need to be searched in parallel only the Solarian League is hundreds of times bigger than those of just the US.

Edit

Despite what you see on TV all these techniques (FP, biometrics, facial rec etc) are in reality used for identity CONFORMATION where you aready have a suspect who you know somthing about and want to confirm they are who you think they are. What none of these systems are any good at it identity discovery.

The reason for this is the false positive problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive_paradox

lets take the sol example with some made up numbers just to demonstrate.

Let the chance for a flase positive detection that random passenger is bad guy X be 0.001% (much better than current tech allows)

Lets assume that there is a total influx of 10,000,000 total people each year into Sol for all reasons.

10,000,000 x 0.001 = 100 people detained at customs because the system things they are bad guy X.

Let us further assume that there are 10,000 really bad dudes on the Sol authorities watch lists and that every year 100 of them try to sneek into Sol.

We flag all 100 really bad dudes and also flag 1,000,000 potential bad dudes, this is 10% of the total passengers inbound and remember this is with a system far more accurate than our current tech.

All these numbers are just for demonstration but it shows the problems that using these system for establishing identity rather well

*fixed a decimal place error*

Silverwall wrote:I assumed the Chicago police were very corrupt like most of the rest of the Solly capital institutions.

I would also expect that most core world police would be fairly well trained and efficient as most of them are stable states with all that entails.

As for faked biometric data and immigration this is a classic big numbers problem. Yes you can get hair/dna/biometrics etc but you then have to compare it to a database of hundreds of BILLIONS of entry. It is clear that this is a processing issue for Honorverse computers which seem to be significantly less capable than those Abby uses in NCIS. NCIS also shows the very real problem of multiple overlapping jurisictions and databases that need to be searched in parallel only the Solarian League is hundreds of times bigger than those of just the US.

Agree about the lack of corruption in the rest of the League. It's mainly Sol and the Verge that are mired in corruption. And we've seen quite a few Verge system governments which have no choice but to comply with OFS/Transstellar requirements.

The League has no authority to intrude into the internal affairs of its full members and even their authority over external affairs are limited in some ways. See the basis of Beowulf's position on refusing the SLN permission to use their terminus.

The CPD is probably not anymore corrupt than any other SL institution but they most likely concentrate their efforts in the better neighborhoods of Chicago. The Loop and the Old Quarter are left pretty much on their own. With the police patrols hitting the fringes of the old quarter where the tourist and slumming rich residents frequent. A good analogy would be Washington D.C. in the late 70's to the mid 90's. Plus with Chicago being a capital city the dueling bureaucracies would be a nightmare. Not many people realize that they're more than half a dozen police agencies in the D.C. metro area alone IIRC you have U.S. Park Police, Diplomatic Protection Service, U.S. Capital Police, Pentagon Police, Treasury Police, USDA Police plus all the federal law enforcement agencies HQed in D.C.

isaac_newton wrote:Not sure thats necessarily true - at least the first para. The Navy - esp Battle Fleet - lost it's way because it had no real challenge for centuries, whereas law enforcement would have had daily practise down on the streets!

Well, not really. "Down on the streets" law enforcement is largely a matter for lower-level government that the League is not involved with at all. The League probably has some federal law enforcement, which may or may not be competent but clearly has some institutional blind spots as a lot of what corrupt transtellars do in the Verge can't possibly be legal.

Silverwall wrote:As for faked biometric data and immigration this is a classic big numbers problem. Yes you can get hair/dna/biometrics etc but you then have to compare it to a database of hundreds of BILLIONS of entry. It is clear that this is a processing issue for Honorverse computers which seem to be significantly less capable than those Abby uses in NCIS. NCIS also shows the very real problem of multiple overlapping jurisictions and databases that need to be searched in parallel only the Solarian League is hundreds of times bigger than those of just the US.

You're making a classic mistake: assuming that you have to do a full compare to every record. That is, as you say, infeasible.

What happens is that you compute a "fingerprint" that reduces the search space by quite a few orders of magnitude. That gives you some potential matches, after which you do a more rigorous compare to find the right one.

That's what services like UTube do to catch people who are uploading copyrighted material.

False positives only happen when the comparison is deliberately using less than full information, for whatever reason. (usually cost).

And remember: it's 2000 years of development later. You're not going to spoof a decent system by holding up a picture of someone else in front of the camera.

drothgery wrote:

isaac_newton wrote:Not sure thats necessarily true - at least the first para. The Navy - esp Battle Fleet - lost it's way because it had no real challenge for centuries, whereas law enforcement would have had daily practise down on the streets!

Well, not really. "Down on the streets" law enforcement is largely a matter for lower-level government that the League is not involved with at all. The League probably has some federal law enforcement, which may or may not be competent but clearly has some institutional blind spots as a lot of what corrupt transtellars do in the Verge can't possibly be legal.

True, v true.

However the original quote was in the context of

Welcome to Earth! Can I please have your passport and please place your hand on this plate and look into that camera there?

, which did seem to imply that it was the lower level nitty gritty policing that was being discussed/slated