To help them, Mr Vajpayee has offered to cut the excise and customs duties on information-technology-related equipment to close to zero.
To get a better handle on how many U.S. dollars are outside of the U.S., the U.S. Customs Service tracks information on cross-border flows through its Currency and Monetary Instrument Reports (CMIR).
Download the CultureGuides mobile app for information about local customs by country.
"TECS really is the backbone or the mainframe, the real operating system for Customs and Border Protection that has the information from other law enforcement agencies, " said Kathy Kraninger, a former Homeland Security official and now a security consultant.
We'll want the information that they pull in, but we'll want this new department to pull in information from the INS, from Customs, from the Coast Guard, from the drug enforcement authorities, from the state and local police.
International standards could be implemented to improve the detail reported to customs agencies globally, to provide a full view of information that exists at the time of the booking and maintain this through delivery.
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It has enabled them to tighten their collective controls by pooling information in a single computer and by getting their customs police to co-operate.
Among other things, it calls for U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies to share information and boosts the number of border guards and customs inspectors.
Illinois immigration attorney David Rubman, suspicious that the annual 65, 000 H-1B high-skilled visa quota was not being filled, filed a Freedom of Information Act request, which U.S. Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) complied with last week.
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Chinese shadow puppetry also passes on information such as cultural history, social beliefs, oral traditions and local customs.
At the so-called Green Line dividing Cyprus from Turkish-administered Northern Cyprus, customs officials said they weren't searching people walking across the border unless they had information they were carrying large sums of currency.
Despite the democratization of access to information that the Internet and mobile devices have brought, the business of social networks is subject to customs, cultural habits, and privacy tolerances.
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Kraninger said that while some of the information housed on TECS is benign, most of it is "derogatory, " ranging from immigration and customs violations to warrants and criminal records.
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