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Biometrics at the Statue of Liberty
gurps_npc writes "There is an interesting CNN article about the Statue of Liberty finally opening again (it was closed since 9/11 for security reasons).
They have increased security to 'airport levels', and offer lockers for people to rent, partly to keep those incredibly dangerous objects like swiss army knives away from the fragile Statue of Liberty. But instead of keys, the lockers use fingerprint readers to open and close (approximately one reader for every 50 lockers)." The article notes that the design was dictated by the Transportation Security Administration.
"What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between the government and the people...And it became always wider...
...or, rather, provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway...
... by the machinations of the 'national enemies' without and within) and the government's 'responses' to them, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us...
...
"The whole process of this disconnect coming into being was built around diversion...
"Nazism gave us some other dreadful, fundamental things to think about
"Nazism kept us so busy with continuous changes, accusations and 'crises' and so fascinated
"Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted', that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures' must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing...
"Each act curtailing freedom... is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow...
"You don't want to act, or even talk, alone... you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble' or be 'unpatriotic'...But the one great shocking
occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes...
"That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring: the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit (which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms) is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.
"You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father... could never have imagined."
Source: They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1955)
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"We will not wait as our enemies gather strength against us. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action, and this nation will act." G.W.Bush, West Point, June 2002
"In this new world, declarations of war serve no purpose. Our enemies must be defeated before they can harm us. I will never declare war, but will take action!" Adolph Hitler, June 1940
"Not too many people will be crying in their beer if there are more detentions, more stops and more profiling. There will be a groundswell of public opinion to banish civil rights," Peter Kirsanow, Bush's controversial appointee the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people, and the West in general, into an unbearable hell and a choking life."
Osama bin Laden, October, 2001
For those that don't get the stupid part of this let me explain. If you were a terrorist casing the statue of liberty for a future attack and noticed the lockers required fingerprint scans would you use one? Even if you didn't know they'd be checking them against the FBI database you'd have to be one seriously stupid terrorist to not realize the possibility exists and it could blow your cover. They'll probably find a random minor criminal or two and arrest them with some trumped up charges to make it sound/look like these are helping fight the war on terror.
Course the reality is they're not helping any, they're just further eroding what little privacy we have left and the terrorists will just avoid them. And yes I realize we're not guaranteed privacy in public places but running fingerprints without notice (on a regular basis, not just when you suspect someone of a crime) is a bit beyond the erosion of privacy we expect. It's just surreal, I don't think even Orwell thought things would get this silly.
Perhaps the FBI is hoping that WHEN someone places a bomb in a locker, they'll be more easily able to identify the perp because their finger print will still be stored in the system...?
If that's the case, then it is no better than in the movie "Demolition Man" where the head cop figures they'll catch Wesley Snipes by waiting for him to kill someone so they'll know "where he is."
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
Excuse me? How is this a privacy *violation*? You'd have to choose to voluntarily provide a fingerprint in a public place, and that's a violation? If I were standing on a street corner asking people to volunteer to have their fingerprints matched to the FBI database, would that be a privacy violation as well?
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
Now in its early stages, the program, known as US-VISIT, calls for visitors to go through biometric scans to ensure that they are who their visa or passport says they are. Passports issued by the United States and other countries are getting new chips that will have facial-recognition data, and other biometrics might be added.
Read the article: if visitors to the US are being connected to their names in this way, how long do you think it will be before visitors to the statue of liberty are connected to their names? We're dealing with a slippery slope here. There're no security measures to prevent this data from being stored or used in inappropriate ways.
What would I like? A guarentee that these prints are deleted at the end of the day, or after check out, or something like that. I doubt anybody wants or could see a reason for permanent records of this sort. (Unless of course you're 'president' dubya, in which case 1984 is looking like paradise)
and this is an entirely off topic discussion to have, but you said "I'm not a terrorist": what the heck is a terrorist, then? What does the database really have in it? Are these people that have been legally convicted of a terrorist crime (okay), or are these 'suspects'? The US definition of 'suspect' is, err, a little suspect these days
okay, /pun
I don't see a problem with using this as a way to deter that.
And this is exactly what the *good* "citizens" of our fine country are supposed to say. "I have nothing to hide please take my finger prints."
I say the hell with that. Just because we have nothing to hide does not mean that we should happily fork over our identities.
As far as it being a useful technology. Yes, it's a fantastic overuse of a technology. I always felt that a key or a temporary code worked better. Perhaps I am just old-fashioned that way probably just paranoid.
The government wants us to be paranoid over terrorists to detract from being paranoid about them. I'm not fooled.
The fingerprints taken to access lockers at the Statue of Liberty are NOT run against the FBI database.
And pray tell, how would you know that?
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
How many times do people visit the SoL? Once? Twice? Three times a Lady?
How are they going to get used to them? Unless, of course, these lockers will eventually be installed everywhere...(cue theater organ)
I'm still surprised that the morons who changed French Fries to 'Freedom Fries' haven't tried to get the SoL taken down and shipped back to France - after all, 'They are against us'.
I live a few blocks away from Canada'sParliament Hill and walked over at about midnight for a walk last night. I didn't see a single person for the first ten minutes. There was one area that had a few RCMP cars (probably their dispatch), but other than that there was virtually no security. I was literally within 10 feet of Centre Block's front door without being bothered in the slightest.
Now certainly Americans have a lot more cause to be cautious, but there's also an attitude here that excessive worry and planning for the worst just give you wrinkles.
Then again, if Canada were attacked we might feel differently.
The problem with that particular line of reasoning is that if you're not a terrorist there's no guarantee that you won't be fingered if the system thinks you're a terrorist. Fingerprint scanning - like all forms of identification - is imperfect, and like all imperfect systems its prone to false positives as well as false negatives.
It's not whether you are a terrorist or not, it's whether the system identifies you as a terrorist.
As an example: a case in south africa not so long ago, a British man was held for 21 days by South African authorities at the request of the FBI, because they mistakenly believed they "had their man". Imagine now that a system as falsely trusted as fingerprint scanning marks you - an innocent man - as a terrorist - the current bogey man. Your stay in a holding cell could well be beyond 21 days!
Of course, this is overlooking the fact that it would appear that these scanners are not likely to be linked to any central database!
The ways of gods are mysteriously indistinguishable from chance.