Slashdot Mirror
CDC Wants to Track Travelers
gearspring writes "According to Government Health IT the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wants your email address, your mobile phone number, names of your traveling companions, your name, your address, and your emergency contacts name, address, and phone number. This information would be gathered by airlines, travel agents, and online reservation systems for all travelers. Their goal is to protect us in the event of a pandemic. The SARS crisis showed them the difficulty of notifying people that they may have been exposed to a disease. It is a noble goal, but couldn't they do this anonymously?"
That's easy, I'm homeless and have no friends. Maybe I'm not, but how are they going to know?
No address, no contacts, no email, no phone. Are you going to deny someone travel because they can't afford these things? Or choose not to have them?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Frell Security! My privacy for security, poor trade, look at Britain...
But my health, my child's health! Definitely worth while to store all this information, in the case of an outbreak and all!
Mr. Bush has already made his intentions clear .
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He has publicly stated if a pandemic strikes there will be martial law, and
the national guard, state police, local police, and "other" authorities will
block "all" travel .
My quetion to this is , who is gonna stop the birds from flying around ???
Want to take that to a WHOLE new level ???
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/8788
Remember the civet cat and Sars ???? Oh my, guess what .
This virus is changing, and it is not done changing .
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8372
If this thing becomes transmitible to the common house cat, killing and eating birds in
every city that has alley cats . We got ourselves a recipe for a bad situation .
Another point of this strain that is being missed is the mortality rate so far .
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?n
If this thing kicks off at anywhere near this supposed 75%, it will be worse than the plague .
Some current numbers put it under 50% and lets hope it becomes less deadly as it mutates .
Keep in mind the 1918 pandemic was 2 - 5%, and not with modern medicine .
This has the potential for a major catastrophe .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
20 - 50 million world wide died in a time before widespread food shipment and travel .
A pandemic has reoccured with regularity every few decades, but this is shaping up to be
the deadliest in modern times if the mortality rates are anywhere near what they are now .
I hope all countries around the world take this VERY seriously .
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
The trouble is, that everyone has their own pet facist policy that they like. Even if someone is against the War on Terror on the basis that it restricts freedom, or is unconstitutional... nearly all people support some blatently restrictive or unconstitutional policy.
For example, do you support one of the following?
1. Gun Control
2. "Hate Speech" Censorship Laws
3. IRS Auditing (forcing people to PROVE they are innocent of tax violations, instead of the other way around)
4. Forced Public Education
5. Eminent Domain
6. "War on Drugs" and Drug control
7. "Campaign Finance Reform" (political censorship laws)
8. Copyrights
9. Banning "Dangerous" animals
10. Public "Decentcy" Laws (anti-pornography cencorship)
11. Manditory Enviornmental Inspections (forcing people to PROVE they are innocent of enviornmental violations, instead of the other way around)
12. Sobriety Checkpoints
13. Laws against polyigamy.
14. Restricting people from promoting religion in public. (street corner preachers and such)
15. Restricting protests around abortion clinics.
That is just a few. Nearly everyone I know who rails against "The Patriot Act" or some other policy that is fashionable to hate, supports nearly all the restrictive, unconstitutional policies mentioned above. Even if you don't support most of them, it is almost garanteed that you support at least some of them.
The first part of realizing what happened in America (and what is happening elsewhere), is to realize you are part of the problem. You may not support the "Patriot Act", but that doesn't mean you are for freedom. Hardcore totalitarian Marxists are against the Patriot Act... people are against the Patriot Act because it is politicly unfashionable, or because it is promoted by a party that is considered "right wing". But lets focus on the restrictions of freedom, of exceptions to the constitution that you support.
If you are a leftist, and you speak out against citizen disarmament (gun control), or you speak out against feminists wanting to ban the Miss Universe pagent, or speak out against throwing people in jail for expressing controversial political beliefs on campus, you are going to be much more effective in promoting freedom that you would protesting the Patriot Act, or emergency powers to prevent bird flu, or whatever.
You need to eliminate the hatred of freedom from your own political ideology before you can work on someone elses hatred of freedom.