US-Visit, or how not to improve security one bit

As you may know, the US has changed quite a bit since 9-11, and one of the things they've done to make themselves all safe and secure is to implement the US-Visit program, which photos and fingerprints foreigners flying to the US. Great boon to Samsung, who've sold US Customs and Immigration thousands of flat screens and Logitec who've sold them web cams [which is what they're using for cameras]. So we go through this at Shannon, which is fine, but we don't clear US customs, which I thought was a bit strange.

Now, when you do this elsewhere, like in Bermuda or in Toronto, when you've cleared Customs you're effectively on a US internal flight, and you just get your bags and wander out of the terminal and go off on your merry way once your plane has landed. But we didn't do that, no.

On arrival in JFK, we entered the immigration hall where all Aer Lingus passengers were told to just walk around the Immigration stands and straight to the baggage carousels. Thing is, we weren't the only flight whose passengers were entering the hall [including one from Kuwait...] but passengers were allowed to just walk past immigration [and the fingerprint machines and the finger scanners] if they felt like it. Nobody checked if we were actually on the Aer Lingus flight...

So all you have to do to bypass the whole US-Visit system is to make sure you fly from somewhere where you won't be pre-cleared by immigration, be on an airplane that's arriving at the same time [and in the same terminal] as a pre-screened plane, follow these passengers and bypass immigration completely, get a stamped customs form from somewhere and away you go. No fingerprints, no pictures, just someone on the airplane manifest they've got no picture of [excluding surveillance cameras of course...] who didn't go through immigration.

Whoops.