Slashdot Mirror
Registered Traveler ID Initiative
Broadcatch writes "At the coming CardTech/SecurTech
in Washington D.C. the Transportation Security
Administration will make their first public announcement of the Registered
Traveler ID Initiative . Seems they haven't gotten the word that ID
cards are a bad
idea."
I read the links but found no concrete information on what this is about, but "Registered Traveler ID Initiative" sounds very disconcerting.
I just watched "The Hunt for Red October" again last week. There's a scene where the would-be Soviet defector sub Captain (Sean Connery) and First Officer (Sam Niel) are discussing what they'll do in America. The first officer would like to live in Montana but says something like "I might buy a recreational vehicle and travel from state to state...they let you do that? No papers?" Captain: "No papers."
Yes, and we've established that driver's licenses are a very 'leaky' piece of identification from an age verification perspective. Everyone on Slashdot who has ever owned a fake driver's license--or borrowed a license (real or otherwise) from an older sibling--raise your hand. Yes, I thought so.
Having a single magical card that identifies you to transportation agencies is not a panacea; it just creates a false sense of security. Even if it is tied to biometric data, there will be leaks in the system. Finally, if errors (innocent or not) creep into the system, a card with an aura of infallibility will make error correction difficult if not impossible. ("I'm sorry Mr. Gustaffsson--your last name is too long for the name field. From now on, you will be Mr. Gustaff. Have a nice day.")
And identifying people even with 100% accuracy is insufficient to solve the problem that we're targeting. Bear in mind that all of the 9/11 hijackers used their own legitimate identification to board the aircraft. Thorough screening of baggage and alert gate personnel are far more important if the goal is to protect airplanes. This ID system merely means that we will be able to accurately identify the remains at the crash site.
~Idarubicin
Have you tried this attitude in the UK? There are many people there who believe it is their God-given right to walk the streets in anonymity. Previous attempts by the goverment to introduce any kind of national ID have been rejected. When I as living in the US, many American friends of mine cautioned me about not carrying ID, stating I ran the risk of being treated like a vagrant or something by the police. This made the US feel a bit like a police state to me. So don't tell me that this attitude towards acceptance of ID is more prevalent in Europe.
The Register
By Thomas C Greene in Washington
We all know that truth is stranger than fiction, and here we have an apparently real item straight from the realm of Tom Clancy. Imagine a huge, absolutely huge, central database containing both the official and commercial data of every single citizen, run by the US military ostensibly for anti-terror and Homeland Security purposes, and all of it under the direction of a convicted felon.
Well the database is in development and coming soon, according to the New York Times; and the felon who will run it is disgraced Reagan administration liar, dirty-trickster and cover-uper Admiral John M. Poindexter, who Dubya has taken out of mothballs to keep us all safe from dreadful evildoers.
Poindexter got caught up in a little Federal crime spree called Iran-Contra a decade ago, stood trial and was convicted, but managed to escape responsibility on an odd technicality.
As told succinctly by FAS.org, Poindexter was "Indicted March 16, 1988, on seven felony charges. After standing trial on five charges, Poindexter was found guilty April 7, 1990, on all counts: conspiracy (obstruction of inquiries and proceedings, false statements, falsification, destruction and removal of documents); two counts of obstruction of Congress and two counts of false statements.
District Judge Harold H. Greene sentenced Poindexter June 11, 1990, to six months in prison on each count, to be served concurrently. A three-judge appeals panel on November 15, 1991, reversed the convictions on the ground that Poindexter's immunized testimony may have influenced the trial testimony of witnesses. The Supreme Court on December 7, 1992, declined to review the case. In 1993, the indictment was dismissed on the motion of Independent Counsel."
Now he's in charge of the newly-invented Information Awareness Office, a part of that mixed bag of good and bad, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and he's got his eye on basically every scrap of data about every single citizen. The system Poindy is preparing to unleash on us "will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant," the NYT article says.
And he's in no way embarrassed by his role ensuring that the US military and federal law enforcement and intelligence spooks can quite conveniently spy on the populace. He's said openly that the US government "needs to 'break down the stovepipes' that separate commercial and government databases," the article says.
Poindexter joins a slew of Reagan-era retreads and Iran-Contra alumni now operating brazenly in Dubya's bureaucracy. No doubt he feels quite comfortable among such familiar company, though I doubt I could say the same for the rest of us. ®
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Since the Ben Franklin quote has been done to death, it's past time to introduce a new one:
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.