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Library to Require Fingerprint to Use PCs
FearUncertaintyDoubt writes "Three libraries in Naperville, IL, soon will start requiring patrons who use the library's PCs to provide a fingerprint scan. The article says, ' Library officials say the added security is necessary to ensure people who are using the computers are who they say they are. Officials promise to protect the confidentiality of the fingerprint records.'"
My sports center requires a hand scan to enter the facility. It gives false or unreadable scans so often that most of the guards just wave you through if you look even vaguely trustworthy.
What about those with disabilities (severed limbs) or those with birth defects (extra fingers)? I bet the woman who started the whole "Finger found in Wendy's chili" scam won't be worried at all. She has an extra one she can use. (Okay, that's a bit too far. sorry)
The Patriot Act requires libraries to turn over that sort of information to the feds when asked.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
engadget version of story
bbc version of story
What does that mean exactly? Doesn't the "Patriot" Act allow for law enforcement officials to easily obtain library records during investigations?
The FBI can obtain a warrant from a secret court. The librarians are forbidden from telling ANYONE about the warrant.
In my opinion, this kind of secrecy and power is dangerous and wrong. I do not relish the prospect of living in a fascist society.
Fortunately, a number of librarians appear to agree with me. In one case the FBI backed down after issuing the warrant.
Interesting reading.
Oh, Naperville. How I hate you so. For those who have never been there, let me give you an idea of what this place is like.
Rich. Conservative. And fucked up beyond belief. Alan Keyes made his home there when he was campaigning in Illinois. It boasts the most expensive highschool in the midwest, and even the shitty highschool on the other side of town has an olympic size swimming pool and a greenhouse.
It's sprawled out so far, that even with all the money the city has, it's getting to the point where it can't afford to plow the whole city when it snows.
So does this surprise me? No, not really. My parents moved out of that town when it was getting gentrified away from a quaint, middle class suburb and into a massive, upper-middle class traffic-fest. It's got a whole lot of libertarians now, for whom 'liberty' really only has anything to do with taxes. Concerning anything else (reproductive rights, personal privacy, etc), they would make small towns in Alabama seem damn near progressive in comparison.
It was never that great of a city to begin with, but right before we left (around 1995 or so), it had turned into what I would imagine a nice, quiet suburb in Nazi Germany was like. You know, everything's fine if you just don't pay too much attention to the smoke rising up in the horizon. I remember kids in my sophmore year social studies class arguing for fascism as a preferred political system. And the teacher didn't trick them, they actually brought up the idea, and were pretty enthusiastic about it.
High school was a frenzy of girls getting raped, drug overdoses, rampant (almost encouraged) racism and classism, severe and rampant anorexia and bullemia, bullying on a scale of Columbine, and just overall one of the worst social atmospheres you could ever subject a kid to.
If anybody ever made a movie about life in this town, it would have to be shot like a horror film.
So, I can't say I'm surprised about this. Naperville's got the money, the right-wing leanings, and the idiocy to do something just like this.
Not true. Most libraries only have records of what you currently have checked out. They don't keep those records after the books are returned. The historical exceptions have tended to be totalitarian regimes like Stalinist Russia.
Fingerprinting library users is insanely over the top. If it was happening in my country, I'd be really worried.
I grew up in Naperville and spent my childhood using the Naperville Public Libraries, and I visit often still because my parents live there. Now that I've moved, I have some perspective I didn't have when I lived there. Naperville is an interesting town. It's a land of burgeoning housing developments and SUVs piloted by soccer moms where people come to raise their kids and shield them from the outside world, because it's a very safe and insulated place. The police department really does have nothing better to do than issue traffic tickets and harass partying high schoolers for violating curfew.
Property values are high, and that keeps the riff-raff out. In the first Naperville neighborhood I lived in, the Chicago Housing Authority had a plan to build mixed-income housing. This was met with bitter resistance, under the guise of worry about gang activity and declining property values. This from a group of senior citizens for whom lower property values would save a lot of money in property taxes.
It's about the last place I'd expect a public outcry against anything claimed to be "for the children," privacy be damned. But maybe things have changed since I left. I hope so, but I'm not optimistic. So should there be such an outcry, I'd gain back a lot of lost faith in Naperville.
On the plus side for the Naperville Public Libraries, they were very receptive to my suggestion of installing Firefox on the same machines that will have the fingerprint scanners. Though that may have been because I said the popup blocking would suppress inappropriate popups, you know, for the children.
It's got a whole lot of libertarians (sic) now, for whom 'liberty' really only has anything to do with taxes
You misspelled "neo-cons".
Patriot-Act could let law enforcement use this database of numerical "fingerprints".
Read the USA PATRIOT Act before stating what it can and cannot do. The USA PATRIOT Act's provisions for public/small business records access comes from the USA Act, which comes from FISA (passed in 1978). In order to access those records, an investigator has to go to FISC and convince a panel of judges that you are suspected of espionage, terrorism, or drug smuggling AND you have not committed a crime that would allow for a search warrant AND letting you know that they want to search those records would allow you to delete data that they want to see. Finally, when they look at it, they have a time limit, set by the FISC, for letting you know what they looked for and what they found.
That doesn't sound much to me like the USA PATRIOT Act lets law enforcement just wander into a library and dump all the data they have.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
It's KOREAN old people, not Chinese old people. If you insist on using a clichè, please use it correctly.
While Neuqua Valley is not the most expensive high school built on a per student basis (about $20K per student, 3100 students at full capacity), I challenge you to find a American public high school with a contstruction greater than Neuqua's $62 million.
PS - According to the Wikipedia article you linked to, "In addition, it is considered poor form to invoke the law explicitly."
You also failed to take into account "Quirk's Exception" to Godwin's Law, which is "Intentional invocation of this so-called 'Nazi Clause' is ineffectual." =)
With the first link, the chain is forged.
You speak pretty authoritatively for someone who left 10 years ago. Care to provide chapter and verse on any of this, particularly the high school hell you describe?
FWIW, Keyes registered address was in the south 'burbs (South Holland, if I recall correctly), as those of us who actually had to live through the fiasco know. In truth, Alan seemed to spend most of his time in Illinois giving news conferences downtown or at O'Hare, so whatever his address was, it was probably irrelevant. Given that he got whalloped more than 2:1 in the Naperville townships, I'd say he probably wouldn't have considered it his base.
Incidentally, same election shows Dubya carrying the township by ~3.5K votes out of 39K cast. They've certainly got their conservatives there, but it's a bit more balanced than you apparently think.
The moral here? Find some more constructive way to vent your high-school angst. For others actually thinking this guy's picture is accurate, just...no, it isn't.
(For the record, yes, the library idea is pretty foolish.)
(Also...yes, I am probably getting way too steamed over this. But to see this modded "Informative" is ridiculous. At least some of the other ranting here on 'Da Dot is semi-entertaining at times...)
Some links here and here.
I work in a library storage facility, and many of our materials have cards not only listing the names of the people who checked out books 30 years ago, but their social security numbers, too.
For the record, this facility was never located in any part of the Soviet Union.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Any library that requires a logon has a good reason for this. Considering most libraries operate autonomously from the government, what a library does has no bearing on the totalitarianism of a state.
From personal experience, I have to disagree with you here. It wasn't until after the Patriot Act was passed that public libraries stopped allowing anonymous web access. Previously, I don't remember ever entering a single library (in a number of different cities and counties in different states) that required any kind of sign-up on logon.
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SERENITY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now I know, the ACLU is a bunch of commie liberals, but let us not forget the very public rebuke Ashcroft et al. received because not only were their search warrant requests being rubber stamped by the judicial panel, but they were also full of errors (one agent was even barred from appearing before the court because he regularly included errors): "In virtually every instance, the government's misstatements and omissions in FISA applications and violations of the Court's orders involved information sharing and unauthorized disseminations to criminal investigators and prosecutors."
Now for some corrections (from Section 215 text):
In other words, they don't need the director's approval, and an "Assistant Special Agent in Charge" is a run-of-the-mill agent assigned to a case. So basically, the cleaning contractors and secretaries cannot request the warrants, but most everyone else can. These warrant requests go to:
This very close congressional oversight you suggest is really a semi-annual report by the attorney general to those committees to tell them the requests that were made, the number requested, and the number accepted, modified, and denied (this from the new 'Sec. 502 Congressional Oversight').
So we've established that you are technically correct that not just anyone can make the requests (as I mentioned, the cleaning crews and secretaries are excluded), and there is oversight (that rubber-stamps the requests, no matter how factually in error they are).
The PATRIOT Act is interesting reading. I suggest you read the text some time instead of getting the boiled down versions off of Fox News.