WASHINGTON: U.S. officials began an overseas media campaign on Oct. 14 aimed at dispelling anxieties about a new security program that requires foreign travelers to be fingerprinted and photographed when they enter the United States.

A full-page newspaper ad taken out in Le Monde in France by the Department of Homeland Security advised travelers: “The flight to America takes about eight hours. Only a few extra seconds will make your trip safer.”

Similar American advertisements are running in major newspapers in England, Germany, Japan, Belgium and Australia at a cost of almost $1 million, officials said. The countries are among an expanded group of more than two dozen nations whose U.S.-bound travelers are now required to undergo digital index-finger scans and have their photographs taken at U.S. airports and seaports under a program that began last month.

“There was a lot of misinformation out there,” said Dennis Murphy, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. “We wanted to dispel some of the false notions and anxieties that are out there and to convey that this is a very simple, very quick, very clean process.”

(By Permission, The New York Times)