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Biometric Database Plans Hidden In Immigration Bill
Doug Otto writes "Buried deep in the bowels of a bi-partisan immigration reform bill is a 'photo tool.' The goal is to create a photo database consisting of every citizen. Wired calls it 'a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.' Of course the database would be used only for good, and never evil. 'This piece of the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act is aimed at curbing employment of undocumented immigrants. But privacy advocates fear the inevitable mission creep, ending with the proof of self being required at polling places, to rent a house, buy a gun, open a bank account, acquire credit, board a plane or even attend a sporting event or log on the internet.'"
Hey, buddy... are you up for another filibuster?
Mission Creep is a ridiculous thing to worry about. Just like your Social Security Number, which the SS Administration has declared from the begining that it is NOT to be used as a form of identification.
Version Control. We should know WHICH politician(s) added this clause. If no one owns up to it, it gets stripped from the Bill. We need names on this type of crap.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
When you get your drivers license.. don't they already store your photo in a database?
The simple solution to this is to just NOT get a drivers license. You know that's a perfectly fine thing to do. Build your life around that fact, instead of lazily building your life around the need to drive a car on a taxpayer subsidized highway system.
These days, no ID = no vote. Opt out of a driver's license (or non-driver ID card), you opt out of voting, too. You also opt out of having a bank account. There's more, but I'll leave completing the list of opt-outs to others . . .
I am not a crackpot.
The surveillance isn't the scary part of 1984. The surveillance is just a tool being used by an oppressive government. The warning of the story is that we must ensure our government exists to serve the people, and not the other way around. Sure, that might mean the government must serve the paranoid folks clamoring for theatrical security, but it's still trying to serve the people. In 1984, every aspect of life was controlled and manipulated by the Inner Party to serve the Inner Party.
Giant facial recognition databases are a powerful tool. That technological power can be used for good or evil, but the risk of evil is no reason to fear the technology itself.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Any concerns of Big Brother database-tampering to frame you for a crime are equally weighted with the benefits of fewer fake IDs
No they aren't. Our founding principles are that we let some guilty people go free precisely because that's preferable than to possibly imprison innocent people. People using Fake IDs are an acceptable condition of not doing 'Papers please' checks on every law abiding citizen on every street corner.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
They're already written in a 'sort of pseudo-code', legalese. Problem is it is very hard to debug and really easy to insert malicious code. But if what you really meant was a language without ambiguity, that seems to be impractical.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
"What's wrong with this? I know it's all George Orwell and stuff, but really. We've moved so far past having any real privacy anymore, who cares? I like the idea of people not being able to pretend to be me, not that anyone would really want to."
You should care because it's not possible to have a democratic form of government without anonymity, and you can't have anonymity without privacy.
The reasons are many, but here is the upshot: if you have no privacy, how can you speak out (or vote) against oppression without fear of reprisal? Answer: you can't. History is full of examples, you shouldn't even have to think twice to come up with one you remember.
I think what you're missing here is that our Constitution, and in particular, the Bill of Rights, was founded on the principle of denying the government too much power over the citizens precisely because the founding fathers had no faith in future elected officials using power exclusively for good. Every place where the government's actions are limited by the Bill of Rights, they are prevented from doing good while preventing them from doing harm.
History has proven that a government that holds too much power over its people will eventually devolve into tyranny. The general public has no possibility of building a database like this for their use against government tyranny, which means that the government must be disallowed from having such a database as well. We can only maintain freedom by carefully maintaining the balance between what your country can do to you and what you can do to your country.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.