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UK Home Office plan: ID Chips in Everything
LauraLolly writes "The BBC ran an article on how booksellers in the UK hope to use Radio Frequency ID chips to report on the entire life cycle of a book, including ownership and second-hand sales. There were throw-away lines about how the Home Office plans to use these chips in all goods, and their current use in U. S. libraries. And you thought that voluntary medical chips were bad..."
Darn, you just ruined the market for my EMP blaster, which message will now no doubt be modded down as redundant and generally ignorant and uncreative...
from what i understand, they're already doing this. it's how they caught kevin spacey.
SOMERSET: For a long time, the F.B.I.'s been hooked into the library system, keeping accurate records.
MILLS: What? Assessing fines?
SOMERSET: They monitor reading habits. Not every book, but certain ones are flagged. Books about... let's say, how to build a nuclear bomb, or maybe Mein Kampf. Whoever takes out a flagged book has their library records fed to the F.B.I. from then on.
xox,
dead nancy
I personally think that this would be a really good and easy way to make my home library catalog. I could just hold up my rf scanner and get the info direct from the books themselves.
I didn't think that voluntary medical chips were that bad, actually. There are different reasons to give up privacy. We can give up privacy for commercial reasons (all the supermarkets nearby where I live issue frequent shopper cards so they can monitor everything I buy -- I hate it). We can give up privacy for law enforcement reasons (depends on how much you trust your government). And there are a myrid of other reasons we can give up privacy.
I don't think that anything that encroaches on privacy is automatically bad. In fact, I'd have to say that encroachmetnts on privacy are only generally wrong because the possibility of demonstrable harm as a result of invasion of privacy can generally be shown to be a real possibility.
In specific cases I can support a mass (usually voluntary) invasion of privacy.
Police states are generally bad because of the baggage that comes along with them. Abuse of power, lack of freedoms, what not. They aren't bad because of the two words "police state".
If technology has progressed far enough to give us the positives of very effective law enforcement and monitoring without the baggage, well more power to it! As a first step, I would support voluntarily allowing tracking systems to be implanted (or worn like ankle bracelets) for the purposes of more effective protection from murders and kidnappers and what not. I think that our government's legal systems -- though not nearly perfect -- have progressed far enough to permit systems like these to be used without bringing along the baggage of fascism and totalitarianism. There is no possibility that they would be 100% effective, but neither would they be ineffectual.
How would a "second hand sale" be recorded in a book? What about subsequent sales? Would I have to go through an agency (ala dept. motor vehichles service -- DMV) where there will be a "change of ownership form" every time someone sells a book? Will I have to wait in long lines as I do at the DMV? Will they justify all this by saying "reading is not a right, it is a privilege?"
About microwaving books, will a person be fined if his book is "not standards compliant"? Will there be an annual inspection (like motor vehicles) for each book?
Since it is the "Mother's day", I will not call the advocates of this policy sons of ******.
S
On the other hand, if you're running a paedophile ring or something equally nasty, that should get you a long sentence, say 20 years or whatever, then refusing to hand over your encryption keys will get you 4 years instead of handing them over for the full 20.
So this law has given people a fairly easily exploitable Get Out of Jail Quicker card...
Regards,
Denny
Police State UK - news and
Blah, blah, blah -- I've got nothing to hide, so why should I worry?
Please stop with this tired anti-privacy and anti-freedom argument. Truth is, if anybody implements any tracking device on anything I own, it's out the door immediately.
Is owning stuff really _that_ important, for us to accept a lasso around our necks?