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The Beast of Brussels
'No nickname' Ian writes "If you live in Europe you should definitely read this story about a government supercomputer. It's written by Andy McCue from silicon.com and entitled: IT Myths: Does the 'Beast of Brussels' know everything about us?
Basically, in Europe there are rumours of an EU-owned super-computer which stores and process information on every European citizen.
The piece debunks the rumour and finds out its roots are actually in a work of fiction - but there is some interesting comment from privacy activists who suggest it may not be too wide of the mark. Simon Davis of Privacy International goes so far as to suggest such computer may have existed - if perhaps not on the same 'three storey-high' magnitude."
If you read the related article about the series (IT Myths Update), check out the last paragraph.
Now, I find it more than a little disapointing that they say they 'have a feeling it might be true'. What person writing IT articles doesn't even know basic computer history?
Surely at least SOMEONE at a tech-based news site has heard of Grace Hopper?!? Although most people might remember her for Cobol, almost any book or show on computer history mentions her famous conversation with Howard Aiken after finding a moth stuck in a relay of the Mark II.
Sheesh, either that or they are really strapped for ideas. Mentioning what should be known as one of the most fateful incidents, by one of the most famous people working on one of the most famous computers, as a 'possible truth' is a really bad way to hype a series, IMHO.
It is also very clear that the EC does not know much about their citizens. One of the most apparent things is that they have very little knowledge of what the average citizen would like a unified europe to give them.
Hint: that is not providing a platform for the large companies of the world to get all the rights and benefits, thereby killing off all small business or forcing them into merging together.
It is also not the reshaping of society into a faster and faster operating commercial merry-go-round.
Well, I live in Belgium too, and I do care. Belgium is full with people in local and national politics who think they are technocrats who use IT for good purposes, and then turn around and do the worst things without realizing the implications to their constituents, or to the IT market/industry/whatever.
...)
Banksys/proton (a private company, being the only one that has the full picture of money flowing nation-wide), the new ID-card with your own personal certificate on-a-chip (nevermind that it's done by a private company - sun - and that the keys are pre-generated, so any of the intermediaries can escrow it), the e-voting problems, the e-tax return with the associated delays, the list goes on and on. Fuckups ranging from trivial to monumental, but all fuckups nonetheless.
I've just got the impression that everyone in this country likes to think they're 'down' with technology, but they're all basically clueless. Half of the things they do are solutions to problems that never existed, the other half, really bad implementations.
Sad thing is: I think Belgium is at least trying to do the right thing, I've heard stories that leave me far more cynical about other countries.
To get more to the point (sorry for all the ranting): I agree with you that an ID card is not necessarily a bad thing. But I'd like to avoid having data about me being gathered and correlated unnecessarily. If you have a ton of data on real people, and analyse that data for certain patterns, you're bound to have a statically significant number of false positives, which will have consequences for the same real people.
And I really hate the remark you've given: "the only reason i can come up with is if you are a fraudster". I don't want to be put in the position where I have to justify my (legal) behaviour, just because otherwise it might seem that I'm hiding something (you're using encryption? you must be a drug dealer, tax evader, child molester,
Yea, maybe I'm a bit paranoid, but it's far easier to have your rights slowly eroded, than it is to regain them.
Did the article mention tatooing?
I'm sure it's a bureaucrats wet dream to know everything about everyone
I doub't it. Imagine the forms he'd have to fill out!
Anywho, though, I'm not sure I see any real evidence to show this is impossible, either. Certainly it is theoretically quite possible; such a scale of data management is no big feat compared to some, and there are indeed government programs which approximate this close enough to make it somewhat more believable than the claims of those who say we never landed on the moon (or that there is no moon).
Bear in mind programs like Total Information Awareness (renamed Terrorist Information Awareness to try and dispell some of the fear raised by the notion of a program led by John Poindexter of Iran-contra fame designed to gather as much information on as many American's activities as possible), CAPS (the airline flight risk profiler which is, admittedly, fairly ineffectual), and so forth. Are all of these bad? No, probably not. Is there a great potential for misuse? Absolutely.
Well, with today's technology the government/EU certainly could collect a lot of information about it's citizens.
;-)
I had a funny experience with a Dutch central government agency that is supposed to do all wiretapping for the police. They contacted me because they wanted to tap one of our customer's e-mail domains on tax fraud suspicions.
It took them two weeks to figure out who was handling the mail for the suspicious company's domain (us). Then they wanted us to forward all mail to a mailbox at a free mail provider. This mailbox almost immediately filled up and started sending 'mailbox full' messages to the original senders.
Big brother has a lot to learn...
X.
(BTW: I changed the sender addresses as a precaution
I couldn't agree more. I don't see why all you people (*COUGHS* BRITISH XENOPHOBES *COUGHS*) are so against ID cards. It's a solid way or proving your identity. I've heard ludicrous arguments, such as "It makes not carrying your card a criminal act", wel excuuuuuuseeeeeeeee me but people with that argument have suffered serious brain damage while they were attempting to build a wall around their island or something. Face it .. privacy is dead. It died a very long time ago and no one gave a fuck. Now all of a sudden people are crying bloody murder ..
I'll tell you something ... The EU's new Privacy Laws require the owner of any network (aka everybody) to save the localisation (aka which user is where) and identification (aka who is who) data for at least a year. I have been fighting this law for TWO years now, and not once has anyone given a fuck. People just don't seem to realise what that means. Aside from wasting countless of terabytes of storage it also means that I can trace where you were yesterday morning at 11am, because a cell phone network is also a network.
Have a nice day.
The myth about the "Beast of Brussels" is not of European origin AFAIK. It builds heavily on religious drivel about Satan. Such religious myths are not very common in Europe. I am a European, and I have never heard it over here. I would not be surprised if it turned out that this story originated in the USA, where conspiracy tales with a religious undertone are far more common. The article says this:
'The Beast' is actually the invention of Christian fiction writer Joe Musser, who included it in his book Behold a Pale Horse in 1970. In the book a gigantic three-storey computer is located in the administrative headquarters of the then Common Market.
Bingo!
Unfortunately, the commission has chosen to ignore it in favour of pandering to US security paranoia, see here . It will be interesting to see if they ultimately get away with it.
In the US it is now common to use bank account cards to purchase everything. If you assume that the government could capture the feeds from all the banks and credit card information, then, storage requirements for such an animal would break out conservatively as:
300 million citizens x 5 purchases per day x 4 bytes fk into SSN table x 4 bytes for long id of item purchased x 365 days x 60 years = 262.8 Tbytes which is A LOT, but doable.
To track everything for just a rolling 5 years, rather than 60, then your storage requirements drop down to 21TB, and then further if you actually assumed only 2 purchases per day (on average), you could knock it down to 8TB, and finally, if you assumed that 150 million citizens were actually buying stuff as the other were children, then, you could knock it down to 4TB. Given today's hard drive prices, this would almost be within the range of affordability for a small business or even a determined hobbyist.
So, the real issue is not, will the government be tracking everything, because, since it so cheap to do it it probably already does, but, the real issue will be, when will we use Kazaa to collect all the purchases everyone made simply for our own entertainment!
This is my sig.
I have never heard this particular urban myth before. That might be my own ignorance, but I like to think I'm kinda plugged in...which leads me to believe this rumour isn't circulating as widely in Europe as the article would lead us to believe.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?