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."
Oh, wait, that's New Testament anyways, isn't it? Nevermind...
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.
All citizens of a country which isn't exactly liked by its neighbours are placed on a single database. Database leaks. Any future authority which doesn't like Israelis for any reason can now reliably identify them at crossing points, when travelling, after an invasion, etc.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
We can construct a topic that will generate the lowest signal to noise ratio EVER! Proceed, gentlemen, proceed!
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.
"Biometric passports are established throughout Europe since years back."
As an Irish citizen currently living in Belgium, I have to say I don't think this is true. I don't know a single person in either country with a biometric passport.
When I was born, my foot prints were put on the birth certificate, which is on file, for identification (my social security card validates against it). When I got my state ID, that had my picture. When I got my SBU clearance, my fingerprints and photo went on record.
It seems to me that the line in question is fictitious. The only question is the efficiency of the ID method, and the security of the database.
What central location?
We did that for our kids.
The central location? The file cabinet in my home office. They only made one fingerprint card per kid, which they gave to us.
Remember, this was in the early '90s, at the tail end of the child abduction hysteria (yeah, it's still around but not as strong).
We were told to keep the card, and put a small clip of the kids' hair into a mini-ziploc, and store it with the card.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Every country strikes its between the privacy of its citizens and the security of its citizens. In Israel, due to its circumstances, the balance is more heavily tilted toward security over privacy. In every country of which I am aware, military service involves sacrificing some level of freedom and privacy. In Israel, almost every non-Arab citizen of the country serves in the army, and of course that service requires photographs, fingerprints, DNA sampling, etc. already. So this is not much different than status quo in Israel, and I would not call it "evil."
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
You don't need a central database to have biometric passports/id cards. All you need is to store their hashes on the card and that would be compared to the person in question.
This is the only thing required of a biometric card.
"Programming is life, the rest is mere details"
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.
I hate printers.
Bin Laden, is what Donald Trump calls "a member of the lucky sperm club" (Trump himself is a member) - someone who was born into a very rich family. Now, I don't know about you folks, but if I were born into a rich family I'd get into the family business, become a full-time Linux hacker, do charity work - like help Palesinians maybe?, or even try being a jet set playboy. NOT killing civilians to get the Satan out of the Holy Land.
Bin Laden is so full of hate that he can't think clearly - he's basically insane with rage. He could have channeled that into a productive rage - use his resources to show American and Israeli injustices towards the Palestinians and Arab injustices towards the Palestinians. He could have been the World's greatest peaceful champion of Islam and shown the World what Islam is about.
But he didn't.
He turned to violence and hate.
The US turned him into that one might say. I'd like to point out that he's a grown man and can think for himself. Blaming the US is complete horseshit.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Your bias is showing through. You are identifying one group by religion and one by nationality. It should either be:
"You can blame the Israelis for persecuting the Palestinians".
Or
"You can blame the Jews for persecuting the Muslims"
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
You call them terrorists, they call them freedom fighters. It's a matter of perspective. Get some.
Total misdirection; a typical tactic of the pro-Israel mob. In 1948 when Israel was declared to exist (it did not declare independence, as it did not exist prior to that), it immediately enacted Jewish favoring laws, and the Irgun and Haganah (which would later become the IDF) harassed and threatened the Palestinians so that they left out of fear. There was a recent exhibit in Melbourne where Palestinian families told how they lost their homes as the borders of Israel creep outward, displacing the people as they go. Most Palestinians do not have Israeli citizenship, and so as the borders move, so must they. Trouble is, their houses do not. Many told stories of being able to look over barbed wire fences and actually see people living in the house that they had to abandon only a few years earlier.
Dunno. How about you tell me about the US being led by people like Colin Powell, who willfully lied to the world about WMDs in order to start an illegal, unpopular. Tell me about GW Bush whose family fortunes are essentially based on war. Tell me about Henry Kissinger who has some kind of fetish for ruining South American economies for fun and relaxation. Tell me about Cheyney lobbying Congress to ensure that his Halliburton cronies got the lions share of the Iraqi war loot.
Then also talk to me about Israel holding a big ceremony celebrating the Irgun terrorists who bombed the King David hotel.
Israel is a state founded with violence. Its borders were carved out by the illegal violence perpetrated by the Irgun and Haganah. Live by the sword, die by the sword. If Israel wants to rule by virtue of being the stronger party, that's fine. But at least be man enough to admit the desire to rule by might. Don't do it and whine the whole time when others challenge that type of rule.
Also, tell me who the terrorists are given a) relative body counts between Israeli civilians and Palestinian civilians b) the fact that Israel has violated more UN resolutions than any other country while pointing vociferously at any other country that violates them (hey, either you support the UN or you don't, but you don't get to point at violators when you yourself are the biggest violator) and c) Israel's continual policy of setting up illegal settlements right along the border and then moving the border just a bit more.
Sorry, Israel is *not* above reproach. Far, far from it.
I hate printers.
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
That's only half the story: shortly after his time as minister of the interior, he joined the board of directors of SAFE ID Solutions AG, a company specializing in - you guessed it - "integrated security solutions to the global ID market with systems optimized for new generation electronic documents".
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
There was no Israel until a people ignored by the British (yes, the Brits, read up on Palestine at the end of WW II) in Palestine declared they were going to TAKE land and set up a state. No one strong enough was interested enough to take action. So in your example, if Israel had lost, they would deserve total subjugation? "Too bad?" No, I suspect they'd have been martyred instead. Trouble with Israel is the same as with any country fought over for many centuries. Americans don't have the history, so they have "all the answers." Count yerself lucky ya cowardly anon. Less to think about.
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.
I'm not Pro-Israel by any means and I don't particularly like the way it was founded (modern day Israel) but you should look at the history as well.
Israel was invaded multiple times - almost destroyed. They took land like Gaza and the West Bank as a buffer from REAL threats.
Let's see your country get invaded by ALL your neighbors (though Jordan's participation was half-hearted). I'd be surprised if it responds in a warm fuzzy fashion.
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."
RealID was a horrible idea, many states refused to do it...it is dead in the water as far as I can tell.
Nope, it was passed into law. All the states requested an extension, so the deadline for implementation was pushed back to the end of March 2008 and then again to the end of December 2009. Since then, 20 states have become compliant, 14 have passed legislation prohibiting their DMV departments from complying, and the remaining 16 are somewhere in between. The DHS has offered the 30 non-compliant states an extension till May 2011 provided they implement a certain number of the requirements. If they don't, then all the residents of those states will have need a passport to fly starting January 1st. I do have to wonder the DHS would really risk implementing this during holiday travels, but that is the plan as of now.
I got this info from our state's Real ID FAQ(PDF) - it is probably on Wikipedia as well.
You are reversing the order of events.
1. Build border settlements
The towns near Gaza are not settlements, they are and always were within Israeli international borders. Ashdod is 43 Km (20 miles), it is not a "border settlement", most of Israel (Including Tel-Aviv) is below 43 Km from its borders.
2. Whine about rocket attacks
The US president would not act nicely towards Mexico if it launches rocket attacks on San Diego either.
they are the mechanism by which Israel is stealing the entire area that was the Palestinian state.
There was no Palestinian state, ever. The U.N decided to divide the British controlled area between the Jews and the Arabs. When the British left at 1948, the Arab states conquered the parts that we now call Palestine. This land was an integral part of Jordan and Egypt up until the war of 1969.
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.
You are trolling, this is simply false, it has been reversed lately. Since the peace talks began, parts of the occupied territories were given to the Palestinian authority (1994-5), and some of the newer maps mark these areas correctly. Unfortunately, due to later unrest Palestinian control was massively eroded (call it retaliation or a security necessity). Despite that, these lands are still marked as Palestinian in many maps.
Gaza and the West Bank are becoming more and more overpopulated as the Palestinian lands shrink, effectively making them concentration camps.
This is only a half truth. The West Bank is shrinking due to actions of Israel, and people there do suffer from it, but this is not so with Gaza (where the rockets come from). Gaza is within its 1948 borders, when it was part of Egypt, and Gaza is the most overpopulated part of Palestine. Israel has nothing to do with it. So do you say that Israeli actions deprive Gazans of land they could use in the west bank? Wrong, Gaza does not border with the West bank. People could never move freely between these two places, not even during their Arab rule. Geographically they are two different nations. They were linked together only due to political/strategic moves by all sides (Israeli, Palestinian, American, European, Egyptian and Jordanian).
The people of Gaza have only two possible expansion directions: towards Israel (beyond 1948 borders) or towards Egypt. This is what many of them want. This is one of the reasons why the peace talks stalled - Israel did not want to let a big percent of Palestinians immigrate to Israel, and the Palestinians did not want to give this thought up.
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
So was Slobodan Milosevic, it did not give him the right to do what he did. Hamas does not promote peace, they promote violence, or at most a temporary cease fire. They do not promote equality, but segregation by gender and religion instead. If anyone wants peace she should hope that Hamas will get out of the equation.
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?
short historical recap: The land of Israel has been the homeland of the people of Israel (nowadays known as Jews) for about 3300 years. The Israelis had independence in the countery for almost 1000 years. The temple, the worldwide center of God worship, stood on the temple mount for a total of 830 years. There has been Israelis living in the land of Israel for over 2280 years, icluding the past 2 millenia. Hardly anyone lived there there in the 19th century. Then suddenly there's an increasing movement of Israelis and Arabs into the country, Arabs at higher numbers than Israelis so that by 1948 the Arabs in the country outnumber the Israelis 2 to 1. The Israelis mainly kept to themselves, but the Arabs attacked Israeli towns during their rebellion against the French in ~1921, and performed pogroms against the Israelis in many areas in the country in 1929. The Israelis established a self-defence organization called Hagana (which literally means "defense"). A group broke off called Etzel (which is an acronym for "Nation Military Organization") and a group broke off those called Lechi (acronym for "Warriors of the Liberty of Israel"). The Hagana only did self defence, but the Etzel and Lechi also retaliated and in some cases took the initiative in the hoatilities. in 1936 the Arabs rebelled against the British but have also targeted the Israelis until 1939, when the rebellion was quelched. in 1947 the UN decided to partition the western bank of Israel between the Arabs and the Israelis. Hostilities continued. Months later Israel declared independence, and two days later was attacked by 7 Arab countries, only 4 of which share borders with the state of Israel. Syria, Jordan, and Egypt absorbed the lands the UN allocated to the "Arab Country", a country which has never existed in the first place. The PLO was formed in 1964, and it's foundation was the first time anyone claimed the existence of a Palestinian nation.
And an Ironic anecdote: Palestine is an Arab mispronunciation of the Hebrew word Plishti, which in English means "Invader".
But I guess no one cares. Supporting the Invaders, whatever their identity and claims, is alway good when the people they are assaulting are Israeli.
PS I might have been off by a year or two here and there in the dates.
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.