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Israel Moves Toward a National Biometric Database
An anonymous reader writes "Israeli's government has approved the creation of a biometric database which would contain fingerprints and facial photos of all Israeli citizens. If the bill becomes law — and it is at an early stage — the biometric information of each citizen would be embedded in their passport and national ID card. Israeli citizens would be required by law to submit to biometric testing upon request by government employees, soldiers, and policemen, so that their biometric info can be compared to the info embedded in their ID card / passport. The declared purpose of the bill is to combat forgery of passports and ID cards, and also to aid identification 'in cases of a mass disaster.' The bill was approved over objections from civil rights groups and the Israeli Bar. The article notes that no other democratic country has a comprehensive biometric database of all citizens."
...you can just hear the maniacal cackling of the engineers of the Third Reich.
Israel is reacting to the threats of regular terrorist bombings.
The Nazis were trying to breed the ubermensch and wipe out the undermensch.
If you want to draw a tie between Nazis and the Israeli State, you're going to have to work harder.
As for the engineers* of the Third Reich, they were ahead of their time. One of the reasons the USA grew so strongly after the war is that we took all the highlights of German industry by way of war reparations.
*engineers as in guys with slide rulers, not the politicians
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The article notes that no other democratic country has a comprehensive biometric database of all citizens.
But the UK is working on it.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
And before all of you Ben Franklin quoters start yammering, the key word Ben Franklin used was "essential."
Actually, the way that reads, it doesn't sound like he's implying that liberty is essential, not that there are a select number of essential liberties, and all the rest are forfeit. Here's the quote:
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
And if there's really any doubt in your mind of what Franklin's intent was, here's a quote from Poor Richard's Almanac:
Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.
Look, if you really have no problem giving up your liberty, go for it. I'm not stopping you. If you have no problem with the Israelis giving up their liberty, I'd love to hear your argument.
But picking apart the semantics of a historical quote, and then using that to imply that the man agrees with you -- that just makes you look stupid. Honestly, do you think any of the Founding Fathers would've consented to biometrics, when they literally got up in arms over a tea tax?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Many Reform jews are pro-Zionist (think the State of Israel is a good thing) but strongly disapprove of the way it treats Palestinians, the Lebanese and their other neighbours, and object to the hypocrisy of Israel having 200 nuclear warheads and then complaining about regional destabilisation (e.g. the letter from Gerald Kaufman MP in the Guardian this weekend). The result is often quite vicious attacks by Orthodox Jews.
Now look at this in the context of this biometric database. It is a wonderful opportunity for the Orthodox in Israel to identify Jews who they may regard as troublemakers. (They already routinely do things like refuse to recognise marriages of non-Orthodox Jews, or refuse to recognise conversions ratified by Reform rabbis). This database will give the police and the army more power to identify and harass, not only the Palestinians, but people who disagree with the settlers and the ultra-Zionists.
Many of the founders of Israel were secular; a lot of them were socialists. I think they would be horrified by this proposal and would even quote the Torah against it.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
And the Israeli tags are shaped like a little star because the government decided that it was a shape that conveyed their aspirations for a better, more peaceful society. And they're bright yellow to make them harder to misplace.
Of all the nations in the world you might hope would be wary of pervasive monitoring, you'd think one that bills itself as a "jewish state" would be it.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Sounds more insidious than some of the neighboring countries we decry as anti-freedom.
I wonder how many of my tax dollars are being used by their government to subjugate their people? I don't like this at all, not for any nation.
According to "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"
Israel is "the largest total recipient since World War II" of U.S. aid. "Total direct U.S. aid to Israel for this period amounts to well over $140 billion since World War II. Israel receives about $3 billion in direct foreign assistance each year, which is about one-fifth of America's foreign aid budget." The authors claim that "This largesse is especially striking when one realizes that Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to South Korea or Spain."
"Israel is the only recipient of U.S. aid that does not have to account for how the aid is spent." According to the authors, this makes it "virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the United States opposes."
Since most the country does compulsory army duty, they already have everyone's fingerprints, photos, dental records and blood tests etc. (things that army needs to identify you when you come home in multiple pieces)
Since the US and UK have mandated biometric passport data, they would be collecting biometric data anyway.
The only thing that this does is cover the remaining percentages and have dogged the army.
A national ID card has been around for many many years. Luckily for Israelis they do not have a governments that seem to abuse this data nor a high court that bends over and looks the away when people try and abuse this power.
The reality is that the data exists. The only new factor here is that it will be embedded on your ID card rather then click away on a terminal.
but with the U.S. funding and supporting Israel those 7.2 million get carte blanche to do things for which the 305 million in the U.S.A. get blamed
I'll post this as AC, to avoid karma-whoring.
The parent is referring to a book by George Orwell called Animal Farm. It's out of copyright in the UK, so can be read online (I did the other night, stayed up all night in fact. Yeah yeah, get out more, but if I did that I wouldn't be a Slashdot reader!).
I also highly recommend that, when the reader has finished the book, they do a little mental excercise in matching the animals to the actual people involved in the rise of Stalinist Russia.
Bear in mind that Orwell was writing before the events of the cold war, as far as I can tell the book ends here. Which brings us neatly back to what the parent is referring to:
A little off-topic, but what's a threaded conversation system for?
Godwin's law on the first post!
The path to enlightenment is truly through homemade drugs!
Do you have to be an antisemite to disagree with the politics of Israel?
I mean really.. Do you really believe that saying that Israel behaves badly toward its neighbours and even its own citizens means you are prejudiced or hostile toward Jews?
Give it up.
This thing probably won't pass. I know that for Americans it's very hard to understand, but being a liberal and serving in an elite combat unit goes hand in hand here.
If you don't believe me, just read the news stories, and the bios of the kidnapped soldiers. The front lines are CEOs, lawyers, scientists, mathematicians, accountants and what not. The middle+ class are the people that go to war. The most leftist and liberal leaders were always the best generals - Rabin (Oslo) , Barak (pulled out of Lebanon), and in his last years, Ariel Sharon who pulled out of Gaza. And most importantly, there is not a single religious general, and Israel never had a religious leader.
I design complex real-time control systems (Mostly based on PIC/NEC/Toshiba ), and like any Israeli, for 28 days a year, I become a soldier. Despite what you may or may not understand about our society, chances are that there is plenty of holes in your understanding how this microscopic 5 million people country works.
But point is, nobody here trusts the government, the current government is extremely weak, and on the verge of being replaced. This thing will not pass. Most people here read 1984 =).
My Starcraft 2 Blog
Before you all get excited: the law stands at "kriaa tromit", which means it's just now readt to be voted on. Each law has to be voted three times after this stage... I'm sure it won't pass, since other draconic laws were blocked. This particular stage, is very easy to pass, for any law, even crazy ones....
But i don't think you appreciate the situation with Israeli documents: they are the most popular forged documents in the world right now: our passports are the easiest to mangle with, and because many countries trust Israeli passports, it's the most bought passport in the black market. Even the Israeli ministry of foreign affairs issued several rules to disencourage Israeli tourists from selling their passports... Our IDs are also quite popular, since we still have problems of women trafficking...
And about terrorism... well, i doubt anybody actually thinks this system will have anything to do with that. There are a very few actual cases, compared with the total, where Israeli citizens Arabs were involved in terrorist activity...
And the last comment i have on this issue, is that in the end, friends, it all comes down to money. Some CEO, with a security system, is related to some government official, and is going to rip off the treasury, when he accidentally of course, win the auction for creating the system. At least that was true for many other security related systems in Israel, the ones that did not go through the defense industry.
Hope I shed some light.
The Israeli government and many of its citizens are always implying so. The Israeli governments continual pretense (or perhaps its a genuine delusion) that they represent the Jewish people is one of the most insidious pieces of political trickery in the modern era. Being Jewish does not imply a particular political viewpoint of national affiliation. But some people don't half push the idea that it does...
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Dude, it's not the Israeli Jews who will suffer here. It's the indigenous population. The Palestinians.
They are the ones who will suffer.
I'll be kind of gutted if you think I'm being anti-semitic, because I kinda pride myself on being 'right on' about shit in general. No- this is nothing to do with Israel being a Jewish state, and everything to do with it being a colony. Every colony that ever existed bullied the aborigines to a greater or lesser extent.
Not to get too pop-psychological, but there's also an element of 'the abused becoming the abuser' about Israel.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
Both sides behave badly. Neither excuses the other, and there is no room for forgiveness for or from each other.
The situation is hopeless until at least one side stops the retaliation.
Brace yourself, I'm going to be giving you a bit of the history of Jewish movements.
Reform and Conservative Jews barely even exist in Israel. In fact, if you talked to an average Israeli about the "Masorti" (Conservative) or "Reformi/Progressive" (Reform) movements, they probably would have to look them up on Google. This isn't because Israelis are crazy-religious; most Israeli Jews call themselves "Chiloni" (translates as "secular").
Instead, it happened because the Reform movement in specific and the Conservative movement along with it have, historically, opposed Zionism up until the 1980s or 1990s, at which point they accepted that Israel will continue existing, and only began openly and strongly advocating Zionism to their own members in the 2000s. I was raised Reform, I know this stuff for a fact.
"Why?" you ask. Well, the Reform movement formed because Jews wanted to walk, talk, eat, and act like the German and American Gentiles among whom they lived without having to actually convert to Christianity; they were extremist secular Jews who sought to call their secularism a form of religion. The Modern Orthodox movement then formed to oppose the Reform Jews, and the Conservative movement formed to find a middle ground between the Orthodox and Reform approaches. Since the Reform had given up on the whole idea of Jews as an ethnicity or nation, and the Conservative (like the Orthodox) wanted the Messiah to come before we got a Jewish state, both movements opposed the State of Israel's formation. Hell, so did the American Orthodox.
In fact, the whole privileged position of the ultra-Orthodox in Israel came about as a political deal made by David Ben-Gurion's government to secure support for the emerging state from the old, respected Orthodox communities. Back then there were only a few hundred ultra-Orthodox yeshivah boys anyway, so not drafting them wasn't perceived as a big deal.
So we've ended up with an Israel that has three degrees of religiosity officially acknowledged:
1) Secular. The majority, who go to synagogue for the High Holidays at most and don't keep kosher laws or Shabat or anything.
2) National Religious. The Israeli Modern-Orthodox Jews who consider Orthodox Judaism and modern life reconcilable. Their actual range of practice goes from what Americans would call a very religious Conservative Judaism to internationally-acknowledged Modern Orthodoxy. They keep kosher, keep Shabat (ie: no work on Saturday, for a really broad value of "work"), and keep the laws of "family purity" (don't even fucking ask). Those three categories, in fact, form the very definition of Orthodox Judaism as commonly acknowledged by rabbis the world over.
3) Ultra-Orthodox. Crazy fundamentalists and black-hats. Since they "make the Torah their occupation" they get exemption from Army service as a part of that deal Ben-Gurion made. They live off the welfare that (AFAIK) all poor, unemployed families receive in Israel, because they don't respect secular professions and, indeed, don't respect any profession except for Rabbi. Their schools receive funding from both the religion ministry and the education ministry, which pisses off everyone else.
Now you might just see the trap the ultra-Orthodox have set for themselves ideologically. They can't live without secular or National Religious Jews (they really, really hate Arabs) to support them, and a growing number of their far-too-many children leave the fold for Army service and a normal life. The ultra-Orthodox can't take over the government because they don't even like acknowledging the government's legitimacy; they still wait for the Messiah.
So the actual chance of Israel toppling into theocracy in practice is quite low, since that would result in everyone starving to death and Big Business (Israel most certainly has Big Business) would never allow itself to be shut down by a bunch of insolent black-hats.
comparing people to the people who killed 'em is kind of tasteless.
But what does taste have to do with it? Shouldn't all that matters be the aptness of the comparison?
After all, Nietzsche, that nazi-enabler, said: "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby becomes a monster. For if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." Which is a generic admonition of essentially the same thing and few if any people fault him for it.
When I first learned of what was going on in palestine I really could not reconcile it with what I had been taught in history class (still can't actually) it seemed to me that the two countries most likely to have empathy for palestinians were the ones with the least - the USA (because of all the propaganda about freedom, self-determination, etc) and Israel because of their recent experience at the hands of an overwhelmingly powerful force. Not that I expected Israel to be happy about all the countries nearby ganging up on it, but I do expect them to handle the 'occupation' that followed in a much better way.
To further mix metaphors its like palestine is the weimar republic after WWI - they lost the war and israel is determined to exact unrealistic penalties from them, thus making them an ideal breeding ground for continuation of the conflict. When they ought to be taking a cue from the way the Allied powers handled the situation with the Axis countries after WWII.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Shouldn't all that matters be the aptness of the comparison?
Sure, theoretically, but in the real world it just doesn't work. It's far too emotionally charged for people to keep a cool enough head to objectively evaluate the aptness of the comparison, and often is only used for the shock value.
For the record, I don't think the comparison is apt. The Israeli's actions are more akin to other colonial powers, not the NAZI's systematic killing and torture on the basis of race/ethnicity. Israeli's treat Palestinian's badly because of the political situation (religion and race are secondary/fueling the whole situation) where as the NAZIs chose the races and then created the political situation, and that's the least of it. Segregation in Israel is nowhere near as bad as it was in NAZI Germany, nor are rights quite that suppressed, (and that's ignoring cattle cars, concentration camps and gas chambers, those other staples of the NAZI regime).
Not that I expected Israel to be happy about all the countries nearby ganging up on it, but I do expect them to handle the 'occupation' that followed in a much better way.
I think to a certain extent they're screwed regardless of what the try, and I think they've tried almost everything at this point. It's 60 odd years of mistakes, many of which can't be corrected. Israel was created pretty much as a dp camp for holocaust survivors, at which point yeah nobody was really thinking about who lived there (collective guilt and all.) It only became as major problem once everyone was too heavily invested in the land for their to be a solution that would satisfy everyone, and every attempt has failed. (Though lately it looks like they're going towards a three state solution that people can somewhat live with.)
open source modern art: laser taggi
"But what does taste have to do with it? Shouldn't all that matters be the aptness of the comparison?"
Yes, exactly.
I'm sick and tired of political discourse being filled with bizarre weasel words like 'tasteless' and 'tired' and 'offensive' and 'disloyal' to describe claims the speaker doesn't like which are, objectively, either *true* or *false*.
I'm sick of politics being about 'opinions'.
Politics *isn't* about opinions. It's about reality. People have strong opinions *about* it, yes, just as they do about science, but those opinions do not *determine* the truth or falsity of political claims: results do. It's not a matter of fashion. Truth doesn't get 'tired' or 'stale' from multiple repetition and lies do not get proven consensus acceptance no matter how many years have passed.
That's why history is an active research subject - we're too polite to admit it, but it's because HISTORY MAKERS LIE, and history is largely the science of sorting through the lies after the fact and determining from documentary evidence just how we were deceived and then guessing at why. If we could take public figures' words at face value at the time they say them, we wouldn't *need* either history or political science.
Political claims, like every other claim, need to be verified against objective, trustworthy evidence, one political system is NOT identical to another, and torture and oppression remain torture and oppression regardless of whether it's the 'good guys' or the 'bad guys' doing it.
And while Israel's policies toward Palestine are not identical to Nazi Germany's toward the Jews, there sure are depressing similarities.
And it just goes to show that suffering atrocity and swearing 'never again shall this happen TO US' is not quite the same as swearing 'never again shall we allow this happen, full stop'.
The other interesting thing is that America's 'torture lite' techniques are, from what I've read, not only nearly identical to the Cold War KGB's (sleep deprivation, sound, heat/cold, stress positions) -- but they actually migrated to the US military lexicon FROM the Soviets via the Cold War.
What you hate, you really DO stand a strong chance of becoming. Literally and not figuratively. Rivals copy each other and adopt the methodologies which seem to work.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Dude, it's not the Israeli Jews who will suffer here. It's the indigenous population. The Palestinians.
They are the ones who will suffer.
Says who?
From what I've heard, the biometric ID will supplement Israel's already-existing national ID. Its stated purpose is to combat forgery and identity theft (...), as well as convenience (you don't have to carry your ID/driver's license around all of the time). So, at the very least, The Jews are are going to suffer from this.
As for the Palestinians... well they don't have Israeli IDs since they are not Israeli citizens (the PA issues its own IDs). However, most of them have to go to Israel to work, or to visit family members, so they need a special Israeli permit. Now, you'd say that biometric measures would be added to those permits as well, and I think you'd be right. But the question here is, how is that going to make them suffer?
You see, one of the crappier parts of being a Palestinian is that a tiny piece of paper is basically your life. It can be stolen, it can get lost, it can be taken away by asshole soldiers. With biometry, you don't need that piece of paper.
Of course, it might hurt the Palestinians' privacy a bit. But remember that we're talking about people who can have their houses searched, and themselves arrested for arbitrary periods of time, without any real warrant or justification. I don't see how biometric ID can make it worse.
"every other nation in the region has a free pass to do anything they want without anyone even looking in their direction"
Free pass? Israel is quietly the most prolific violator of UN resolutions, violating more than all other Middle Eastern nations combined. There are many other UN resolutions which the US vetoed on Israel's behalf.
Free pass indeed.
Oh, and Iraq didn't get to do what it pleased. It tried trading oil in Euros and that got it a set of trumped up WMD accusations and an invasion. Iran doesn't seem to be free of criticism either.
Cut it out with the Jewish victim complex, the rest of the world is tired of it. Criticism of Israel != antisemitism. I am a Muslim. I am a vehement critic of Israel's politics. I am also friends with many Jewish people, who I find to be very warm, friendly and pleasant people. In fact, many of my Jewish friends' biggest problem with Israel is that they carry out their politics in the name of Judaism.
I hate printers.
Once upon a time "anti-semite" was a label for someone who hated Jews.
It has become a label for someone a Jewish person hates.
The UN is dedicated to enacting resolutions against Israel?
Huh?
Victim complex, anyone?
I hate printers.
Murdering a bunch of civilians is your solution?
Ever looked up the definition of terrorism?