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Silicon Valley vs. Your Privacy
TreeRat submits word of an article in the New York Times' magazine section, including mention of the proposed national database which has been talked about on Slashdot before. "The story goes into great detail with Larry Ellison, who is still pushing hard to bring 'Big Brother' to life. When asked if this database will be created, and run on Oracle, Larry's response was 'I do think it will exist, and I think it is going to be an Oracle database. ...And we're going to track everything.' There's a lot more than Ellison in this piece, though, and much of it is scary.
Reading said article requires me telling the New York Times Magazine about my 'interests' and other personal data (including household income?!?!).. Considering the relationship of this post to the Big Brother(esque) mentality, the irony becomes to thick for me to handle--thus reducing me to a pile of incoherent literary rubble on the floor.
-twitch twitch-
Now, I live in a country where we do have a National database and each and everyone has their own number. I don't have a problem with that and I think that USA could get a lot of good things out of that. Of course you need to put down some ground rules about how this data can be used and which databases should be connected. Don't define the solution by the features of a existing product. As in any other project it's a bad idea to look at the solution before the problem/job has been defined. Define the project and then look for products that can help you reach your goal. If Oracle is the best choice for the project then it's great. But let's look at what we want before we look at how to solve it. You might as well say, I want to travel from Europe to USA fast and I want to drive a car all the way. Instead one should have said, I want to travel from Europe to USA fast, and now look into the best way of doing it. I am not convinced that you end up using the car. :-)
my sig
All Dubya has gotta do is get up and say, "Well with a connected database, the INS would have known that some of the 9-11 hijackers had warrants out." Nuff said.
"Dubya" has already come out against this national id/database idea.
If you knew your facts, you would know that leftist democrats favor this idea much more than republican/libertarians. Leftists tend to trust the government much more than republicans/libertarians.
Maybe you need to do a little political philosophy research before you spout such nonsense.
But then again, this is slashdot where anything anti-republican is modded up.
You might want to read a book called "The Naked Consumer". While it's about commercial databases, and not government ones, the author makes a pretty compelling argument that it doesn't matter what limitations are placed on data collection. Once the information exists in an organized form, it will eventually be used for purposes other than that for which it was ostensibly collected. And when policies are changed AFTER the fact, there's no way to opt out.
We all agree that terrorism is bad and that it should be fought. But we, the techies, hackers, geeks, doesn't agree with the governments how it should be fought. We belive that everybody has a right to privacy. So here's one solution. Let them track us and profile us. In airports and on the Internet. Just give them guidlines on how.
Imagine you enter an airport, now a computer has tagged an id to your creditcard, cellphone a.s. and tracks this id. This id would not be stored in a database but simply in an in memory map linking your id to what you've done. Then should it match a terrorist profile the computer would then try to identify you after having been cleared by a security officer reviewing the data collected. Your data would otherwise expire and be deleted after you'd left the airport. The law could require that such systems don't have hard-drives, but boots the OS from a ROM, and that there doesn't excist any method for retrieving data that isn't associated with potential threats.
This is compromise.
Look a monkey!
Yes. And if your idea got through, it might even be that way for a month. But once the infrastructure to collect the data is in place, it is the silliest of idealism to think that the "your data would be deleted after you left the airport" clause would last ten years.
Social Security numbers were NEVER supposed to be used for anything but retirement accounts - and people who claimed they would someday be used as identification were called paranoid.
You say: This is compromise. I have an idea. I want you to send me $100, you don't want to send me anything, so why not just send me $50? This is compromise, too.
Giving people the power to take away your rights is not "compromise", it is capitulation
God is real unless declared integer
True, so very true...
What Big Brother Ellison doesn't seem to "get" is that people want their privacy respected...
If he wants to build his database, let him. BUT, it should be left as an exercise for the student (in this case, the incredibly naive Ellison) to determine which of the data in the database is *real*, and what isn't. AOL claims to have so many "members", as does Yahoo, Netscape Mail, etc., etc. But how _unique_ individuals are there behind all those accounts? I get phone calls nearly daily on my modem line for the individual who had the number before I got it - in December, 1999. I don't know what his new number is or if he's even alive. I submit that Ellison's database could be stuffed full of dead or erroneous information - and should be.
1) Oracle saved a billion dollars a year and found it easier to track, monitor and discriminate among its customers. This was what Ellison now wanted to do for America.
Fantastic. I think discrimination should be easier and more accessible, on a nation-wide government level. Is that even possible?
2) It's this fear of an all-too-powerful government rising up and snatching away our liberties.'' Since Sept. 11, Ellison argued, those qualms no longer make any sense: ''It's our lives that are at risk, not our liberties,'' he said.
Both are at risk, jackass, they aren't mutually exclusive. But, if saving lives and fighting terrorism is the goal, here's an easy way to do it. Listen up, get ready to write this down if you're a member of the government: If we want to put an end to terrorism, all we have to do is......(ready?)..stop funding terrorists. Don't give the Taliban $43mil, don't give both Israel and Palestine money and act surprised when bombs go off, don't create Contra's or an Osama Bin Laden knowing full well what they're capable of. If our governments and large corporations stop going in for funding them, it clips their wings. It won't end terrorism, but it'll make it a hell of a lot smaller. I think with $43mil and however-much-more we don't know about, a terrorist could fund their way around an Oracle DB.
Besides, what's more efficient than a database is just putting a soldier with an M-16 in every home to watch over us. Or to have a marine follow every citizen around...start a draft to even up the odds. Maybe when he said our liberties aren't at risk, "our" referred to him and his buddies? Who even knows anymore.
In a recent interview with a Berkeley, Calif., radio station, McKinney said: "We know there were numerous warnings of the events to come on September 11th. . . . What did this administration know and when did it know it, about the events of September 11th? Who else knew, and why did they not warn the innocent people of New York who were needlessly murdered? . . . What do they have to hide?"
As usual, you can generate a random New York Times login every time with the registration generator I threw together. Share and enjoy.
Hitler's success in tracking down Jews and sending them to the gas chambers to die also started by assigning everybody a number first and creating a fairly primitive centralized database. Our government is already well into implementation of such a system by abusing the well intended social security system and is failing to create laws that prevent landlords and industries from continuing to commit such an abuse.
If not everyone one of us actively speaks out and acts NOW against the abuse of social security numbers and further centralization it will be too late very soon.
The first step is a simple rule that you want to follow for security reasons as well: Do never give your social security number to any landlord, utility company, administrators, organizations, schools, potential criminals, etc.
The damage to this nation from the kind of thought you express here goes far beyond what you seem to think. Terrorists are trivial risks. Driving a car on any road on the US is infinitely more of a risk than encountering a terrorist. Never the less through the simple minded ideas of "acceptable risk" you assert your terror. Bin Laden has conquered your thought. The loss this causes is incalculable. It means women can't wear bobby pins on planes anymore, that your grandmother can't knit on a plane because her knitting needles might be used as weapons.
It means that some undereducated fool at a security check point will tell you "its for your own safety," when anyone that can think KNOWS that no US flight, and probably none anywhere will ever again be taken over by terrorists in the foreseeable futre because the 9-11 terrorists proved themselves liars. No passenger can ever again accept the risk of believing a terrorist's assertion that they won't be hurt. This "security" is not for your own good; it was not for your own good; it will never be for your own good. Building a reliable mass transit would be for your own good.
While you are thinking about this try running a simultaneous search on google for "Bush" and "bin Laden." After you read a few of THOSE hits, the fact that an ORACLE data base could monitor every emergency room bed in New York state "on the eve of " 9-11 might really get your paranoia going. Look into the stock transactions for American and United in the month immediately before 9-11 and try to correlate those moves with any news about the companies. Someone made several fortunes shorting them, but not all of the profits have been collected yet.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.