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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. "
The Homeland Security Chief is not Richard Clarke. It is Tom Ridge. Do people even read the articles they submit? It plainly says " President Bush's special adviser on cyberspace security said". I love to bitch about the editorial control of this site, but this is obvious.
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
Your social security number is already a national id card. Link it with a driver's license and you're set.
Regardless, this is a good sign. I also think one of the reasons that politicians are backing down on earlier proposals is because the public isn't as furious anymore. Wait about 3-6 months and few will care; wait a year and it'll be thrown in the back of society's minds. (Note: I don't mean to downplay the attacks by any means; all I'm saying is that it's human nature to get over things in about 3-6 months, of course, not including the people who were directly affected by it.)
Anyways, now that society's not as angry anymore, people are becoming relatively sane again. And in another year, we'll be back where we started.
...unless you, the people, fight like grim death against it.
Here in Australia we had a proposal for the `Australia Card' -- basically the same as this proposal, only not as technologically sophisticated. It was put to the people's vote (referendum or an election issue? I don't remember) and the people's response was to tell the proposers how to fold it into sharp corners, and where to stick it afterwards. That's Ok, though, because then they introduced the Tax File Number, which is a wannabe SSN -- you need it to earn an income (failure to provide a TFN is not illegal, but automatically results in you being taxed at 49.5%), to open a bank account, or just about anywhere else where you are using money in a non-trivial way.
The TFN was possible because we (the Australian population) had just fought furiously and won against a more draconian scheme, and were tired. Also, this almost slipped under the radar without comment, as the parliament rushed it through with very little debate, in the house or in public.
This may turn out to be another High Aim Tactic. Ask for something which is absolutely ridiculous, and let yourself be beaten back to what you wanted in the first place. Even if Ellison is serious (surely not...?) his overtures can -- and probably will -- be used by others with the same barrow to push.
The question is where to draw the line. How much freedom from surveillance do you want? Once you have figured that out, don't settle for one jot less! As soon as you rationalise that `I don't really need to be able to X' and bargain away the right to be able to do so, then you have just lost something precious which you will never get back.
Of course, things are rarely that simple, and some things are obviously stupid. (Such as, eg, `I demand the right to stockpile Anthrax spores'.) But the apparatchiks will use these examples to persuade you that the right to freely assemble, for example, is just too dangerous for you to have. It will not be put to you like that. It will be that some travel may have to be restricted, or that restrictions based on profiling [Hmm, you have travelled in the middle east, your family name is arabic, and you talk funny...] will be instituted `for the time being'.
If history teaches us anything, it is that `for the time being' can be translated `for the foreseeable future', and that just means `until it is no longer profitable to do so'.
Wasn't it a Founding Father who said `the Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance'?
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 1992 the state of California brought out the new digitized driver's license. The DMV had this big pr campaign saying that it was impossible to counterfeit. That lasted for about two months until perfect fraudulent licenses were being found. How did it happen?
Because DMV employees were being bribed--as much as $5000 per license.
See, the thing is, if such a card is so powerful, then there will be a justification in getting a fraudulent one. Before photos were added to licenses (not all states require the photo incidentally) no one faked a license...because it couldn't do crap. No one bribed a DMV official for a license--they just drove the car. After the photo was added, then the license became a powerful document--now I can cash out someone's bank account, or write bad checks...et cetera.
And in the instance in California above--the criminals didn't even mess about trying to fake the card--they just bribed a DMV official. A biometric card wouldn't prevent this...because clearly the card would be made correctly--it's just representing the wrong identity. And if this were a national card, then there would be millions of cards made per year by thousands of government officials--all you have to do is find one to bribe (and it's easy...they don't make that much money ya know.)
In computers, they say that your security is as good as your biggest weakness. Consider the California driver's license--it's got microprinting and holograms and all that silly stuff. That's not the weakness of the card--the weakness is that it's issued to 30 million people by thousands of DMV employees and is verified at tens of thousands of different places. I don't care if you required DNA to issue such a card, the numbers just don't make it that secure.
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.
What really blows my mind is this strange addiction to smart cards... digital ID? smartcard smartcard!!!!!!
smartcards suck. The readers are overpriced, the cards are delicate and cannot be worn on the person without clothing or in the shower.
I have an Ibutton ring, I shower with it on, If I'm buck naked (Ok all of you can stop going Ewwwwww!) I still have my ibuton on me. It stores more, can do more(Java VM built in) is pretty much indestructable (stainless steel) and is super secure/tamper proof. (Open the ibutton can and it releases the inert gas inside and causes the silicon inside to quickly erase/destruct)
I log in my computer, unlock my home's doors, and open the garage door with it. I also store my bank accountnumbers inside and when in my reader that cost a paltry $15.00, it also stores my login/password for websites and automagically logs me in.
granted the java ring is expensive ($75.00) bit the ibuton in single price quantity with 32K of flash storage is around $5.00 and about $2.00 if you are only interested in a ID.
smartcards are $5.00 each in lots of 100, the reader is horribly overpriced, and durability is not there by any means.
A national id is a horribe idea, but thinking of using a smartcard for it is plain stupidity.
About as stupid as thinking that Oracle was being nice and generous by offering to design the database.... Geee, what humanitarians.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Anyway, the only data they have to work on are just that: data. Every incident, every occurrence, is fed into the database and correlated with as many factors as possible and realistic. There is a problem when the insurance benefit is high dollar (as æroplane insurance must be) and there is relatively little data to collect. On 11 Septemeber we had four commercial plane crashes. That's probably more than in the continental US in the previous dozen years, and certainly more than in the past half-dozen. Suddenly their actuarial tables were thrown all out of whack. So they corrected them.
The intelligent corporation self-insures as much as possible. When large enough, one may collect one's actuarial data, and put aside as much as one would have put into insurance premiums, and come out ahead of the game. Insurance is a sucker's bet, in the real world as much as in Vegas. Anyone who takes it deserves the reaming he will most certainly receive.