EU Preparing Vast Air Passenger Database

jfruh writes: Despite privacy concerns and doubts over its usefulness, a plan to track passengers entering or leaving the European Union in a series of national databases is likely to become reality by the end of the year. Legislation working its way through the European Parliament will authorize European nations to set up databases of the sort already in use in the UK, and to share information with each other. All the EU parties except the Greens are in favor.

Comments

A passengers DB

[hcs_$reboot]

So before that was done unofficially. Next, that will be official. The difference is that little by little people tend to get used to be traced everywhere (and this time again, the move is probably granted thanks to the terrorist attacks in Paris a monh ago)

Failure mode?

[KlomDark]

Perhaps we are entering another species failure mode that we will have to solve for. Computers and the internet are great gifts to humanity, but it seems lately to have taken a bad turn. Instead of uplifting the human race, it's starting to look more like a trap.

I've spent my whole life involved with computers and networking. Now at times I wonder if I will eventually regret my contributions to building this better mouse trap.

I personally find that the risk of a dark totalitarian period that lasts for hundreds or thousands of years to be more threatening than any terrorist threat these dark systems purport to protect us from.

Humanity needs to figure out how we want to use these new tools. All this surveillance mode machinery is not good. It just takes one evil dictator to get control of this to trap us in ten thousand years of darkness.

It's a sad fearful reality we are marching towards these days.