The Amazing Race 6, Episode 5

Gorée Island (Senegal) - Berlin (Germany)

I mentioned last week that of 18 contestants on The Amazing Race in Senegal, none appeared to be making any attempt to speak French. That continued this week, which is a litle bit surprising, considering that French is the second most widely studied foreign language (after Spanish) in the USA.

But which languages are taught in schools and colleges has little to do with their value to travellers. Outside Québec, French has limited value for travellers within North America, even just across the border in northern New York or New England. In the Caribbean, there are more speakers of various Creoles (mostly unintelligible, for the most part, to speakers of French as a foreign language, and only partially intelligible to native French speakers) than of French.

But what about further afield, or if you are planning a trip to a diversity of places, like the contestants on The Amazing Race? A while back, a reader of my columns wrote me, "What do you consider to be the most useful languages for a world traveller to know?" Here's what I told them:

Certainly the most useful language to know, if you want to travel to a wide variety of countries around the world, is English. There are few large cities or heavily-touristed places anywhere in the world where you can't find some people who speak at least a little basic tourist English.

There are places where no one speaks any language except the local one(s), but it's possible to communicate basic travel needs ("food", "toilet", "place to sleep", "transport to the place I'm pointing to on this map") with no mutual language at all. A well-designed set of pictographs helps -- the best are the laminated Kwikpoint cards, and I'd rate them an absolute "must", if they are allowed, for contestants on The Amazing Race.

My first trip outside North America started with a nonstop flight from San Francisco to Shanghai. Neither I nor my travelling companion recognized a single character or understood a single word of any Chinese language or dialect. We had nightmares before we left that we'd never find our way out of the airport, but it all worked out, as it usually does -- even though the only words I learned to say (badly) were "Please" and "Thank you", and the only characters I learned to distinguish were the ones for "Men" and "Women" on the doors of the toilets. I'm headed back to China (and the Philippines) at the end of this week, with happy anticipation -- still not knowing any Chinese, although I wish I did.

You'll get more out a visit if you know a language understood by at least some of the locals, but not knowing any locally-understood language shouldn't stand in the way of going wherever you really want to go.

That said, the most useful languages other than English for world
travellers are those that are:

1. used by at least a significant subset of people
2. throughout a large area
3. where English isn't widely used.

Depending on the region(s) of the world in which you are most interested (and leaving aside the varying difficulty of learning different languages), that would include, more or less in order:

• Spanish (useful throughout Latin America -- even in Brazil spoken Spanish is widely understood, and knowledge of written Spanish is adequate for understanding much written Portuguese)

• Mandarin (useful throughout East Asia, and to a lesser degree in many other places; outside China more overseas Chinese speak Cantonese, but the numbers are shifting in favor of Mandarin, and most overseas Chinese I've asked recommend learning Mandarin)

• Russian (English is not widely spoken in the former USSR, and some people speak Russian in surprisingly many other places)

• Arabic (used as a second language by Muslim intellectuals throughout the world, even where Arabic isn't the primary language)

Other less widely useful possibilities (either less widely spoken, or spoken in places where English is more common) would include:

• French (mainly useful in western, central, and northern Africa, but losing ground rapidly to English in many areas)

• Hindi or Urdu (useful in a large region of South Asia, but in most of that region it's relatively easy to get around in English)

• Swahili (ditto in eastern Africa)

• German (the lingua franca and most common second language of much of central Europe, having largely displaced Russian in that role over the last decade)

I'd welcome readers' comments and suggestions on this list.

(I'll be travelling until January 11th, and not necessarily staying in hotels with cable or satellite television to get "The Amazing Race", so don't count on any commentary on the race until I get back.)

RFID and biometric passports move forward despite objections

Despite increasingly visible outcry against them both in the USA and Europe, RFID pssports including digitally encoded biometric data (such as fingerprints, photos, and/or iris scans) are moving toward adoption and deployment on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the USA, the ACLU has posted excerpts on its passport Web site from government documents on the development of the RFID passport standards obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and an analysis of how the USA was aware of, and proceeded in spite of, known risks and concerns raised by other governments about the lack of encryption and vulnerability to identity theft, "skimming" (clandestine reading), and "cloning" of passports using the standards proposed by the USA for worldwide use.

Meanwhile, the Council of the European Union [my original referecne to the "Council of europe" was in error] has moved rapidly to require fingerprints to be included on all European Union passports, and in a central database, disregarding objections from members of the European Parliament and an Open Letter to the European Parliament on Biometric Registration of All EU Citizens and Residents from Privacy International, Statewatch, European Digital Rights (EDRi), and dozens of other organizations and activists.

EDRi and Statewatch have more details and links.

[Addendum, 14 December 2004: EDRi reports that the requirement for fingerprints on all EU passports -- but without mention of a centralized fingerprint and photo database -- received final approval by the European Union's Council of Ministers on 13 December 2004. Statewatch has additional details including the full text of the regulation as adopted. Exactly as in the USA, the EU regulation avoids any explicit requirement for RFID chips in passports, but does so implicitly by incorporating International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Document 9303 into eu law. In effect, this delegates to ICAO the power to legislate for both the EU and the USA, and and gives whatever future changes ICAO makes to Document 9303 -- which is already the object of near-universal criticism from security experts, civil libertarians, and even many in the RFID industry -- the force of law without further debate.]

"Privacy and Human Rights 2004" published

Privacy International international.org and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) have released their annual Privacy and Human Rights 2004 yearbook, including an entirely new chapter on Privacy and Travel of which I was the principal author (with several other significant contributors).

Given book production schedules, it's inevitable that some important developments have occurred since it went to press. But I think it's the best available overview of why travel has, in the last year, become a core area of concern for privacy activists recognized as warranting inclusion in such a volume (as it wasn't in the past), and the specific privacy issues that travel presents.

Congress enacts comprehensive travel surveillance law

This Tuesday, 7 December 2004, as its final act before adjourning until after newly-elected members take office in January, the lame-duck Congress of the USA gave final approval for the creation of a comprehensive system of government credentialling, tracking, and control of domestic and international travellers, as part of the so-called "Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004".

I've written previously about some of the proposals that preceded enactment of this legislation. But despite talk of "compromise" between the House and Senate, the amended bill as finally approved, and as expected to be signed into law by President Bush with a few days, includes provisions for travel surveillance far worse than those in any of the versions originally introduced months ago in Congress.

The conference committee report giving the final text of the bill, and revealing for the first time some of the most objectionable last-minute additions and amendments, wasn't published by the House and Senate (you can download the same document from either) until 7 December 2004, the date of the final Congressional votes, precluding any meaningful public (or even Congressional) scrutiny or input.

The rules for Congressional consideration of the final version of the bill permitted only the most limited debate. But some of the strongest criticism was directed at the travel identification, surveillance, and control provisions, particularly the denunciation of the bill by Rep. Ron Paul (Republican of Texas), brought to my attention by Wendy Grossman in The Inquirer [UK]:

The federal government should never be allowed to demand papers from American citizens, and it certainly has no constitutional authority to do so.... Domestic travel restrictions are the hallmark of authoritarian states.... Those who are willing to allow the government to establish a Soviet-style internal passport system because they think it will make us safer are terribly mistaken. Subjecting every citizen to surveillance and screening points actually will make us less safe, not in the least because it will divert resources away from tracking and apprehending terrorists and deploy them against innocent Americans! Every conservative who believes in constitutional restraints on government should reject the authoritarian national ID card and the nonsensical intelligence bill itself.

What exactly does the new law say about travel? It's hundreds of pages long, and includes a mishmash of disparate provisions, many of which have nothing to do with terrorism prevention and most of which have in common only the sloppiness of their drafting.

The portions of the new law establishing the travel credentialling, tracking, and control system are mainly contained in Section 4012 ("Aviation Security -- Advanced Airline Passenger Prescreening"), 4071 ("Maritime Security"), 5301-5304 ("Visa Requirements"), and 7201-7220 ("Terrorist Travel"), as follows:

Section 4012 begins with a clause that requires testing of a new airline passenger prescreening system to begin by 1 January 2005. This appears to override the previous statutory precondition of a report by the GAO which hasn't been completed, and almost certainly won't be by the end of 2004.

The conditions the law places on such a system, however, would appear to prohibit the deployment of the Secure Flight scheme currently planned by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Under the new law, the TSA must "ensure that there are no specific privacy concerns with the technological architecture of the system." Whether or not the TSA thinks it has responded to those concerns is irrelevant: the statutory criteria is whether they exist, as clearly they do for "Secure Flight".

Since the concerns raised by hundreds of comments on the "Secure Flight" proposal aren't going to disappear, the TSA will remain prohibited from deploying it. The mandate of the new law for a prescreening system about which there are no such concerns is, if one takes the law at face value, a mandate for the TSA to abandon "Secure Flight", go back to the drawing board, and come up with a new prescreening system that isn't based on identification and surveillance.

I presume that, unless compelled to do so by legal action, the TSA will ignore the plain meaning of this section, and treat the new law as a mandate to deploy "Secure Flight" in spite of the fact that there are, and will remain, "specific privacy concerns with the technological architecture of the system."

Next, Section 4012 (a)(1) of the act adds the following language to the U.S. Code for domestic airline flights within the USA:

49 U.S.C. (j)(2)( C )(iv) PASSENGER INFORMATION --

Not later than 180 days after the completion of the testing of the advanced passenger prescreening system, the Assistant Secretary [of Homeland Security for the Transportation Security Administration], by order or interim final rule --

(I) shall require air carriers to supply to the Assistant Secretary the passenger information needed to begin implementing the advanced passenger prescreening system; and

(II) shall require entities that provide systems and services to air carriers in the operation of air carrier reservations systems to provide to air carriers passenger information in possession of such entities, but only to the extent necessary to comply with subclause (I).

The TSA has already demanded this information (and, so far as is known, been given it) for "Secure Flight" testing, and claimed that it had legal authority to enforce such a demand. And the new law creates separate obligations for airlines (clause I) and for computerized reservation systems (clause II), despite the unwillingness of the TSA to discuss the role of the CRS's,and claims by the CRS's that the data demands applied exclusively to airlines and did not implicate the CRS's.

In effect, the inclusion of this new language is an admission that the TSA's previous demands for passenger name record (PNR) data from airlines and CRS's lacked any basis in prior law, but required new law, and an admission that active collaboration by the CRS's is necessary in order for the government (or any other third party) to obtain information from the PNR databases hosted by the CRS's on the airlines' behalf.

Section 4012 (a)(2) for international flights requires the issuance within 60 days of "a notice of proposed rulemaking that will allow the Department of Homeland Security to compare passenger information for any international flight to or from the United States against the consolidated and integrated terrorist watchlist maintained by the Federal Government before departure of the flight."

But unlike the preceding section on domestic USA flights, this section makes no mention of any requirement for airlines or CRS's to turn over any passenger data. At least for data collected in the European Union, and pertaining to international flights, airlines and CRS's thus remain obligated by EU law, without conflict under the newly-clarified USA law, to refuse to turn over any PNR data without the passengers' consent.

That leaves it up to citizens or residents of the EU to initiate complaints and request enforcement action by their national data protection authorities and (under the EU Code of Conduct for CRS's) with the European Commission, against both airlines and CRS's that have turned over information about them, without their consent, for "Secure Flight" testing.

Notably, neither the sections on domestic nor international flights mention any oblication on travellers (or other people making reservations) to provide names or other information, leaving unmodified the provisions of current law requiring airlines to operate as "common carriers" and transport all qualified passengers.

Section 4012 (b)(2)(B) requires a report including "a discussion of the implications of applying those [no-fly and automatic secondary screening selectee] lists to other modes of transportation", making explicit an agenda -- previously only hinted at -- to convert the "no-fly" and other watch lists into what are referred to later in the act as "no-transport" lists.

Not waiting for that report, Section 4071 requires the use of these lists within 6 months for "screening " of all cruise ship passengers.

Section 5301 extends the requirement for a personal inteview with a U.S. embassy or consular officer to all applicants for non-immigrant visas to visit the USA (including tourist visas and transit visas) between the ages of 14 and 79, regardless of how far from any consulate or embassy of the USA they reside, or any other cost or hardship the requirement may impose. Presumably, the effect will be to make non-citizens less likely to visit the USA, thus increasing the USA imbalance of payments and decreasing international understanding by and of the USA.

Section 7201 (e) requires the Director of National Intelligence to "significantly increase resources and personnel to the small classified program that collects and analyzes intelligence on terrorist travel." This is the first explicit acknowledgement I've seen of a federal travel surveillance program. There is no indication as to whether it is limited to international travel or non-citizens of the USA, or whether it includes (classified) military surveillance of domestic travel within the USA by USA citizens.

Section 7204 (b)(2)(B) requires the President of the USA to attempt to negotiate an international agreement to "establish and implement a real-time verification system of passports and other travel documents with issuing authorities", i.e. an integrated global identification database accessible to all governments worldwide.

Section 7211 ("Birth Certificates" or, as they are referred to elsewhere in the act, "Breeder Documents"), Section 7212 ("Drivers Licenses and Personal Identification Cards"), and Section 7313 ("Social Security Cards and Numbers") together mandate the creation of a system of "enumeration at birth", lifetime identity tracking, and presentation of Federally standardized identification credentials for all government purposes.

Even before that national ID number and ID card scheme can be put into effect, Section 7220 requires the establishment of "minimum standards for identification documents required of domestic commercial airline passengers for boarding an aircraft", thus making clear that the purpose of the "ID" scheme is actually not just identification, or even surveillance, but control of who is, and who is not, allowed to travel within the USA. So much for that Southwest Airlines slogan, "You are now free to move about the country." (Not, of course, that human rights or Constitutional guarantees were ever, or should be, merely privileges granted by commercial entities.)

The government has already been claiming, in its response to the Gilmore vs. Ashcroft and Frontier Travel vs. TSA lawsuits, that they have the right to require identification credentials, and determine who can and who can't travel, through secret directives that aren't subject to meaningful judicial review.

While this section of the new law is, as Representative Paul pointed out in Congress, manifestly unconstitutional, at least it is now explicit, public, and subject to more straightforward challenge. And it is, in effect, yet another admisison that the TSA's previous actions have been unsupported by any law, even an unconsitutional law.

Finally, Section 8404 reinstates and extends for one more year, through 19 November 2005, the deceptively reassuring but in practice likely to be largely useless to travellers provisions of Federal law for holders of tickets on airlines that have gone out of business.

Other USA-based airlines flying the exact same route (if there are any, which in many cases there aren't) will once again for the next year be required to carry holders of tickets on bankrupt airlines for at most US$25 per flight (i.e up to US$100 for a round trip journey with a change of planes in each direction), if space is available (which it might not be for weeks, especially to, from, or via hub airports previously dominated by the bankrupt airline), if they can prove they had tickets (which most holders of electronic tickets won't once the bankrupt airline's reservation database is no longer accessible).

For more on what to do if you already have, or are thinking of buying, tickets on an airline that is already bankrupt or might be liquidated, see my updated FAQ on Airline bankruptcies and my previous discussion of this topic in my blog.

The Amazing Race 6, Episode 4

Stockholm (Sweden) - Dakar (Senegal) - Kayar (Senegal) - Lac Rose (Senegal) - Gorée Island (Senegal)

En route to Africa this week, the producers of The Amazing Race start off with an enormous editing gaffe: a product placement photograph of an American Airlines plane. Memo to CBS television (and American travellers to Africa): No airline based in the USA flies to anywhere in Africa, although several attempt to mislead travellers into thinking they do by putting their flight numbers on codeshare flights to Africa actually operated by European or (in fewer cases) African airlines.

But the producers rapidly recover by making the racers' first task in an unfamiliar continent something that should be recommended, if not required, for all foreign tourists, if they haven't done it before they arrive: familiarize yourself with the key people and concepts of local history and the local worldview by reading at least one book by an influential local writer.

In Senegal, that's especially easy, since the most important person in national history is also the most famous literary figure of the region: Léopold Sédar Senghor .

Like Nehru, his contemporary in India, Senghor may be more significant today for his literary, intellectual, and ideological legacy than for his track record as the first president of his native country. At the airport in Dakar, the racers are given a copy of one of Senghor's most famous poems, "Femme noire", and told to identify the author and make their way to his grave. At the cemetery, next to a surprisingly modest monument to a hero who might have been expected to become the focus of a personality cult like those of some other post-independence political leaders, the racers each receive a copy of one of Senghor's books along with their next clue.

No one will hold out a million-dollar reward to you as a real- world traveller for familiarity with local literature, but if you arrive in Senegal without having read it already, a book of Senghor's poetry, or one of his philosophical and ideological volumes on "Négritude", would make an appropriate first purchase to read during your visit -- and to give you something to pass the time, and to talk about with the local people around you, during the inevitable periods of waiting, especially for transport, that seem to characterize African travel.

None of the racers appears to speak French, I didn't get enough of a look to tell whether the poem and the book were in the original French or in English translation, and the racers can be forgiven if, for reasons of weight and money, they give away their books when they leave West Africa. But as long as they are in the region, they should hang onto them. People treat me very differently when they see me reading, or even just see me carrying, locally written books -- especially books expressing those aspects of local people's perspectives on the world that they are most proud of and most want foreigners to understand -- than when they see me carrying or reading a guidebook or a travelogue by a foreigner. I've found no better starter for the conversations about, "How to you and other people in this place see themselves and the world?" that I always hope to have with my hosts, and that are often the high points of my trips.

Reading lists for travellers tend to emphasize travelogues and other writings about the place as a destination for foreigners. I prefer to read what the people who call the place I'm going "home" have to say about it. I'll find out what it looks like to me as a foreigner when I get there. Seeing it through the eyes of other foreign travellers who have gone before me is likely only to reinforce my biases, and compromise my ability to see and experience the place I'm visiting on its own terms. Many of my favorite travelogues are those by people exploring, and trying to understand, their own countries: Rehman Rashid's Malaysian Journey , Marat Akchurin's Red Odyssey , Eduardo Galeano's Days and Nights of Love and War , or the book I'm reading now, Ma Jian's Red Dust .

Fortunately for those visitors who seek them out, these sorts of books that tell foreigners what local people want them to know are, for exactly that reason, among those books by locals most likely either to have originally written in English, or to have been published in English translation. Don't be unduly discouraged by people who tell you few locally-written books in English are available where you are going. Most tourists aren't looking for books, least of all local nonfiction, as souvenirs, and you may have to leave the tourist district to find them. Try academic bookstores, or the neighborhood around a university, if you can't find them elsewhere. But I've not infrequently been in places where the handful of readily-available books by local authors in English were exactly the ones I would have chosen.

The contestants on The Amazing Race , of course, didn't know they would be going to Senegal. But what if you are planning a trip, and want to be better prepared than the racers?

Because Americans have -- as measured by sales -- such slight interest in what people are saying and writing in the rest of the world, especially outside the First World, new books published in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are still hard to find in the USA. I list some of the dealers in imported books from these regions in the resource guide in "The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World", but unless you are certain you want a specific new book, you may be better off making a field trip to a research library with a good area studies collection.

Fortunately, many of the classics of Third and Fourth World thought -- such as the works of people like Senghor and Nehru -- are easier and cheaper to find these days than most books newly published in Africa or Asia. Almost anything you can order from Amazon.com you can also find at, or order through, your local bookstore. The real breakthrough in Internet bookselling is the Advanced Book Exchange, abebooks.com or abe.com , a joint listing service for independent used-book stores and other sources including dealers in library discards. Most used-book stores in the USA, and a growing number in Canada, the UK, and elsewhere, list their catalogs with abebooks. If there are 3 copies of an out-of-print book available for sale in the USA, at least one of them is probably listed with abebooks. If there isn't a copy currently listed (I read some pretty obscure stuff, and it's only happened to me once or twice) you can register what you want, and they'll notify you as soon as a copy comes into stock in some bookstore anywhere in their network.

The Practical Nomad says, "Check it out!" -- and start reading up on what they are saying and thinking in the places you want to visit next.

Global day of action for Bhopal

Today I attended this film showing and discussion in San Francisco as part of the global day of action for Bhopal on the 20th anniversary of the pesticide-factory explosion that released a cloud of poisonous gases over the city of Bhopal, India, killing some ten thousand or more people, injuring hundreds of thousands, and causing genetic and other damage that will continue to manifest itself for generations in the descendants of those exposed.

Union Carbide (now part of Dow Chemical) first called it an "accident" (while downplaying the danger of the toxins, which have never been cleaned up) and then "sabotage" (despite a complete lack of evidence of sabotage, or any suspects). Indian criminal prosecutors called it "culpable homicide" (criminal negligence), but the accused, Union Carbide CEO Warren Anderson, jumped bail and fled back to the USA, where he lives to this day, on his Dow/Union Carbide pension, as a fugitive from the Interpol arrest warrant and extradition request.

Five years after the disaster in Bhopal, I rode out of New Delhi on the electrified Bhopal express train. We got off at Agra, and didn't continue to Bhopal, but I couldn't help thinking then, as I couldn't help thinking later when I worked for three years in a chemical warehouse on the shore of San Francisco Bay, about how easily the same thing could have happened here as in Bhopal, and how differently it would have been dealt with.

It's sometimes painful, but it's always important to remember that conditions of life for the majority of the world's people who live on less than three U.S. dollars a day are just the same every day (or worse, since tourists stay away in the worst of times) as they are at those time when the lives of First World guests intersect with the lives of Third and Fourth World hosts.

We visit other places, and then we come home. But we bring home memories, if nothing else. And one of the best things about travel is the lasting sense of connection it gives us with the places we visit. For me, that's happened especially with Kashmir , but it can happen anywhere, to anyone. Even those who least expect to be moved by their travels can find their memories of travel a permanent presence and transforming influence on the rest of their lives.