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Presence Systems Number One On Federal Wish List
coondoggie writes to tell us that top among feature requests for any next-gen communications system among federal network managers is the ability to identify and notify employees in real time. "Federal interest in presence technologies 'may come from the fact that agencies want to know where their workforce is to be able to look at the effectiveness and the efficiency of what they're able to do,' says Aaron Heffron, vice president of Market Connections. 'They want to be in contact with them at all times.'"
The government just loves to give citizens privacy.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Seriously, no one gets anything done in any job with their manager looking over their shoulder. Just think about it, every time the boss wanders into your office you stop what you're doing. And if you didn't, they'd start in with 'advice' until your productivity was shot to hell anyway. key-loggers and such are another great example. Any place I've ever been that used key-logging people spent more time trying to either get around it, or do the bare minimum WPM than they did in actual honest work. An invention that lets a boss micro-manage every employee on a second-by-second basis is going to bring our society grinding to a halt.
[PDF] Functional neurotransceiver.
Implant an RFID - obviously.
Is anyone at all skeptical of the profitable return, to the taxpayers, for the amount of money which will be spent on this type of micromanaging technology at the absurd level? The strain of micromonitoring employees will cause more harm and discord from people succumbing to the extra pressures without their usual outlets. Whether or not those outlets are on or off the clock, technically speaking, is irrelevent when considering that humans are not machines. Every human in every system, whether it be monks in a monastery, coders in a huge borg-like cube fortress, or workers on an assembly line, learns how and where they are able to sneak a few extra moments for themselves, by themselves, without the glaring eye of big brother breathing down their neck. Technologies like this tout performance gains and efficiency ratings which can only be expected of machines--not of humans--because humans inherently steal time for themselves.
Given that the advertised technical merits of these expenditures in no way properly align with ten thousand years of knowledge of basic human and social psychology the only explanation for these programs is: pork barrel boondoggle.
Stop wasting taxpayer money on high tech corporate welfare!!!
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Connected? I'd like to think not...
Since they are only making it illegal for employers to demand implantation. It must be legal for the government.
Deleted
Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, and, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour.
Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
afforded by this system ... might government employees approach productivity levels somewhat equivalent to their compensation finally?
I am, therefore you think.
Am I the only one who doesn't like to be on call 24/7?
more concerned about the implications here. This is called eating your own dog food. Once this is done, the feds will push to have this put in ALL phone systems.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
After a fashion, and to an extent which increases daily, it already is.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Before everybody gets all worried about employee privacy (which I agree is a legitimate concern), consider the applications this would have for first responders, particularly in cases where more traditional networks and or critical infrastructure components may fail.
Until a specific application is discussed, dismissing the technology as invasive seems premature.
=======
Science -- Sealed, Delivered.
Lets start with congress.
... to not work for the U.S. government.
Yes, this has nothing to do with microsoft, but the borg tag seems so much more relevent...
for every little parts of there jobs and thinks like this will just end up having any time gained from this will lost to the paper work, overhead, and people doing the bare minimum. Works will just do the minimum amount of work not to get fired if they had a office with bosses like this.
The government keeps getting more and more paranoid.. and less and less relevant.. until they're sitting in their reinforced compound polygraphing their employees weekly and timing the average time it takes to page-down and read the latest memo on TPS reports.
Read it too fast and you're in trouble because you couldn't have adequately digested its fascinating implications. Read it too slowly and you're not being productive enough, slacker!
The IRS now taxes cell phones issued to you by your employer. If they tax cell phones, why not this? Dosen't your wife want to know where you are?
We're sorry. You seem to be under the misconception that employer workplaces are sovereign nations unto themselves and the humans inside of those sovereign nation compounds are no longer afforded the rights and protections of the Constitution. You're wrong.
"You're supposed to be..." is no excuse for maintaining a fascist ideology.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
My boss wanted me to make myself available by phone on a 24x7 basis.
;-)
When I asked him how much extra I would be paid, he went quiet.
The discussion stopped quite abruptly
They already have this. They are called a blackberry and personal pager and my personal cell phone.
.... you get the idea.
Why reinvent the wheel when we have cell phones with gps?
And for the record, if the above three devices are unable to get a hold of me, I highly doubt another will help. If they want to go this route just issue everyone a blackberry with gps and require people carry it around all the time. Then when that doesn't work because half of the people forget to charge them or completely ignore them they can start on the implantable devices that run off our own electrical energy. Then when that
Of course, Inner Party members like Dick Cheney will be exempt from this program.
You know, so that they can get Frank and Candid Advice.
Number one on my list is an avatar that can autonomously handle the presence system.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
You've made a very careful logical error in your assessment. The motive of the initial investment, contrary to the assertions of TFA, has little or nothing to do with janitors sleeping in closets or employees who might legitimately need such documentation of mobility.
The point of these expenditures is pork barrel corporate welfare. Everything after that is a product of the question,"How do we pitch this to the taxpayers such that there will be no significant backlash over the expenditure amount?"
The same system of reasoning can be appropriately applied to the military endeavors in Afghanistan and Iraq. They were not conceived initially as military endeavors. First was conceived the need to ensure that the American taxpaying population would remain in perpetual debt--giving the Federal Reserve guaranteed profit for as many years as they feel like regulating the interest rates on that debt--for the financial advancement of the ranking politicians and private interests. The concept of using military action to justify said extra-large expenditures, and the excuse of both 9/11 and some vaporous ailing cleric (who may or may not still be alive and who may or may not have actually been at the core of the 9/11 tragedy) is a product of that insidious motive to sell the American nation into perpetual indentured servitude.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
... is not telepresence. The problem is that government employees are generally not paid by merit. They're generally unionized, which means we, the taxpayers, pay more, get less, and get to line the pockets of organized crime to boot.
The first step to efficiency is to actually implement an effective discipline system for government employees. Then, once we fire the incompetent ones, we can divide up their pay, give it to the competent ones, and all of a sudden it would actually be an honorable career to work for the government.
First off. This whole article is just FUD. This is not the tracking of citizenry. This is simply a replacement for the pager.
r o
Why Government Employees Make Less...
1. Pension. Government Employees earn a pension. Basically if you retire after 20 years you make 25%-up of the average of the last three years salaries. This is every year for the rest of your life. This varies greatly based on how long you work before retirement. To figure numbers for yourself take the last three years salaries average them. Take 1% (unless you are over 62 then use 1.1%) of that number and multiply that by your years of service. This is your annual benefit for the the rest of your life. http://www.opm.gov/fers_election/ri_90/f_bbp.htm#
2. Job Security. As a government employee your job is extremely stable. I have worked with many a government employee who needed to be fired. Even the supervisors cannot fire. Basically you don't get fired, you might get stuck in a horrible job. But short of commiting a crime your job is safe.
3. Lack of Productivity. This is purely anecdotal, but most government employees are nowhere near as productive as their salary gives them credit for. Now this is not always because the employee is lazy or whatever. It is a systemic problem that allows for the breeding of this kind of laziness and ineptitude. By the way I used to work in this system so I know a few things about it.
$diff terrorists hippies
$
$rm -rf *terrorists *hippies
They gps enabled all of the local taxi industry's fleet. All taxis are tracked at all times and jobs are handed out according to the position of the closest vehicle.
So what do the cab drivers do? Stop in the most profitable area, and remove the gps antenna from the car. The system assumes the cab's gps signal is blocked by a building and further assumes that the car is in the same location. The cab driver then goes home, to the pub, where ever, and waits for the jobs that he wants to come up.
To think that employees wont do similar things with this system is naive.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
Dilbert-PHB-type managers always believe that if they could cut down the lunch hour to 59 minutes, so that everyone worked 481 minutes but only got paid 480, they would be getting 0.208334% higher productivity, which in a company with 10,000 employees earning an average salary of $50,000 translates to over a million dollars... straight to the bottom line!
It never seems to occur to them that those employees might waste another minute a day in retaliation for the cheap chiseling...
What people don't know is that cell phones already have sophisticated built-in surveillance systems that work even when the phones seem to be off
A 16-year-old girl in Washington state, her mother, aunt, and friends, are going through a nightmare right now with a stalker recording conversations through the cell phone mic and viewing their actions through the cell phone camera even when the phone seemed to be off. Covering the camera lens with tape and taking out the battery from the phone seems to be the only defenses that work.
from the article:
If cell phone surveillance is so easy to abuse, then our intelligence agencies are probably abusing it.
What would be the best tool to track large numbers of US Citizens ("terrorists?") at once? "Presence Technologies" would make it very easy to abuse whole groups of people at once. The FBI made secret tapes of Martin Luther King to discredit him, then made preparations to promote someone "to assume the role of leadership of the Negro people when King has been completely discredited".
Once the technology is perfected, it won't be any harder to add to all the cell phones in the US than the remote listening capabilities were. Tools like this would reduce the amount of manpower it would need to track many thousands of people at once, and make recordings to privately threaten them with when necessary. Projects like the defunct "Total Information Awareness" demonstrate the desire of the government to know "everything" about it's citizens.
Wired magazine predicted all this in 2001 .
Because if it can be abused, it will.
--"Zero Sum" by Nine Inch Nails
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
There is Jabber/XMPP for that.
_ and_Presence_Protocol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Messaging
http://www.xmpp.org/
http://www.jabber.org/
Providing these misfits with technology that fulfills their wishes will lead to a long line of labor abuses. Not just now, but for years to come. Once the technology is in place, the maladjusted "boss" types will find it irresistable.
What a horrible idea.
I work for the Department of Transportation as an intern and I can vouch that they are definitely trying to keep tabs on EVERYTHING that you do. We have a ridiculous database that crashes every day that we have to 'create a new task' in every time we change what we're working on. They're very insistent on it, despite the fact that we could be working on 10 different things at the same time -- and the system only allows one task at a time.
The system in place takes more time up just using it than it's worth. If a manager wants to know what an employee is working on, they should stop by or call the employee's damn office phone. Forcing the employee to detail everything that they're doing at any given time is time-consuming and often times impossible.
Just because you have a utopian view of big government as a benevolent big brother or, at worst, a bumbling conglomerate of incompetent old men, doesn't make it so. The outcomes of the vast majority of actions taken by the federal government over the last 150 years indicate that you have a enormous pair of blinders attached to your head.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
The government does not monitor it's employees - most of the time. They use firewall filters and such to monitor "bad" web surfing - each agency defines bad on their own. Some are proactive and block sites, others report users for porn and some for the amount of time/bandwidth (but that is rare). They use some email filters to check for bad words or classified info...but not too many places do this...
;-)
Most federal work environments are covered by union rules. These unions ensure the workplace rules do not allow for active monitoring of employee activities. They are often negotiated at the agency level (not one set of rules throughout government). In fact, one case management system built for the government locks managers out of the employee work areas so they can't monitor progress - under union rules. In another instance - the FBI guy who spied - Robert Hanssen - was actually able to log into the FBI records system and search for info about himself ("dead drop", KGB, his neighborhood). Were they watching him then? No. (P.S. Last I heard that system still uses green screens for an interface - but they do search the log files now).
As for privacy it is a two edged sword...you all don't want government workers to have privacy on their machines. Their work product is often official records that can be obtained through FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests showing how decisions are made or what events actually transpired.
The REAL push in the federal government to know where the employees are and when started after the OKC bombing - when some federal agencies didn't know if they had employees ASSIGNED to the building - much less present that day (and federal agencies were very embarrased in the press - which is how you get change in the government). MANY federal agencies spent a lot of money developing processes, policies and databases of employee locations after that.... 9/11 only re-inforced this issue...now agencies have "survival lockers" in federal buildings with items for disasters and such...and want to know how to contact them in real time to alert them to dangers. And then Katrina...similar story how many employees were in that office, did they evacuate, where are they now, when are they coming back - the gov't didn't know.
In addition, information sharing and collaboration are primary concerns in the intel and law enforcement arena. These often require real time presence awareness in crisis situations.
As for the rest of us - the emergency broadcast system will work fine
Chirrrp! "Where you at?"
"Where you at?"
"I know where I'm at, where you at?"
And thus, the government knows where their employees are "at" at all times.
And now phones come with GPS built in, it would only take a little Java app, a website, and some AJAX to glue it all together.
Get your own free personal location tracker
So how long before this translates into the comm badges from Star Trek? Will I have to wear one of these things on my ACUs in Iraq?
Interesting implications as far as the warfighter is concerned. I can't really see any true benefits for the civilian sector though.
Hmm, RFID implants anyone? /sigh...
In Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, there is a scene that it reminds me. Reading the rules for efficiency every morning to see what changes. Giving an average reading time for a document, which is a no-win scenario. She ends up scrolling down to read the times, then scans through it, scrolling back as if she was reading it to give the computer the impression she actually cared. There were other aspects of the US government from that book that also reminded me of the real-time presence indicators.
--- My novel, The Mummy's Girl is now for sa
...is not aboard the Enterprise.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I see "presence" technology as yet another admission by current leaders of there corruption and incompetence. One doesn't need digital leashes on ones employees to get them to work. I've found most people in government want to work and work hard but that it is the corruption of an entrenched few, squatting on resources with the ability to say "NO" that are the problem. God, the paperwork they spew to deflect progress is as bad as the 27b-6's that devoured Harry Tuttle.
Because of these trolls controlling the gates of regulation, any fresh, new enthusiastic, idealistic employee soon gets worn down to suffer the low buzzing malaise of our Byzantine bureaucracy.
The problem with our government is "Stasis", the overwhelming weight of controls sucking leadership, innovation and the entire nation down to skew the representative curve promoting special, power interest's side avenues of access by way of money, connection and brute litigative force.
Presence technology is just another tool of the corrupt socialist collective mindset, wielding anarcho tyranny to batter the less powerful into deeper slavery while the elite laugh all the way to bank. The concept is morally and philosophically bankrupt going against all the fundamental ideals that make up the foundations of the US declaration of Independence, Constitution and centuries of Western libertarian philosophy.
What is so funny about all this is that one simply needs only to continually fire the lazy bastard trolls when caught squatting on resources to fix the whole issue. Then again, that would run contrary to seventy years of the Socialist collectives, divide and conquer, disarmament, peace at any price, enforced fairness, big government, poisoning of western libertarian philosophy.
Nobody seems willing to starve the government beast, to fight that bloody civil war just yet.
Just loking the break room. Government employees are the most inefficient workers in the world.
no life. Do you make any original contribution to the world at all or does your entire life revolve around calling on others?