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Dutch to Open Electronic Files on Children
Del writes "The Dutch government plans to open an electronic file on every child at birth as a tool to spot and protect the troubled kids of the future. All citizens will be tracked from cradle to grave in a single database - including health, education, family and police records."
It's dangerous storing all information about people in one, most likely easilly hackable location.
"...if people respected copyright more, like you guys do with the GPL so religiously, [the DMCA] wouldn't be necessary."
Is this meant for control as in "Brave New World". Or is this meant for research? Knowing the Dutch, and the way this is worded, it seems to goal of this is noble. Whether it will stay noble is the question.
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
One good thing about the media in the Netherlands is that this new system has been visibly covered in the media. I can well imagine that it would have been swept under the rug in other places; after all, it's just various organizations dealing with children and their problems cooperating.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
why no country has attempted to do this sort of thing? For the entire world, there could be only 6 billion records - a single nation would need to have less than a billion - maybe a few million for most countries.
What can be the security implications for storing things like name, date of birth, sex, present address, etc. for all citizens? It's amazing that in these days of hi-tech gadgets and advances in storage, such elementary data is not available OR not reliably accurate.
Even population estimates have a more than 10% error rate for most nations. How can we plan for social welfare and emergency relief when we don't have accurate data? Amazing, really...
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
The operative legal principle should be that our personal information belongs to the individual, and if someone (even someone who works for the government and who "wants to help you") wants to store data about you, they should be required to store that information on YOUR PODS (personally owned data storage). Easy enough to use a checksum to prevent you from modifying the information, but if they want to see it again, they should be required to say why, and you should have the right to agree or disagree to their proposed use of your personal information.
Trivial example, if you want to borrow money from a bank, then the bank would have good reason to query your PODS for information about your financial history. If you don't agree to provide enough information, then the bank is not going to agree to the loan. However, once they've made the decision to loan you the money, they should store the records on your own PODS, and erase most of the personal information at their end. Once you've finished paying off the loan, they'd have no reason to keep any of your personal information (though the records would still be stored on your computer if you want them again, as for another loan).
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
As a privacy safeguard, no single person or agency will be able to access all contents of a file. But organizations can raise "red flags" in the dossier to caution other agencies about problems Even if that may solve some problems, it creates others realy serious. What this means is both that some grumpy social worker, on bad day, can flag a kid for life, and there is no way for anyone to put a judgement on the social workers decision. Also, gifted children often have behavioral problerms which can not be easily diagnosed for what they are.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
You would have thought the Dutch of all people would understand the dangers. In Holland before WWII the local authorities had records of the religion of their people. The reason was simple, so that contributions could be made to the churches on their behalf. All very reasonable and in keeping with tolerance and religious diversity. But come the invasion, it was very very simple to find everyone of a given religion.... It is not what these guys will use this stuff for, its what their successors may use it for.
While I suspect that this has good intentions
I think you can put that suspicion to rest.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
that could lead to profiling and profiling is wrong
So they can arrest the parents or take the kids away because in a semi-similar situation the kids were much abused or killed.
So when one abused kid who was charged with something at some time grows up and has kids and severly injurs or kills their kid, then some overzealious young gov't worker brown nosing for a promotion or raise or corner office uses that limited data to create a profile everyone who had jeuvinile charges thrown at them when they were a kid is now a suspect for possible child abuse.
I only said charge, not conviction and didn't say what it was for. It could be that some kid broke a neighbor's window while playing baseball when he was 9 and instead of accepting compensation from the kids parents, the kid-hating neighbor gets their DA friend to bring the kid up on charges to teach him a lesson and/or make an example for the rest of the neighborhood kids. Since that system is probably going to record everything, even something pointless like that during childhood can make them a future suspect. In the US you don't have to report legal charges, only convictions and most jeuvinile records are sealed when the person turns 18 and can be petitioned to be destroyed/removed from the permanant record. Yes, that's an extreme example, but possible that something that happened to you many years ago can put you at risk because someone 100yrs before did something similar and then did something worse. And no one caught it because not all law enforcement depts have access to all of it.
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
First off, the gestapo did a LOT more than just murdering jews. They spent a lot of time monitoring as many of their citizens as possible. Basically, you did not dare speak out, as the person next to you may very well be SS.
Next, we ARE a lot closer than what we were even a decade ago. Now, that gov. are tracking citizens and listening in their voice and internet coversations, how is that different than what gestapo did to the average german citizen? Likewise, the reason why so many fought against FDR's Social Security was that they were afraid that the SSN could be used in part of a national ID (interestingly, the republican party fought it hard based on that). The more that a gov. tracks and listens, the easier it is for the next one, to extend that further. They all say that is for the "good of the nation" or for "homeland defense".
A good example is China now has forced abortion on women and forced sterilization on both sexes. We are not talking a 1-2 months abortions, but 9 month (ready to deliver). Now, with this kind of tech., how easy will it be for a gov. to say, oh, we know that you are pregnant by listening in on coversations. And yes, if China is doing this now, how soon will other govs. decide to do the same? Perhaps, they have decided that junior there does not have the genetic make-up that is desirable. But of course, we both know that a gov. would NEVER take that step. Right?
And no western gov. would ever spend their effort listening in on all their citizens.
And no western gov. would ever control the press by locking up foreign journalist (say known musleum reporters in a war zone) or allowing their own press to be owned by just a few friendly companies in which the CEO and "moderators" decide what is ok to print/tell/view.
And no western gov. would try to control those who do have intimate knowledge of deals
10 years ago, I would have though ppl crazy for thinking that a DB is bad. Now, In light of what has happened over the last 5 years, I have changed my mind.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I would rather be concerned for countries which do execute people and do drag people to camps without judge or trail "for national security" and do invade foreign nations to expand their sphere of influence, all covered with a thick layer of propaganda and national pride. *That* is I call tending towards Fascistic nature.
But linking information that's already being gathered for decades without problems? That is, except the problems of unlinked databases, which stopped us from preventing several children from being murdered by their own parents recently.. How does wanting to prevent that even come remotely close to creating WW2 like scenarios?
It's the public consensus that creates WW2 like scenarios, not governments creating systems which could theoretically be abused if they really wanted to. They don't need new systems to be able to abuse them. You have to make sure they don't want to, thats the key.
Yay! My first Freak!
;-)
But seriously, I wasn't trolling, I was attempting to make a serious point:
Merely because the current government in the Netherlands apparently isn't predisposed towards fascist/totalitarian behaviour, that's no reason to hand them the capability without thought.
Allowing the government additional powers isn't merely a question of "will they use it responsibly?".
It's actually a case of "will they, and every single government who comes after them, for the entire conceivable future of the country use these powers responsibly".
I'd submit that no "government" can be trusted for all time, since the people who make up each "government" change every few years, and while it's easy to restrict civil liberties and pass restrctive laws, these measures don't tend to be repealed by anything short of a revolution.
The (admittedly slightly emotive) example of the US was intended to illustrate this point - in the mid-90s you'd have been laughed at to suggest that the current situation would occur within 5-10 years, and yet the US has gone from shining beacon of liberty to the world to an unprecedented crackdown on civil liberties and an unprecedented drop in international esteem.
Apologies if you think I'm trolling, but that wasn't the intention at all. And when your Freaks list is at least as long as your Friends list, maybe you want to re-evaluate that hair-trigger on your killfile
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
"children die because social services are hugely incompetent."
This should read "because PARENTS are hugely incompetent"
You're welcome.