Slashdot Mirror
Israeli Knesset Approves Biometric Database Law
Lord Duran writes "The Israeli Knesset approved a bill that will require every Israeli citizen to submit a visual scan of their face and a biometric scan of their fingerprints to a national database. I, for one, fail to see how this is anything but evil. TFA mentions the Israeli census was breached — I'd like to point out, for comparison, that it's still freely available on your peer-to-peer file sharing network of choice."
FTA: "...that the system would be kept as confidential as any banking website"
Why does that not make me feel better about this?
Same problem with all biometrics.
What happens when the system is compromised? How do I change my password?
I find being offended by me offensive.
What is a "biometric visual scan of their face"? A photograph?
Every country does that. It's called an ID card. As far as fingerprints, I've had to submit my fingerprints like 10 times for various services, clearances, not to mention immigration documents.
This isn't really news. Even if it's a 3D laser-scan, that's really not different from a photograph nowadays.
As much as it bothers me to have centralized databases of ANYTHING, if there is anything that needs a centralized database, it's identification. I'm a privacy freak and I am not sure that this bothers me, especially in the context of a country that can claim the dubious honor of being the most likely terrorist target in the industrialized world.
While their actions and policies towards the Palestinians are pretty heinous, you can't just paint the whole society as evil. They have developed a verymodern society in the midst of their enemies and excel at many fields of science and literature.
You can blame the Jews for persecuting the Palestinians, but you can't say that everything they do is evil.
You can blame the Jews for persecuting the Palestinians
Is that like being an apologist for terrorists, and then blaming the victims when they try to defend themselves? Wait, that's not a bad analogy, it's just what you're doing. You can't blame the Jews for persecuting the Palestinians, because they haven't been. They actually get better treatment is Israel than in any other country in the Middle East. If the Palestinians don't like the defensive measures Israel takes, then they should stop attacking Israel.
Here's an analogy for you- What do you think would happen if the Mexican government started sending rockets and mortars into El Paso because they wanted to take Texas back? What would happen if snipers from Mexico started shooting farmers in Arizona? If they blew up crowds of shoppers in San Diego? And the Mexican government refused to stop? I think the US would start carpet bombing in about 2 seconds. Does that analogy work for you?
There's a bit of irony here because a little man in Germany fifty years ago did something very similar in categorizing and identifying Jews. It was not benign.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Well, if Mexico had tried to invade the U.S., and lost badly, and had a bunch of their land taken away for starting a war against the U.S., I would say too bad for Mexico.
They were not offered a place to stay, Palenstinian land and buildings are usurped using the progressive tactic of:
1. Build border settlements 2. Whine about rocket attacks 3. Move border out of range of rockets
Wash, rinse, repeat. This is why the illegal settlements are such a sore point in the issue; they are the mechanism by which Israel is stealing the entire area that was the Palestinian state. Just look at a map from 1948 and a map from today. If you have time, check the map every decade between, you'll see Israel increasing steadily in area.
That's just it; the Palenstinians contend that Israel is not only violating their sovereignty, but displacing it physically by pushing their country into a smaller and smaller area. Gaza and the West Bank are becoming more and more overpopulated as the Palestinian lands shrink, effectively making them concentration camps.
Say what you want about Hamas. They were elected fairly, in elections overseen by Jimmy Carter. Whatever you, the UN or your government may think of them, they are the democratically elected party, and they were elected mainly because the previous group who did not support direct violence fell out of favour because Israel refused to negotiate with them. This fuelled support for Hamas. Now that Hamas are in Israel strangely wants to talk to Fatah again.
Smells like Israel just wants a belligerent neighbor so they can keep pointing at them and playing victim all the while dredging military aid from the US by the billions.
Right. Because it's completely justifiable, logical, and rational to elect fucking terrorists as your leaders. They don't have a country, they never did as far I as I can tell. Their complete inability to defend their sovereignty is the nail in that coffin. The fact that they elected terrorists democratically is irrelevant.
Back in 1948 when Israel was declared independent, no one displaced. No one was kicked out. What did happen though was a bunch of racist "palestinians" who hated the Jews so much that they got up and left voluntarily. Then after it was all said and done it was suddenly a problem that needed a solution. A man made problem by a bunch of obviously barbaric people.
How civilized can you say a people really are when they elect terrorists to lead them? How sovereign is a nation that technically cannot defend itself from foreign threats?
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
All citizens must be known to the government at all times.
This leads to all citizens must be forced to carry identification at all times. Biometrics is a short-circuit around forcing people to carry ID papers 24/7. At present, I can walk out of the house without my wallet, and nobody can identify me without my permission. Not so with biometrics.
More to the point, it's a way of monitoring the populace. It assumes that everyone is a latent criminal, and needs to be watched.
And hey--what if they decide that racial group 'x' needs to be wiped out? They've got the data from face scans, they just need to send out the troops.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
You call them terrorists, they call them freedom fighters. It's a matter of perspective. Get some.
I think you're a bit confused. There is nothing stopping a person from being a freedom fighter and a terrorist at the same time. The first term refers to why they're doing what they're doing. The second refers to how they do it. So while Hamas may (it's rather questionable. but so are many other things) be fighting for freedom, how they do it (purposefully targeting, attacking and executing unarmed civilians) makes them terrorists.
If only one could get that wonderful feeling of accomplishment without having to accomplish anything.
I thought about him a while back in my Jewish studies class (online gen-eds, gotta love 'em). There was a part dealing with antisemitism, about how it has evolved to into anti-Israeli sentiment to cover it's ass, so to speak, by taking the guise of a reasonable argument against a nation's policies, not pure racist hatred, because clearly there are two types of anti-Israel sentiment: reasonable and racist. Imagine if black people only made up a small enough percent of the population that 40% could live in one small area. Do you think the KKK and the neo-nazi skinheads would criticize that nation's policies, regardless? You know they would, and publicly, they'd do it under the guise of 'criticizing policy' but really, it would be racism. We all know it would be. Israel is the same way. Take a race that has historically been hated and but them in their own little country, guess what the racists say about it? Only now, they have a mask for their racism, they can claim that they're anti-Israel, not the antisemitic Jew hating racists that they really are.
I don't think criticism of Israel is all without merit. Yes, some of it is insane, like when people say the Israelis are monsters for defending themselves from terrorists who want to kill as many Israeli citizens as possible, but Israeli policy has, at times, not helped things, and that is worth criticizing. Israel has done, and does do, bad things. One of my Arabic professors presented very reasonable criticisms of Israel. Problem is, there's enough blame to go around when Israel's neighbors are supporting a group that launches rockets at Israeli civilians while hiding behind other civilians and using them as shields, so it is hardly unreasonable when Israel takes the precautionary principle, and a degree of overreaction on their part is sadly justified.
But I agree with you all the way, you're wasting your time if you argue with douchebag. I saw a bumper sticker the other day that read 'Hate is the ONLY enemy.' People like him, they hate. They are part of the problem. Israelis are not the enemy, Palestinians are not the enemy, Arabs are not the enemy, Iranians are not the enemy. People who hate are the enemy. There is so much antisemitism and islamophobia in that region and around the world trying to make itself look reasonable, it's disgusting. There's plenty about Israel you can debate, but not with an antisemite who thinks the Israeli people are evil and that a country were people are born and die and make their homes and lives shouldn't even have the right to exist.
Not everyone wants peace. They are the problem. They are the evil ones.
Israel is a state founded with violence.
That's every country, by the way. Look at how many countries were formed by, at one point in their history, by unjustly killing the natives. Almost all, if not all, of them. Might have been 300 years ago, might have been 100 years ago, might have been 50 years ago, but the only thing that separates Israel and every other country in that respect is time.
But it's still evil. I always tell rednecks :
Israel is one of the very few countries in the world with significant terrorism problems. If Israel doesn't need some security measure, we sure as hell don't need it.
So Israel agreeing to buy American tech with America's aid money to keep American politicians happy hurts my argument. :(
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
War is just terrorism with a bigger budget. (And better political spin.)
You call them unarmed civilians, we call them "collateral damage."
The most disturbing thing about all this is how readily people in the "civilized" world continue to simply submit to this sort of nonsense and view it as an acceptable part of living.
Hi! I’m going to move into my house, which you for some reason decided to move into after I was hauled off in the dead of night and imprisoned unjustly without trial or basis other than my race. I’ll even let you stay there, if you’ll agree to be a halfway-civil roommate. Sound good to you?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
they are the mechanism by which Israel is stealing the entire area that was the Palestinian state
Just what Palestinian state do you speak of, sir?
Here we are again with short and selective momery. Forgetting the Israelis have lived in, and had sovereignty over Israel for way linger than anyone else. That the Israelis were there way longer than the newcomer Arabs, were here to greet them when they arrived, and never left. So yeah, if you only look back at the last 100 years you'd think Israelis are European foreigners, when in fact they forced into exile and didn't come back because they couldn't. The land was unuhabitable untile we returned and turned swamps into fields and deserts into forests, which is also the time when Arabs started flocking into our country in droves, to the point where the newcomers outnumbered the natives. And it's at that very convenient point in time, while ignoring all the Arab violence, that the European and American memory of this region begins. So people want to blame the Israelis. If the facts are inconvenient then crop them to fit.