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Finnish Politician Suggests Embedding Chips In Citizens To Protect the Welfare State
New submitter janit writes that social benefits to Finnish citizens living outside of Finland have in recent days been the cause of controversy, and links to an article which suggests just how much of a controversy: A politician from the True Finns Party, Pasi Mäenranta, is also worried about the abuse of the benefits. He published a post on Facebook, where he suggests that all Finnish citizens leaving the country be embedded with an identification chip. Sounds like a parallel system might be a popular idea with some U.S. presidential candidates, too.
I guess we need a second installment of 1984 as the pace of ideas from authoritarian control freaks have exceeded Orwell's wildest nightmares.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Revelations 13:16-17:
And he causes all, the small and the great, and the rich and the poor, and the free men and the slaves, to be given a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, and he provides that no one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name...
Just sayin', regardless of reality or fantasy, when your policy suggestion is basically the exact thing the devil does during the "end times," you might have a tough sell there.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I think that at least with smartphones he misses the point, when they were introduced the point wasn't to track the individual carrying the phone, it was to provide the individual with the ability to communicate and to use applications for productivity. Arguably some of the first smartphones from Qualcomm didn't even have data service, the productivity applications were entirely centered on the phone, and they were essentially Palm Pilots with a telephone function added to them.
Jump to the modern phone, and you find that if people use features that allow them to "check in" from a given location, they only use that feature when they choose to use that feature. They do not state their location everywhere they go, they use it selectively, to essentially boast, or because they earn a living through online connectedness and marketing and it is to their advantage to share far too much information with the rest of us.
As to the data communication between the handset and the carrier, that's an unfortunate necessity of the technology. The frequencies and density of users means that phones have to be tracked in order to remain in communication with them as they roam about a given area and change towers. The average cell user doesn't really understand how that technology works either, but would probably not be happy if their movements were being logged everywhere they went, an that theoretically should be privileged information between the carrier and the subscriber, as in the United States, one Federal Circuit has recently ruled.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
... Europe considers implementing a new chip-in-Finn system!
Scandinavian welfare states evolved from the traditional communitarian cultures of these countries. Within this culture, the Lutheran moral code promotes helping each other out in time of need while stigmatizing freeloading.
But now Europe as a whole is facing an uncontrollable, Arizona-style flood of refugees who are not part of this culture and who do not feel restrained by the Lutheran moral code. Now Finland has its first Joe Arpaio.