[Freak_NL]

It seems that the rules have become a lot stricter recently, and it looks like American citizens might end up feeling the consequences as well. This week a Dutch journalist wrote about being rejected by the ESTA visa waiver application because of a previous visit to Iraq as a journalist. So to travel to the US he gets to pay almost $200 and formally apply for a visa — for accredited journalists this is unheard of. Similarly Dutch with roots in Iraq or Iran are completely banned from the US simply for being born in the 'wrong' place.

This is all within the rights of America as a sovereign state of course, but it does mean that the call to cancel or limit the visa-free travel agreement that currently allows US citizens to visit the EU without a visa is gaining momentum (tit-for-tat politics).

[posguy]

Hey now, inferring that some journalists deserve protection because they may have credentials with a company or govt is both silly, and very dangerous. It creates a situation where you literally strip protection away from most journalists and put them in harms way.

Jake Appelbaum had a sendoff speech where he covered how his fellow journalists were putting him in grave danger when calling him an "Internet Activist" meanwhile he was publishing in the same paper as they were. He also covered how The Guardian left Julian Assange out to hang, allowed known compromised systems to remain in day to day use, and banned fellow journalists at other news orgs from writing about quite a few papers/topics from the Snowden archives.

[Freak_NL]

> Hey now, inferring that some journalists deserve protection because they may have credentials with a company or govt is both silly, and very dangerous.

I'm not sure what you mean by your comment with respect to what I wrote — I'm not inferring anything. The ESTA visa waiver program allowed for some leeway in granting people who visited certain countries (e.g., Iran, Iraq) access in certain cases. This seems to have included politicians and journalists. I expect that the US government did limit this to accredited journalists.

Personally I agree with those critics who point out that the whole ESTA program is effectively a thinly disguised visa program. It is a shame that it exists in the first place.

[wolfd]

It's not nearly as bad as that, but when I traveled to Canada recently, and was crossing the border back into the US (as a lifetime citizen), I was asked about why I traveled to Turkey and the U.A.E. in the past two years. It was a bit weird, but I guess I'm not sure how routine it was.