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White House Frowns on National ID Card
sonic writes "'One security measure that [Homeland Defense Chief] Clarke didn't put much store in, however, was a proposal by some industry leaders, including Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, to create a national ID card.
Clarke said he could not name one official who supports the idea as proposed, though he said the administration does not yet have a formal position on the concept.
"Everyone I've talked to doesn't think it's a good idea," Clarke said. "
Robert Heinlein said it best:
"When ID's are mandatory, it is time to leave the planet."
Does the word "vulture" come to mind ?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
They certainly don't have to pay for it.
When a company like MS eventually gets Hailstorm rolled out, they will have a database of a large sector of the country.
Which they will then "share" with the government for free.
Or at least to get out of anti-trust difficulties.
Paranoid?
Maybe. for now.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
Does
Anyhow, my point: this would be a good time to write to your representative. Tell him/her/it that the White House's reasons may not be the same as yours or your rep's, but that the Congress should stand behind this "frowning."
After all, "frowning" is hardly a policy decision. A few campaign contributions from major software companies and Bush will change his mind. Now is the time to say NO and make it stick.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Uhh, it's national. Driver's licenses are by state, and regulated by the states. Driver's licenses are also optional - nobody ever forced you to get one.
Like we've said before each time this comes up.
WHATS the point of ID's? We have drivers licences and passports and state ID's and All this other stuff. We also must remember that we are at war with terrorists. They kill themselves while they kill others. They don't care if you know who they are/were. Matter of fact, they probably prefer that you DO know.
Don't Tread on Me
1) Driver's licence is optional.
2) Driver's licence is state-controlled.
3) Driving is a state-granted ability; citizenship is a birthright.
4) Lose your driver's license, you can't drive until you get a new one; lose your national ID card, ???
etc, etc.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
How extensive of a background check should we do on a foreign tourist coming to the US for a two-week vacation in New York? There's been a lot of talk about closing loopholes in the student visa process, including tracking down people who overstay them. But as any potential terrorist can come in on a tourist visa, I don't really see the point.
When a company like MS eventually gets Hailstorm rolled out, they will have a database of a large sector of the country.
.NET My Services previously known as hailstorm, would be a system for centrally storing all the user info from Hotmail/Windows XP users that decided they want Microsoft to be the central arbiter of their information.
At best,
Oracle and Sun on the other hand decided to use the an incident that involved the most deaths by violent means on American soil in over a century as a chance to hawk their fucking software. People on Slashdot like the bash Microsoft because their software is buggy and they put a couple of greedy startups out of business yet when people sink so low as to use the deaths of their fellow citizens as a cheap and guady way to make more money WHERE THE FUCK IS THE OUTRAGE?.
Here's my take on it...Prototype of US National ID Card Unveiled
PS: What's interesting is that besides being one big ad for Oracle and Sun products not one person has shown how a national ID card would have prevented the acts of September 11th. Heck, it isn't like teh airlines weren't already asking for ID before people boarded the plane or are Ellison and McNeally suggesting racial profiling where all foreigners fly on seperate flights from God Fearing Americans?
In Canada, Income Tax was introduced sometime in the last century as a method of dealing with war debts if I don't miss my recollection. This "Temporary Measure" has proved to have remarkable staying power. Decades and decades later, and still going strong.
Hmmm. Kinda like the Liberals getting elected with a plan to repeal the GST (VAT-like tax). They never did. Hmmmm.
Temporary measures tend to not be. Governments tend not to repeal measures giving them more money or power.
The old RPG Traveller (by Marc Miller) captured this by pointing out (in the rules for generating worlds) the relationship between high population and oppressive government and between oppressive government and high levels of law and law enforcement.
It was only a game. But strangely reality seems to be following pretty much the pattern they mapped out....
Tomb
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
For example, try a search for "id card" on BBC news and you will find quotes such as: "widespread repugnance at the prospect of the police
I found this interesting. I live in Italy, where we are so accustomed to the idea of ID cards and lots of other documents, that recently someone talked about taking fingerprints to all the population (no joking) and it seemed nearly normal. The problem with "safety" and police measures is that once they are in place, after a while you forget it is NOT normal, they become invisible in a sense. I suspect this is also the way not-so-nice police states are created. Also called the "boiled frog" procedure (erode rights in many nearly-invisible increments and no one will notice).
It isn't actually very surprising to be hearing this from the Whitehouse. Republicans have traditionally been against national ID cards, in fact I remember republicans railing against the Clinton Health Care Plan because it could have implicitly created a national ID card.
There are still some ethics in Washington, surprisingly.
and it's not like anyone didn't just see this as a ploy to sell more copies of Oracle anyway.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
First we have...
"no big brother in sight"
And then we see...
"national ID cards"
"you must register where you live at the local public authority"
Perhaps you need to try opening your eyes... or at least learn what is meant by "Big Brother:" a government keeping an eye on its citizens for little reason beyond "their own protection."
As for some of the other more interesting one-liners...
"our economic wealth is greater"
By what measure? I'm assuming it's not by GDP (in which caes you're blinder than I thought), but even if you go by GDP-per-capita, we've got every major western European country beat by about $10,000.
Belgium - $25,300
Denmark - $25,500
Finland - $22,900
France - $24,400
Germany - $23,400
Italy - $22,100
Netherlands - $24,400
Norway - $27,700
Portugal - $15,800
Spain - $18,000
Sweden - $22,200
Switzerland - $28,600
UK - $22,800
USA - $36,200
The only European country I could find that beats the US is Luxembourg with its $36,400 per capita. Even CANADA and its $24,800 manages to beat all the G8 members in that list.
"There might be reasons for this but they belong to the 18th century not to the 21th."
The reason is "decentralization of power due to distrust of authority." And several European countries through the course of the 20th century have had very good examples of why authority shouldn't be trusted.
And since I'm going to get modded down to Offtopic/Flamebait anyway...
The EU and its member states are already giving examples of the abuse of power and trampling of personal rights this early into the 21st century. New York City and Washington, D.C. were attacked, and yet its the European politicans that are talking about shutting down mosques and denying entrance to their countries to any and all Arabs...
The EU used to make me laugh. Now they're frightening me. In my opinion, "The Europeans are doing just fine with it" is an argument against the US doing something, not for it.
Clarke said he could not name one official who supports the idea as proposed, though he said the administration does not yet have a formal position on the concept.
If they ever DO mandate a national ID card/number I want it to be mandatory to provide it for registration in federal elections and to be collected federally and checked for uniqueness. That would go a long way toward eliminating election fraud.
"Everyone I've talked to doesn't think it's a good idea," Clarke said.
Which is why I almost didn't post this, for fear of turning more Republicans on to the idea of national ID cards than it turns Democrats off from it.
In case you haven't been following the issues, it's primarily Democratic legislators who have been in favor of a national ID card and other tightening of citizen tracking.
But the Democrats are the main beneficiaries of the votes of illegal/undocumented non-citizen voters. So they have also been strong opponents of voter verification and proponents of unexamined registration and voting schemes such as "motor-voter" and always-absentee-without-reason voting.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Europeans, on the other hand, think this is paranoid and stupid. We simply look at things differently and there's no need to try to get either one to change. Sorry, but that's just how it is.
Driver's license will suffice in most cases since it has your picture on it. When accepting employment, you have to combine different forms of ID (there are different combinations) like birth cirtificate and driver's license to prove that you're legal.
I'm a immigrant in the US and this new ID card would surely just make our life much harder and would allow the US the explot undocumented immigrants even more. For those of you who don't live in the US: Here the undocummented immigrants are the ones who clean at night and work at the jobs that no other person would do, and the pressure of an national ID would push them deeper underground making them more vulnerable to abusive work conditions. besides that it would limit the personal freedom of the average citizen, this measure looks like taken from a dictatorship!
Your inability to do so much as type "Heinlein" into Google (~100,000 hits) is not.
If you remain unable to answer even the simplest questions on your own, how can you hope to even understand the daily news without prior spoon feeding of the history, technology, and other information it depends on? I hope you haven't reached voting age yet.