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DHS Official Suggests REAL ID Mission Creep
The Register noticed that a senior US Department of Homeland Security official has floated the idea of requiring citizens to produce federally compliant identification before purchasing some over-the-counter medicines — specifically, pseudophedrine. The federal ID standard spelled out by the REAL ID act has been sold as applying only to air travel and entry to federal buildings and nuclear facilities. A blogger on the Center for Democracy and Technology site said, "[The] suggested mission creep pushes the REAL ID program farther down the slippery slope toward a true national ID card." Speaking of federal buildings, CNet has a state-by-state enumeration of what will happen on May 11, when REAL ID comes into effect, to citizens who attempt to enter, say, the Washington DC visitors bureau.
Won't someone please think of the meth addicts?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Since I've spent years outside the U.S., I don't have a driver's license. When I return to the U.S., I use my passport as identification to purchase alcohol or travel long distances. If people are concerned about Real ID posing massive privacy issues, why haven't people like me using our passports faced this yet?
I wonder if the DHS consciously constructs slippery slopes and has timelines drawn up for when to feed what to the American people, or if they're just really good at accidentally destroying our civil liberties...
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
I am not American but I wonder why you have such problems with personal identity numbers. Here in Sweden we had them since 1947 and we all have ID cards with this number, name, address and a picture. Its really an easy way to identify yourself. All organizations also have an identity number.
Look, I know it's cool to fight the drugs, and that meth seems to be evil from what I've seen, dunno, haven't tried it.
But speaking as an asthmatic allergy sufferer, and someone who gets some really crappy colds every year making good old sudafed a bitch to find/get/procure. That new Sudafed crap elevates my heart rate by over 20 bpm and doesn't clear my head. You feel like you're ordering donkey porn when you go in and try to buy something that has it, and most vendors don't.
For the record, Aleve has a 12 hour decongestant that is the evil good old sudafed in it. After suffering for three days with every other stupid cold pill on the shelf took one of those, and was fine for 12 hours.
Of course, it was too late and I got a sinus infection so I had that joy to go through.
But this is just stupid. I'm ok with you putting it behind a counter so a meth head doesn't come in and clear the shelf, stealing it all. but the limits on the amount make it rought if you have a >3 day long cold sometimes.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
What happens if I'm summoned to a Federal Court appearance and don't have the required ID? Do I:
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
That would give non-citizens more rights than citizens, since they can hardly make it illegal for resident aliens to buy medicine. Or will they be forced to show green cards or the like? What nonsense.
I already have to show ID when I buy a product with too much Pseudoephedrine in it. It's kind of annoying when you need to show your driver's license and sign a slip for buying a big bottle of NyQuil. Is this merely a state law (I'm in NJ) or have people in other states seen it as well?
...when The Register posts negative stories about erosion of privacy, security, censorship and the likes when they themselves are guilty of extreme bias on their site (Heavily Anti-Apple, Anti-MS) in both initial reporting and in censoring of comments and corrections that show the bias in their stories posted to their site.
It's really not the sort of site Slashdot should be accepting submissions from if we're to get a realistic picture of the situation. A site that demonstrates extreme bias in the way The Register does about things we know are completely false makes it hard to trust things they post that we're less experienced or unable to actually find the truth behind. Put simply, I wouldn't listen to anything The Register has to say - try and find alternative, vastly more trustworthy sources of news and information.
Thankfully at least for all Slashdot's faults we're allowed to post corrections here so even if the initial story is wrong we can correct it in the comments.
And you are helping how?
What exactly does pseudophedrine have to do with homeland security? Why do those DHS guys even think about it at all?
Someone forgot to take their meds. Besides, no worries! Al Gore is just the president of the internet, not the country.
When middle Eastern oil is depleted do you really think Texas is going to share the contents of its capped oil reserves with the Yankees?
You overabundance of "clever" misspellings (Did I honestly see "corepirate" used more than once in a post?) kills any sort of legitimate statement you may have been trying for. At least, I hope those were intentional.
Regardless, after about a paragraph of that...I just gave up on it as some spam post. I imagine at some point there's reference to a Bank in Nigeria. And maybe a large abundance of monies if I can help him pay a small transaction fee.
And did somebody REALLY Mod that post insightful? How?
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Most people would consider me a liberal, although exactly how liberal depends on the current position of the pendulum. Yet it seems to me that the strongest argument for conservatism has always been this: you can't get everything you want. Yes, we'd all like the poor to have access to health care and top notch education, but if we throw money at those problems we reduce entrepreneurial incentive (or sometimes even worse: refocus it on capturing windfalls) needed to grow the economy and provide access to wealth for all.
Here we see a flip side of this argument: we'd all like to be perfectly safe, but at some point you buy the next increment of safety at the cost of something else. Are we really safer if we have a government functionary peering into all kinds of aspects of our private lives? Is Republican Party conservatism just the choice of an alternative form of government paternalism?
This kind of thing is what conservatives (and liberals) ought to be on the lookout for.
Conservatives for years have railed against the idea of a government ID ("papers, please"). Personally, I don't have a problem with a standard government issued ID, but I do understand what they're getting at. It's about the indignity of some unaccountable government flunky exerting control over your private affairs. If the growing conservative discomfort over ID standards is any measure, many conservatives have begun to realize that the government issued ID is really symbolic; it's not the ID per se, but what can be done with it.
All things being equal, an ID that is standardized, either by being issued by a single authority or whose issuance and features are controlled by a single authority, is better than an unreliable ID. The problem is that a better ID is also convenient for illegitimate purposes. Why mandate such an ID for purchasing medicine, if other than to put medicine purchases in a federal database?
And that's the rub. Conservatives are way behind on recognizing the coercive power of databases in government hands as they are ahead in recognizing the dangers of a national ID.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The separate states have had some form of identification which records the four elements of information you mentioned for years. The definition of "photo ID" is pretty standard across the nation.
The problem is that the federal government has now decided that those identification cards are no longer acceptable, and mandated a solution to the problem through the RealID Act, but provided no funding to the separate states to achieve compliance. This will require the separate states to absorb the cost of complying with the Act. It's another unfunded mandate, and one which unfairly deprives otherwise law-abiding citizens of exercising their rights under Amendment One to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Which is exactly what caused the "American Experiment" in the first place.
If the federal government would agree to fund the Real ID Act, most of the complaining from the separate states would probably stop. Everyone more or less agrees that you shouldn't be able to acquire photo identification which says you're someone you're not. There are some privacy concerns, especially since the federal government hasn't demonstrated it is able to adequately police its own use of private, non-published information, and those safeguards should be strengthened.
But having real penalties for FBI agents who violate their neighbors' privacy to find out if their neighbors make more money than them, or lose their laptops, for example, would probably cause the problem of public servants abusing, or being careless with, their position of trust and authority to go away. When the mayor of Houston supports legislation that asserts the city should be free to place a closed-circuit television in the home of any minor offender, his house should be the first house wired. When Congress supports legislation allowing the FBI to expand its biometric database to everyone in the nation, they should be the first in line for cheek swabs. When the federal government mandates "Angel ID" or some other RFID-based solution to identity, every government representative should be chipped first, like dogs, starting with the President. And any citizen should be allowed to challenge any government representative, to essentially demand that the representative demonstrate his or her compliance with the law before requiring the citizen to comply.
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
As for you who pay for it .....
How many years into this nonsense and it just now dawns on them that there are multiple unintended uses for a national database of all of our picayune details?
I blame the cubicle blinders^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H walls.
That and a hyper-hypocritical admin mindset that wants to evince their anti-big gummint creed by adding a master layer with unprecedented access.
But that's just me.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Though some claim it to be a logical fallacy, there is some instances in the past where a change (for the better) has lead to other changes (for the better).
Example, voting rights. Men -> other races -> Women -> All citizens 18+ (I think I have the general order correct)
Though in situations such as these it's not really a slope being slipped down, but rather a peak being climbed to. However, and this is why I use it as an example, each time somebody proposed opening up voting to more people there were a fair share of critics trying to argue why it would be wrong or dangerous.
To sum it up quickly: The slippery slope may not always be the best logic to use, but there are plenty of historical examples of where one change/event/decision directly set precident to the next.
You yourself are using somewhat faulty logic by employing such an absurd/extreme Scenario B.
I do not see where it is a national ID, what I see is where each state will have to have a standard "design" for their ID, typically a drivers license. In Illinois we already have the new style and it is tied to the state's Driver's License number. I understand why it needs to be a standard, little Suzie sales clerk may be able to spot a forged drivers license from Illinois, but would have no way to know if a drivers license from Utah was real or not if it was not standardized somehow. It is not a national ID number!!!
For everyone who is wondering why the federal government should not do this, please read the story that preceeds this one regarding a state attempting to legislate pi.
People who try to control too much are evil. Is it so hard to see this?
Accounts of problems.
Also, the USA doesn't have the privacy laws that all of Europe has; once we have a national ID, we become visible to just about every nosy commercial data broker and any reasonably efficient criminal.
The federal ID debate is simply a matter of how much we want to centralize it.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
And in record time for a federal agency. I think its creation was a mistake and its continued existence a money-sucking waste of resources. Instead of focusing on terrorism they've started to put their greasy fingers into all kinds of areas not related to what's supposed to be their core mission.
Unless someone can relate cold medicine and terrorism. If we've got this terrorism thing whipped that DHS has so much time on their hands, then scale back their budget.
We have the FBI for domestic terrorism, the CIA for overseas operations...they were getting the job done before 9-11. Just as a reminder, the problem wasn't that we didn't know about the terrorists before 9-11, the problem was we didn't act on what we knew. And we knew without massive, illegal wiretapping of Americans, without the Patriot Act, without waterboarding, secret prisons, GITMO and all the other retarded things we've done out of fear since then.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Still proud to live in New Hampshire.
Sorry, I'm an Aussie and the RP spam makes me want to vomit.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
. . . are actually speaking out AGAINST the whole nightmare scenario of Real ID?
Gee, I wonder?
Combining both posts gives the obvious solution. Let them introduce global ID numbers
Then get your state to legislate that your ID is just the first digit.
THIS IS A BLATANT GUISE. Will you PLEASE start thinking for yourself? Tweaker now has to get a RealID to get pseudoephedrine. That is all. How does this stop him from getting pseudoephedrine? Please tell me that.
The whole notion of this is incredibly retarded to associate RealID with stopping meth production. You make some sort of association and then a statement, and BAM! people buy it right up even if it makes absolutely no sense when you bother to read it.
A good question. If you'd merely dropped it into a puddle, the RFID chip very likely wouldn't have gotten wet, but since you actually washed it, the RFID chip probably has water on it. It is interior to the passport, so it won't dry out easily. With water shorting out the traces, the chip probably won't work at all, and if it does work, it will reply nonsense data.
Unfortunately, since the RFID chip is so embedded, a hair-dryer won't suffice to dry it out, you need a deeper heating. The most certain method is going to be to use a microwave oven. Wrap the passport in a paper towel, and put it in a microwave; about 1.5 minutes at "high" should do the trick, no problem.
...the ONE uber-alles consolidated federal police force, supplanting all others(FBI, DEA, US Marshalls).
The thing that's going to turn REAL ID from just another card that you may carry if you want to into a mandatory document, required to be presented on demand to any government official (and probably lots of non-officials), is illegal immigration.
There's a large portion of this country that's willing to give up all sorts of rights if it'll let us keep those damned illegals out. Right now they're largely fixated on border protection, the 700-mile fence and all that. At some point, though, they're going to realize that a tiny percentage of illegals get in by sneaking across the border, and the fence and the guards aren't going to stop much of that small group anyway. At that point, they'll realize that the only way to get rid of the illegals is by having lots of internal controls and checkpoints verifying the citizenship or legal resident status of everyone.
Buses, airplanes and trains will be key checkpoints, but the roads will have to be covered as well, in an attempt to make all movement by illegal aliens impossible [1]. Employers will also have to check, and may even have to request a real-time ID check to a national database of legal residents (this is a proposal that is on the table even without REAL ID). Hospitals are another good target, because most seriously injured people will choose to get medical help even if it means being deported. Schools will be required to check the identity and status of children who enroll.
All of this together will make it nearly impossible for illegal aliens to live and work in the US, but at the expense of turning us into a society that expects to show electronically-verified ID on a daily basis, making it a simple matter to collect all of the verifications into a central database. The result will be that the government will have a detailed record of our movements and actions, ready to be cross-referenced with private sector databases (credit cards, etc.) to provide an intimate view of our lives.
Oh, and expect the ACLU to ensure that you can't be passed over at the checkpoints just because you're white and have an American accent, either. The far right will make sure the checkpoints are installed and manned, and the far left will make sure that they apply equally to everyone.
The coming War on Illegal Immigration is going to make the civil rights impacts of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror look like nothing, unless we start fighting back.
[1] This, by the way, is how Mexico manages their problem with illegal immigrants from Nicaragua, Honduras, etc. I spent a couple of years in southern Mexico and got stopped to have my papers checked several times. Even got detained for a few hours once because I didn't happen to have my visa with me.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Are people going to wake the fuck up and see what the "War On Drugs" is doing to our country? It does jack shit to stop people from using drugs, but it fills our prisons and restricts our freedom.
Drugs abuse should be treated as a sickness, not a crime.
So do you know that it won't happen?
No.
I can't imagine why people think a SS card is any sort of sensible way to authenticate identity. Of all the important documents I have that one would probably be the easiest to forge.
Funny story - when my wife voted in the last presidential election she was asked for some sort of ID. So she presented her passport which should satisfy anyone right? The idiot holding the voter registration books said "no, no, you need a government issued ID." !!?!?! Thankfully the person sitting next to her wasn't such a retard and explained what a passport was. Really inspired confidence in the the election process.
having to do with deeply held suspicion of government power.
But also with the nature of the social contract between government and the people.
In Sweden, you have government intrusion to a point many Americans would find unacceptable, but you also have a welfare state that truly cares for the people - world class medical care, housing, education, etc. You trade off privacy for some real benefits.
In the US we do not have that social contract.
We are losing our privacy to government intrusion, but we are not gaining any real benefits from it. It is a strictly one-sided transaction, that benefits the government entirely and the people not at all.
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
Will Ron Paul allow me to do that? Or is he such an uptight totalitarian that'd he'd throw me in prison the first time I punt a poodle?
I didn't realize that. Back in the day (oh, 15 years ago) I had sinus problems and figured out that I'd buy quite a bit of Sudafed over the coming months. The little blister packs were so damn expensive that I asked my sis about how she bought hers. She clued me in, so I talked to the pharmacist at Kroger and did an order for a 1000-count bottle. If I remember right, it cost about the same as 4 little boxes containing less than a hundred pills.
After a few years, I ran out and bought another one. When I tried to buy a third several years after that, I was told that it was no longer sold in bulk.
Now you tell me that it *is* still sold in bulk in some places? I'm going to have to go look again. Thanks for the headsup.
A "logical fallacy" is one which is false. That is, and *instance* of the slippery-slope argument might be fallacious, but the slippery-slope technique in general is not fallacious.
What I infer from what you say is that the slippery-slope argument is not fallacious, but insufficient. And on that, I agree. Simply invoking the slippery-slope is not good enough. You'll have to back it up.
In this case of the Real ID, we've already seen the "slippery-slope" happening. It's not only logical that it will slide down that slope, but inevitable. The question is not "if," it's "when." With the DHS grasping for more power, that time seems now.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Now, if I'm not mistaken, state reps to the capital (i.e. your standard senator and representative to mention a few) must be residents (and therefore have IDs) of the states they represent. And I can only assume that in the current state of things they would have to show their IDs at some point (in what form I don't know, and I don't know if they actually have to show them as I've never had the privilege of going to DC). So I would have to ask, what happens to legislators from those states that have refused to cooperate with the RealID system? Do we just start excluding them from law making decisions? Do we basically force them to secede from the union? wind up with a really screwed up civil war over something so trivial?
The majority of the acts of terrorism in the US were by home-grown nutjobs, not some Middle Eastern imports. 9/11 notwithstanding, the chances of a terrorist attack in the US is exceptionally small. Hell, we get one about once a decade. And that's it. (Except for the 90s, which had the first WTC event, OK City, and the Unabomber. What a great decade!)
There are more people killed by gun-toting relatives in the US than by Islamofascists. Before 9/11, there were more people killed in the US by Christiofascists than by Islamofascists. I think the concern about terrorist attacks is so overblown, it's reached the state of self-parody.
(No, I don't support gun control. I'd just like to point out that you're *at least* 30 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than by a terrorist attack in the US, and over 120 times more likely to die in a car accident. That assumes one 9/11-sized event every ten years.)
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
So there are already drivers licenses and passports and other forms of ID in people's posession, but one do we need to have one card to do *everything*?
Sure, that might make somebody's life easier in data collection and gives someone a nice database and means you only carry one card (therefore being cheaper to support), but the other side of the equation is really very very ugly and outweighs all of those benefits.
So here's the important question:
Why can't I have a medical card for buying medicine, with a number on it that is independant of anything else I have?
How do you apply for one of those cards? Same way as you apply for a SSN.
i.e you *DO NOT* give DHS your SSN.
There are some other benefits from having *all* medicine purchased by a single person associated with a single card, such as:
- drug stores (or pharmacies/chemists) being able to check if they're about to sell you something that will react badly with something else you've bought (could this have saved Heath Ledger's life?);
- this is the 100th bottle of pseudoephadrine tablets you've bought today...
Now *maybe* the latter is a privacy issue (why should the government care if i buy so much of a drug), but there are limits on what can be considered 'normal' behaviour vs suspicious.
Is a good idea because it allows individual states to experiment with different laws and policies and residents to vote with their feet. If one state decides to give subsidies to industries that voters aren't interested in subsidizing, or open a bunch of museums no one is interested in visiting, then residents can respond by leaving the state. States can learn from each other's mistakes without having to make those same mistakes themselves. When you only have federal laws, that mechanism is destroyed. If the U.S. gov't decides to enact stupid policy, you're trapped unless you want to leave the country, which is much more difficult than leaving your state.
There are benefits of harmonizing laws between states, increased efficiency among them, but harmonizing ALL laws is a mistake, because it doesn't allow individual states to act as experiments, and if the federal government screws up you are trapped.
And also, to the extent that some policies are only good or bad based on people's personal preference, differing state laws give you more choice on how you want to live while still remaining in the U.S.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
I'm not religious in just about any sense of the word. In fact, I consider myself to be atheist whatever you think that means. But I find it striking that the book of revelations in its description of evil things to come discusses the mark of the beast or whatever it's called mentions that you will not be allowed to do business... to buy goods and services without the mark... without permission.
Maybe the people driving these ideas have the best and most pure intentions at heart... or maybe they want their jobs to be "easier" by making every merchant an agent of government control. But whatever the cause may be, the harm to the general public is clear and obvious.
Why would the government, for purposes of identification, need to know if I have allergies?
Is it because nanodust makes me sneeze just like pollen does?
I was in Hong Kong a while back, and the general advice from the tour guides was that you should only buy the silver $10 Rolexes from street vendors, not the gold ones, because the color rubs off the gold ones....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Parent article is troll and/or flamebait.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Older US passports don't have the RFID chip; it's very new - the old ones have bar-codes which the passport control people can scan if they want to, and other people who take passports as ID (such as airline ticketing and TSA harassers) don't actually scan it. Usually laundering them will damage the paper parts of the passport but not the RFID; microwaving passports can burn the paper next to the chip.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
They said that simply because the Social Security Administration didn't want to go to all the work of producing an identity card, verifying that they only gave the card to the correct person, providing a mechanism to verify that a person holding a card was a correct person, etc. It was just a simple information card you could use to keep track of your number if you had trouble memorizing 9-digit numbers reliably.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But if I understand this correctly, if my state chooses to "opt out" of this I will not be admitted to any Federal building. So if I'm called to Federal Court to testify, would that count? Or to server on a Federal Jury? Is this not a violation of The Bill of Rights Amendments? Amendment I To freely and peaceably assemble, visiting a Federal building such as the Visitors Center would fall under that. The right to petition my government for a redress of grievance. So because, my state or I as a tax payer refused to get a Federal ID I would not be able to air those grievances in person in the proper forum. Amendment X The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. Why don't you just tattoo us all like the Nazis did in WWII and just get it over with, or RFID us. 1984 is here.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Here in the US, people believe that we're free and the government works for us - we're not owned by some government. Britain's a bit different, having a tradition of feudalism (we has a revolution against ours, while they mostly outgrew theirs), but they still also believe in individual freedom as a fundamental value. We both know it doesn't really work that way any more, and don't like it, and that really annoys us. Our countries also both have a history of slavery, and we know how owners treat property, though we didn't use ID cards for slaves back then.
South African friends of mine also had ID cards, but they could travel freely around their country because they were obviously white, while blacks and coloreds had to show their passes prove that they were going somewhere the white people wanted them. If you need a pass to travel around your country, you're obviously not one of the white owners, and if you want other people to have passes to travel around, you're saying you *are* one of the white owners.
Organizations assign you numbers and ID cards because they want to keep track of you and make you ask their permission to do things, and because they don't trust you. I don't mind if my bank does that - they're keeping my money, and I don't want them to let other people take it. But when a government says I need to get their permission to go somewhere, that's morally unacceptable - freedom to travel is a fundamental human right - and they're able to enforce it because they've got a bunch of guns and can shoot anybody who doesn't obey. I don't mind if the government uses numbers as database indexes to keep track of appropriate things; I'm not the only person in my town with my name. But if they're keeping track of things that are none of their business, that's wrong. And ID cards mean that they can keep all those records together, which is dangerous and inappropriate.
I've been really surprised that Europeans are tolerant of ID cards, not only given the recent unpleasantness that had just happened when you Swedes got yours, but also given the history of the 1700s-1800s, with monarchies, czars, secret police, and that sort of abuse from traditional governments and their replacements.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Personally, I prefer stainless. The gold has rubbed off every watch I have except the Wenger, go figure.
/.'r being able to see the humor in a potentially fatal situation. Rolexes excluded...
Now for the hard part. They modded my post 'funny'. It was serious.
Never doubt the
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
"Very often when we screw up our life it brings others down with us."
Some people suck, therefore we should all give up something.
Policy that aims to account for the least common denominator leads to a world of mediocrity, and in the end, we will all suck.
I'm actually curious about this. What is 'wrong' with having a single, national ID? I am very conservative (small government conservative, not religious), but I do see the merits of having a national ID. There is nothing wrong with someone asking you to confirm that you are the person you claim to be. However, it seems that the biggest concerns about the national ID, isn't what it is, but rather what it could be. I think we could remove a lot of the opposition to this plan by adding a few restrictions.
1. Enumerate exactly when you can be requested to present your ID.
2. Declare that outside of those specific enumerated instances, you cannot discriminate against a person who declines to display their ID.
Lets use this as an example
Times when ID is required:
Entering a court
Entering the country
Confirming your identity to a police officer (yes a bone of contention for some, but lets include it for arguement's sake)
If a cell phone company were to request your national ID number, you could refuse them, or allow them. But regardless of your decision, they could not deny you, or hinder you from entering into a contract with them.
I can't come up with a good list of when you should be required to present ID. But would it not be a good idea to specifically identify when you would be required, and make all other instances non-prejudicially optional?
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Yes! Of course they construct them on purpose! Constructing slippery slopes is great political strategy, since it allows you to change the game in a subtle way that your opponents may not notice, but that you have calculated will weigh heavily to your advantage as time goes on.
Slippery slopes are a bad thing if someone puts you on them, but first steps are a great thing if they steer events toward outcomes you desire.
...
You do not seem to understand how it works. The more domains we bring under our security apparatus, the more our resources grow. We know exactly what we're doing, so just stay at home and watch TV for our alert system.
Lies about crimes
This is just the beginning, folks. It's all right there in the "final rule" published by the DHS. The Real ID is "only" to be used for "access to Federal facilities, boarding Federally-regulated commercial aircraft, entry into nuclear power plants, and such other purposes as established by the Secretary of Homeland Security."
That last phrase leaves the door wide open. It's just like those job descriptions that end with the phrase "and such other duties as may be assigned," so you can never say "that's not my job" when the boss asks you to scrub the toilets or something. They could require the use of Real ID for ANYTHING THEY WANT and always point to that phrase.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
Are once again proven right. The government by definition is not to be trusted. Ever.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm not sure where CNET gets there data pertaining to Idaho... As it was the 2nd state to pass legislation (after Maine), Opposing the RealID act.
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/28942prs20070308.html
The Governor's statement:
http://gov.idaho.gov/mediacenter/press/pr2007/prmay07/pr_039.html
I've been looking for information that says that has since changed, I have not found it. Please correct me if I'm wrong...
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
The two year old son of as meth addict mom was tossed off a bridge onto the H-1 highway by their meth addict neighbor. From the Honolulu Star Bulletin: http://starbulletin.com/2008/01/20/news/story02.html
In theory, the notion of freedom of choice wrt drugs and personal responsibility for any consequences sounds nice. However, in practice, ugly things like this occur to innocent and powerless victims, undermining arguments for legalization.
Real ID? Meh. My state rejected this crap last year.
Liberty in your lifetime
States aren't rejecting this for privacy. It's the money to change crufty old non-relational database code. Go COBOL!!!
It has two wings, the Republicans and the Democrats.
I wonder if you know just how close you are to the mark. Thomas Jefferson was the founder of the Democratic-Republican Party.
I'd like to see neckties outlawed, or mandated that anyone who wears one hangs himself with it.!
Instead have the laws say only Winsor knot ties can be used, none of those clip on ties, and the person has to know how to tie it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
"If I derive pleasure out of it, then it can't be wrong." I'm sure there are plenty of sexual deviants (molesters, rapists, etc.) and hate-crime perpetrators who would agree with you on this one.
Thing is is molesters and rapists violate another person's rights whereas smoking hemp does not.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The two year old son of as meth addict mom was tossed off a bridge onto the H-1 highway by their meth addict neighbor.
n theory, the notion of freedom of choice wrt drugs and personal responsibility for any consequences sounds nice. However, in practice, ugly things like this occur to innocent and powerless victims, undermining arguments for legalization.
Another sad story: "Body is last of 4 kids thrown off bridge" no drugs involved. It doesn't take illegal drugs for something bad to happen, bad things happen with and without drugs being involved. You make the bad act illegal not drugs.
But that's not why hemp AKA marjuana was made illegal. Hemp was made illegal because it posed a potential treat to the wealth of wealthy and powerful people. Some of those who pressed to have hemp made illegal included William Randolph Hearst, a powerful newspaper magnate who owned thousands of acres of forest he harvested for the pulp to make paper he sold; Du Pont who was granted a patent on making plastics from petroleum oil, and his financial backer Andrew Mellon of the Mellon bank; and Rockefeller of Standard Oil and Rothschild of Shell. In the 1930s, before hemp was made illegal, MIT did a study on the use of hemp to make paper, they concluded an acre of hemp was able to produce more paper than an acre of forest. Before Du Pont's patent plastic was made from plants of which hemp was a good source, now research is again being done on making Bioplastic. Among other advantages it is renewable and it's biodegradable. Eastman Kodak made plastic for both the cameras and the film from plant cellulose, the original cellophane wrap for food was made from cellulose. In the 1920s and '30s Henry Ford worked on making ethanol from hemp as a fuel for vehicles. He also used hemp to make plastics for them. Rudolph Diesel inventor of the Diesel engine designed it to run on most any vegetable oil including hemp seed oil. In front of congress when Dr. James Woodward, a doctor as well as lawyer, testified for the AMA he said the AMA would have denounced the law making hemp illegal sooner but the AMA had only learned the "Mexican devil weed" to be outlawed was in fact hemp and was used a lot in medicine. He testified it should not be made illegal.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I wonder if the DHS consciously constructs slippery slopes and has timelines drawn up for when to feed what to the American people, or if they're just really good at accidentally destroying our civil liberties...
Behind the scenes the DHS and RealID has always been about tracking people.
FalconShould there be a Law?
No, No, No! You're supposed to say "Swing Heil"!
FalconShould there be a Law?
let the Supremes decide if they can usurp authority that is _NOT_ enumerated to the Federal government.
Unfortunately with the Justices currently sitting on the bench I fear the USSC would allow the DHS to do almost anything it wants. After all they had to twist the Interstate Commerce Clause so it was unrecognizable to deny California's state rights to allow medical marijuana.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The U.S. is no longer a band of 13 competitive colonies who had to be pushed into staying in a union. It's a coherent whole, and we might as well reflect that in government.
I'd rather have 50 labs than 1 monstrosity. By allowing each state to try something else they can more quickly see what works and what doesn't. When something works for one state other states can try it as well and when something doesn't work the other states know not to try it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I realize I live in a nanny state that attempts to dictate everything we do while appearing to be liberal
Yea, I live in Minneapolis. That's something that bothered me when I moved here, that it was a Blue State and no alcohol was allowed to be sold on Sundays. Where I moved from it was left up to the local governments, the city I lived outside of banned alcohol sells on Sundays but the county allowed it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
But they will happily vote for all the candidates that stand for more war, more taxes, and bigger government (read: contraction of liberty). Well-done, America! Way to hate freedom.
I would like to say, too, that I am *not* making you out to be a nazi; if I had been, I was in a foul enough mood to have thrown that in there. However, I *was* implying that you were a 'good German' -- which, upon reflection, isn't fair either. 8^P
I have gone back and re-read your posts on this issue; I see that you say "For the record, I would LIKE to be against a national ID, I get the feeling that there is something wrong with it. I simply don't like to be against something, without having facts and rational arguments to back up my position." I have to admit that this is, indeed, a reasonable stand to take on this issue. It is clear to me now that I let my prejudices overrun my rationality. I will try to do better in the future.
Again, my apologies for being a flamedick.
--Randym
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Thankfully I have it setup so I get emailed whenever someone replies to my posts. This response was more than is to be expected on the internet and I appreciate it. It seems that like me you take your posts and the responses to those posts seriously and that is to be commended. Hopefully today will be a few shades brighter.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj