Slashdot Mirror
US Lawmakers Eyeing National ID Card
According to Wired (and no big surprise, considering the practicalities of implementing massive changes in medical finance), US lawmakers "are proposing a national identification card, a 'fraud-proof' Social Security card required for lawful employment in the United States. The proposal comes as the Department of Homeland Security is moving toward nationalizing driver licenses."
Nice national ID cards for our safety and you know just to be on the safe side we need a DNA database too, to prevent people from misusing this program...and hey we need to start monitoring your internet usage to prevent people from pretending to be you and setting up appoitments or chaning your information.
Yeah its nothing to be worried about, Im sure it will be all OK.
"You just got the right to healthcare, but do you really want that going to illegal immigrants?"
That's actually a bizarre statement. The options are:
1) Illegal immigrants can pay for health care in the open market (potentially taxpayer subsidized).
2) We can pay for illegal immigrants to go to hospitals as indigent care (definitely taxpayer subsidized).
I don't really understand why people would go for #2. If I can choose 100% loss vs. even 95% loss, I'm going to go with the 95%.
I'm not sure why Slashdot is so afraid of this. You don't have a right to be anonymous to your employer. You don't have a right to avoid taxes. You just got the right to healthcare, but do you really want that going to illegal immigrants?
Why? Because we've already gone through this with the social security number, which was promised to be only used to administer social security benefits, and is now used for everything.
We don't want any more stinking ID!!!
I've had this talk with a number of people. They argue that if you have nothing to hide why hide?
Well, what if they make something illegal that is a basic right.
What if alcohol was illegal?
What if being homosexual was illegal?
What if being black meant you were not allowed to vote?
What if being female meant you were not allowed to vote?
But your right, it's not like the US has a precedent of have laws like that.
All crimes are committed by the living, therefore living is a crime (Judge Death, 2000AD)
There's no such thing as fraud proof. Humans are involved in the process and humans are corruptible.
In fact, fraud proof makes it difficult to prove someone stole your identity if they some how manage to fraudulently apply for ID in your name.
This being MY country and MY birthright, fuck them.
So which boat did your ancestors come in on?
.
It costs money to pay police officers to make sure people can't rob your house and kill your kids. The money to pay for these officers was taken by force from other people. Are you going that you don't have a fundamental right not to be killed by random strangers? Some of these tax-payers had enough money to defend themselves with private security forces, why should their money be stolen just to pay for your "security"? Socialism!!!
All rights cost something, that's the point.
It's the same reason militia groups train in the woods. They like to pretend that they could defend themselves against the United States Armed Forces. It's simply a distraction against the things that really protect freedom, like voting, community organizations, or being an active citizen in the Athenian sense.
The standing army is used for foreign coup d'etats instead of civil wars on home soil. They learned a long time ago that giving you the "choice" of entertainment, fast food joints, cars, and clothes is far more effective distraction from participatory democracy than direct government violence.
In the fantasized bleak future, the government wins because they have a national ID card. In reality, you are already owned by your debt. You either plead fealty to the system in exchange for access to material goods, and live and die by your credit report, or you suffer the consequences.
And that's exactly what the real native true blooded americans should have done when your ancestors waltzed on in pretending they had some kind of a right to be there.
To be fair, if his ancestors came on a boat, they probably immigrated legally. Yes, I know you're trying to point out that it is a country of immigrants, but frankly, if everyone who wanted to come to the U.S. did come to the U.S., the whole thing would fall apart. Over a hundred years ago, it was difficult to get here, so we didn't really need quotas; if you were able to make the trip, we had room. Even from Mexico it was hard; the north of the country is a desert, and before cars were available, that was a damn difficult trip. Nowadays, it's really easy to get here (particularly from Latin America); while we still have room, we can't take everyone at once. Acknowledging that we need to establish a system for limited immigration that can be absorbed without causing problems isn't purely xenophobic (even if that is the primary motivation for much of the anti-immigrant movement); if we don't enforce the rules of said system then there is no system, and we end up experiencing all the problems the system is supposed to mitigate. We already have an issue where low and unskilled work doesn't pay enough to support a family; fifty years ago it could (hell, one low skill job could support a family, nowadays two low skilled jobs often aren't enough). Some of that is due to business friendly politicians, some of it is due to competition from immigrants. If we only had legal immigrants competing for the jobs, wages would not have fallen as steeply, simply because there would be 10 million or so less workers available to do the work.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Why? Because we've already gone through this with the social security number, which was promised to be only used to administer social security benefits, and is now used for everything.
True enough. As far as I can tell, though, I have yet to be seriously harmed by my SSN. The data security provisions of my bank might be another matter, but my SSN is no more harmful to me than my name, my phone number, my dedicated IP address, or the primary keys assigned to me in any of hundreds of databases. I'm certainly not going to wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat thinking, "Oh shit! I've been assigned another number!"
We don't want any more stinking ID!!!
Meh. Doesn't even rank in the top hundred things that worry me about the government. Any number of both free and unfree countries have such things, and like gun ownership, to which the same applies, there's not much correlation between that and the local degree of personal freedom. And frankly, I'd rather not have my tax dollars going to paying for the errors and duplication of effort that come from not having a single, reliable personal ID.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Yeah, I'll be sure to let Germany know that they're about to go bankrupt. They'll be pretty surprised what with their economy kicking ours' ass, but I'm sure they'll see the writing on the wall when I tell em rubycodez said so.
The enemies of Democracy are
California does not look remotely socialist from here (UK). It does not even look particularly middle of the road. Do you feel this because those nasty people make the rich pay more tax?
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Mine came here LEGALLY. Know and understand the distinction...
I got a fistful of broken treaties with those who walked over that says "legal" is a stack of BS post-justification written by the occupiers. Just sayin'.
You really ought to learn to argue this in a way that doesn't reek of xenophobia. There *are* legitimate criticisms of uncontrolled immigration, but when you argue it on the basis of "I've got mine" you turn people off. Immigration is still useful; this country, like most countries, is a Ponzi scheme of a sort. Without immigration our population would contract and the whole scheme would collapse. Limited, legal immigration maintains the necessary population growth while allowing time for services and infrastructure to expand to support the additional load. Unlimited immigration could mean overwhelming the existing systems before they have time to adapt. Striking a balance is important, but your xenophobia causes knee jerk opposition to your argument.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
That's the fable. Any "right" that comes from society can be taken back, and that means it certainly isn't a right.
Rights require recognition from society, but that's not where they come from. Yes, people can violate your rights, but the fact that they don't violate them doesn't mean they are the source.
Rights change over time, as society dictates.
Then they aren't rights, they are privileges.
There's lots of people who get cancer at relatively young ages, get medical treatment, and live a normal lifespan. I'm sure they're all quite happy they got to live an extra 50 years or so instead of just giving up and dying. If you want to kill yourself when you have a health problem (whether it's cancer or a finger cut, because after all, that could get infected), then go ahead. The rest of us prefer health care to get the most life possible.
No, rights absolutely come from society. That is the only place they can come from. You can claim "god", "the creator" or "they just are", but in reality what you're talking about is the social mores of the people in that era. As such they can change with the beliefs of the people.
Here's an exercise for you- you claim they don't come from society. Then where do they come from? Because they sure as hell don't come from nature, and there's nowhere else they *can* come from.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
They tried. We had better weapons, for the most part.
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
...is more government power. Once the national ID is in place it will be expanded. First ID, then driver's license, then credit card, then key card, and so on, and it will not be long before the United States government has a record of everything you buy, every place you enter or leave, every place you can enter, and, eventually, everything you do or say. This is not a slippery slope argument because we are already far down that slippery slope sliding on our asses at bewildering speed to the rocks at the bottom. Picture yourself living in a world where everything you do or say or possibly, not too long hence, even think, is being continuously monitored by the almighty government. This isn't just a conspiracy theory any more. It's a policy. A $500 ticket every time your car drifts a couple of miles an hour over the speed limit, spot checks scanning your (effectively naked) body for weapons or contraband, not just at airports but lots of other places that "need security", the government monitoring your fat intake, your cholesterol level, how well your kidneys function, how much nicotine is in your blood. Don't think so? Socialized medicine is all the excuse needed to directly regulate everything you eat, everything you drink, every product you ingest, rub on, carry.
We live in a country with literally millions of pages of laws, rules, regulations, and requirements that apply to every citizen. Now picture what it will be like when the government is finally able to completely enforce every single tiny, seemingly inconsequential rule, law, regulation, or requirement that's on the books. Tell me how anyone will be able to get through a day without being cited for multiple violations of laws that you can't even know exist because no one can read that much material.
I'm sorry. That's not a free country. That's not America. That's not what our forefathers wanted to leave for their posterity. And it's no place I want to live. So where will we be able to go, those of us who still want freedom or privacy or the right to make decisions for ourselves? Why do any of you even want to live in such a country? Make no mistake. That is where Obama is going to end us up. If he's elected to a second term, you will see all of the above put into place.
And Congress did not "give us" the right to medical care. Rights are intrinsic to each and every person, they cannot be granted and when they are taken away there is tyranny. Rights are negative things, we need them so we can stop other people from doing things to us that we don't like. When you turn a right around and make it a positive thing, like the "right of medical care" then you also put into place a requirement of service from someone else to implement that right. You're "right" then enslaves that person. That's not freedom. And that's a fact.
And frankly, I'd rather not have my tax dollars going to paying for the errors and duplication of effort that come from not having a single, reliable personal ID.
So, you would rather have your tax dollars paying for the errors and bad assumoptions that come from having a single overly trusted id instead.
Life is never so simple as you appear to believe. There will never be such a thing as a "single, reliable personal ID" - for a whole host of reasons. Chief among them is that having just one ID is like having one big lock between the fraudsters and piles of money. Figure out how to forge that ID that everyone thinks is reliable and BAM they are in the promised land of fraud.
That duplication of effort you don't like? That's security and efficiency. Having application-specific IDs makes the system more secure because (a) a lot less people are going to be trying to forge each one - think 50 different driver's licenses versus one, that's 50 times the expertise required from the same number of forgers. (b) requiring multiple ids for certain high-value authentications makes those forgeries even harder while low value authentications don't need some uber-id, they just need to provide a reasonable level of confidence.
And don't forget (c) - unintended consequences - one id to rule them all means one key for every single database. That puts a handle on your entire life that anyone with malicious intent can grab ahold of and yank on. There is no need for me to have the same identity at the bank, at the grocery where I use a credit card, at the DMV, at my job, at the nighclub, etc. All of those places just need to authenticate me in their limited domain - the bank needs to know that I am the same person taking money out who puts money in, the grocery store just needs to know that I am the authorized user of my credit card, the DMV just needs to know that I am qualified to drive with no legal sanctions against it, my job only needs to know that I'm the same guy they interviewed, the nightclub only needs to know that I'm of legal age to drink alcohol and that they haven't kicked me out in the past, etc.
None of those organizations need to know what the other organization knows about me. But put everything under one number and you can count on them either sharing that information for their profit - not yours or my benefit - at the very least boxing all the info up in a database that they sell access to ala credit reporting agencies gone wild. And this isn't some chicken-little thing - DMVs have routinely sold their databases to companies who resell it to anyone willing to pay. That's despite cases like "My Sister Sam" where an actress had a stalker who pulled her DMV info to find her house, walked up to her door and shot her in the face, killing her dead. As it is today, any PI or other motivated individual can pull up a buttload of personal information on you for a couple of hundred dollars.
The solution isn't some gargantuan mess of privacy laws either - laws that will require tons of overhead for compliance, and can easily be changed at the whim of a panicked congress or just outright ignored by criminals. The solution is to stop trying to centralize identity. Leave it the fuck alone. Let each group do what it needs to do authentication the people it needs to authenticate, and no more.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Rights are an aspect of reality and apply to individuals.
If you lived as an isolated individual, you would have to build shelter, make tools, hunt and gather for food. No other person would be there to stop you. You would be free to preserve your life and well-being; you would be free to take the actions you saw fit to take; you would be free to keep the shelter, tools, and food that you produced. The only thing you would have to worry about would be animals, and the vagaries of nature.
When people choose to live together, they can recognize what it means to live as a human being, and apply that to a social setting. The rights to life, liberty, and property are the recognition of the life of a human individual in society with other human individuals.
People could live in close proximity, and wantonly steal or kill one another, but that's not society. That's living like animals.
Society cannot invent rights, only recognize them; government cannot grant rights, only protect them. Rights exist apart from society and government, and their existence is definite and specific.
If the social mores of a group of people reflect something other than life, liberty, and property -- so much the worse for them. What they're perpetuating has nothing to do with rights. Moreover, what they're perpetuating is something less than a human society.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
I don't file a claim with my auto insurance company every time I need to change the oil, get a car wash, get new tires, or replace a broken CV axle. I pay for it myself, and it's cheap (actually, dirt cheap because I do it myself). So why should I have some giant insurance company that I have to go through every time I visit a doctor for an annual check-up or an ingrown toenail or whatever?
That's because your car isn't insured against breakdowns. If you paid monthly for breakdown insurance, the warranty company would be smart to throw in monthly oil changes and build it into the price. That way, you'd be much more likely to get that basic maintenance done, and ultimately their repair bills would be lower. And the reason you go through the "giant insurance company" is that doctors have colluded to charge you three or four times as much if you go in uninsured. That's why that doctor's visit with the $20 copay will cost you between $60 and $240 if you go in uninsured--and that's just for the checkup.
Borders and nations are artificial, man-made. They enforce a low-brow, low-IQ "us vs. them"' mentality and thus belong in the dark ages.
Let's see how fast this gets modded down as a troll.
Really? I thought borders were to show where one government's laws end and another's begin. You know, there are governments that will force you to pray five times a day, by killing you and your family if you don't, right? Provided that those governments exist at the will of the people, I'm OK with that. But where does that government no longer have the right to force YOU to pray to Allah five times a day?
I bet it's a border.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
To be fair most of that was an accident. (Our diseases did the vast majority of the killing.) And you are actually completely wrong. We killed off all the native americans? Than where are all Hispanics in the world coming from? Are they magic ninjas? O no wait they are native Americans or at least their distance cousins.
Why? Because diseases are communicable. And because keeping people healthy benefits everyone. And because it's the morally correct thing to do.
My former roommate was an ER nurse. At one of her jobs, she was the only nurse who spoke Spanish and, as such, treated a lot of the illegal immigrants that came in. She would complain to no end about how these people would come in with some gaping wound and only after treating that wound would she figure out that six other maladies including symptoms consistent with TB. Until she quit the job, she was taking a TB test a least once a month.
The thing is, when people don't have health care, they'll put off going to the doctor until it's unavoidable. Meanwhile, they're walking petrie dishes that interact with the rest of us and help spread disease. And by the time they do come in, their problems are worse and more expensive to fix than they would have been if they'd come in when they first noticed a problem. Sure, we'll attempt to bill them, but it's an almost futile effort. Unless we're ready to accept a health care system where people are denied emergency care unless they've got insurance, there's no way around this. If health care is universal and free, they'll get treated as soon as possible whenever they have something wrong.
Also, even though these people are likely doing menial work, keeping them healthy means they can continue to do that menial labor and we all benefit from that.
Lastly, some of us want to live in a world that's more compassionate than the selfish world that's typically the result of free-market ideals. If I'm fortunate enough to earn a comfortable living and others are not, I want to do my part to help them enjoy a more comfortable life. Not to the extent communism takes things, since that removes the incentive to work hard and try to improve your life, but defining a minimum standard of life to which everyone is entitled is not a bad thing. And I view access to health care as part of that minimum standard of life that I think everyone should have.
Hispanics aren't pure native american. They're also descendants of immigrants from Spain and Portugal and such.
I don't read AC A human right
Well said. Fact is, when some one is hurt the first thing EMS responders do is help the person, not check their ID. This card won't change that, or do folks think that we should wait on starting CPR or stopping bleeding until after we find their card and make sure that the government says it's ok to help these people? The law says we help every one, it doesn't say to let them die because they are not supposed to be in this country. With that in mind, the card changes nothing, except make it simpler for folks to keep track of people that may want to complain about having people always looking over their shoulders. Now, change the law so that it says no card and you get no help, then it would make a diff, but until then it is for tracking purposes only. Heck, I'm a white male with roots in the US going way back, and /I/ have a harder time getting health care then the illegal immigrants. This card isn't going to help the US, a country founded on freedom. It will help the folks that think every one needs to be tracked and watched because they may dare to think differently. I can't help but notice that our parents and grandparents lived quite well with out all this extra security and protections. They had planes, bombs, guns, drugs and all that other stuff for a long time and some how we survived. I don't believe that the world has suddenly become so much more of a danger that we need all this crap. Want to live in fear, fine with me. But it's time to wake up and tell folks to stop insisting that every one live in fear. It's the same world you lived in as a child, and your parents lived in all the way back. There have always been risks, there always will be risks. Use that brain a bit and chances are you'll be just fine.
Question reality.
My house in NC was broken into at least 3 times. They cut the phone wires, they broke 3 doors worth of locks. I lost my washer and dryer, all my garden equipment, all of the records, tapes, CDs, computer equipment, stereo equipment and they even took a cheap wall clock and couch!
The damage that they did to my house was in the thousands. The material things that they took were in the tens of thousands. Insurance didn't cover but a fraction of it. I'm not angry.
What they did take was 20 years of memories and my awards and achievements for serving America as a member of the United States Air Force. That is what really hurt. For twenty years I defended the rights of Americans to freely worship, demonstrate, practice liberty and all the little things that make up America, only to have petty thieves steal the few mementos that I had for all my efforts.
I wish I could have been there to greet them as they broke down the door a second time with my 12 gauge (they took that too), cocked and loaded with 00 buckshot. To hell with them! I pray that there is a deity and he has a special hell for those people that destroyed my property, robbed me of my material possessions, caused me unwarranted mental anguish and took from me my piece of mind and belief that all humans are equal.
Those people aren't human, those inhuman bastards are lower than dirt, they're scum, there is no justification for their very existence. When I hear about how others stood their ground, or utilized castle law, I cheer.
You may mod me down now, thanks!
I do provide an answer. I can provide dozens of successful nations working as I described, and working well. You'll find them in Europe and Asia (not China, think Japan or South Korea). It's been proven to my satisfaction that the way you describe things working is false in practice, and that collecting taxes and using that to provide a minimum standard of living and safety net (things such as universal health care and education) for the worst off in society is a better way to run things. Moreover, it's the morally superior way to do things, as it recognizes the humanity and dignity of everyone, not just the wealthy or the lucky.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
There is no duty to warn the intruder or use less than lethal force
Bonkers.
Pretty much every British person is proud of their National Health Service and their unarmed police.
A significant amount of Americans foam at the mouth at the thought of not being able to take a gun into Starbucks or the thought of providing health care to someone unable to pay.
Bonkers.
simon