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Smile for the US Secret Service
Judg3 writes "Apparently the United States federal government began a plan in 1997 to start a national photographic database, digitizing driver's license photos among other things. More details are availible online. " It's being test piloted in 3 states currently, while kudos goes to Electronic Privacy Information Center for uncovering the information about this program. As would be expected the bogeymen are "illegal immigrants and terrorists".
That's actually the issue. The government would not walk up to someone from, say, 100 years ago and say "we want your name, date of birth, who you are married to, how many children you have, where you live, your picture, and the right to sell all of that information to the highest bidder, or failing that, give it away. We also want to issue you a number, and if we draw that number, you're going to have to join the army." 100 years ago, the average citizen would have started a revolution over less. (140 years ago, a bunch of people DID.)
Instead, the government said "We just want to start tracking births and deaths. It's important to know how many citizens we have." They had no real use for the information that anyone could see, other than a census - so nobody minded.
Then they started tracking marriages. There were some benefits, and they seemed to offset the problems, so nobody minded. Except a few privacy nuts - probably polygamists.
Then they start issuing ID numbers to everybody. "It's just a number; it helps us keep track of where government benefits should go. You don't want to lose out on benefit money, do you?" So nobody minded.
Then they started licensing drivers. Those new motor cars were dangerous if the driver was unskilled; so nobody minded.
Then they started tracking income. "We have to know where the poorest areas are, so we know who needs help the most." So nobody minded.
And now today, the government knows your name, date of birth, who you are married to, how many children you have, where you live, your picture, tracks you by number for taxation and draft purposes, and nobody minds. Except a few privacy nuts. But hey, don't worry - the government says their all a bunch of paranoid gun nuts. Just watch, I'll bet they'll be in a bunker someday, threatening your children, and we'll have to go after them with tanks. But we'll need their pictures, so we know who we're going after, so if you'll just line up here please, and smile...
-- The meek shall inherit the Earth. In very small plots, about 6 feet by 3.
Kenny
Just like gun control issues. Are the "illegal aliens and boogeymen" going to register a gun or get a drivers license? You can drive without one for Lord knows how long, if you drive halfway decent. And guns will always be on the black-market. I am all for privacy. But do you remember that national datbase we already have here in the US? It's call Social Security. Dang near everybody born in the US has a number... Maybe they could just tattoo that on us. Grrr!
This, my friends, is the reality of modern politics.
This whole line of replies is scaring me.
Who are you hurting when you're smoking pot? Perhaps yourself, but that's no reason to stop someone from doing it. If we do that, let's keep them from drinking, from looking the wrong way at people, from doing ANYTHING that could possibly endanger them.
There's something wrong with that kind of thinking, and it leads to more and more people being thrown in jail for crimes that have no victims.
Why stop people from smoking pot? Because it made you more and more stupid?! You can't stop people from being stupid, and putting them in jail for smoking a joint is a big waste of YOUR tax money, and everyone else's, when you could be putting it towards a host of other things that are real problems in the world.
Scapegoating all of your problems on the pot smokers and on the porn on the net is a sign of living far away from where reality really is, and it's exactly what the government wants you to think. They'd rather you trade your freedom for your security. You'll end up having neither once they're all done.
The danger at the present time is that the anti-privacy technology is advancing rapidly, and the government is learning to use it much more quickly than civilians. The asymmetry in surveillance could continue to grow wider and more rapidly, ending in something like 1984. Perhaps the best thing would be for civilians to start learning about this technology, and using it to track the lives of the legislators who favor abuses of privacy.
So maybe there needs to be a web page that shows recent candid photos of all these legislators, and their home addresses, home phone numbers, travel itineraries, tax records, police records, where they eat dinner and who they meet, and all the other fun stuff they would like to know about the rest of us.
In the worst case, the government would use its monopoly on privacy to secure so much power for itself that it no longer requires the process of popular elections. This would remove the last means by which the people constrain the government. Consent of the governed would become an unnecessary hindrance.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
I agree completely about the risks of strong bad government. Overthrowing such beasts is almost impossible - look at Iraq.
I agree with what you say about most effort in many liberal regimes (and most especially the US) being directed at keeping government weak. I think this has been an unspoken bu longstanding principle for some time - not only must we forbid that the government take certain powers, we must ensure it remains weak so if it does take them, we can overthrow it.
My concern with this is that weak bad governments, being unscrupulous, have a very easy time turning themselves into strong bad governments, especially if people are angry or not particularly aware of what is going on.
The situation the US is in now, where it has a moderately strong government with a widely questionable record, raises the question of what to do to make it at least a good government, if not a strong good government. If people set out to weaken governments on the ground that they are not particularly good, I think its quite possible large portions of the electorate will get upset because certain tasks they think the the responsibility of the state are not being filled. That increases the risk of unscrupulous, and probably bad, governments being elected by promising to clean up the mess. This is what looks like it might happen in Russia.
That "Mark of the Beast" bit is a bit ridiculous when applied to this context, but it could prove useful.
Consider: although free speech is constantly under attack in the US, no one dares question freedom of religion (no one regarded as a sane person, at any rate). Therefore, you can always refuse to be added to the database "for religious reasons" and the government cannot stop you for fear of word getting out (hell, phrase it that way and this would be an issue that would likely have every activist group in America, from the Christian Coalition to the ACLU, from People for the American Way to the Citizens for the Ten Commandments, all agreeing for once; that'd be kinda cool).
If I remember correctly, this is even precedented on a couple of military bases, where "MARC cards" were becoming popular for matters of security clearance. The name has since been changed to "SMART cards" and they're not as pervasive as they might have been. Someone posted that on Slashdot once; I forget who.
You can get 25 years in jail for stealing pizza
The government has a back door into every windows machine
It's damn-near illegal to use software that the government can't crack
The us government spies on the world, and passes secrets on to us companies.
Am I missing anything?
(I should point out at this juncture that, MS-hatin' linux-usin' zealot that I am, I don't believe the NSAkey story).
If you've got a congressbeing, write to it now (irony: listening to Manic Street Preachers as I type. Like they say, if you tolerate this your children will be next).
Seriously people, could cracking be justified in a case like this: A company without my consent makes copies of my photgraphs for a purpose I believe is illegitimate, and refuses to remove the copies at my request. Argh....
When will humanity stop trying to screw itself over in its endless quest of the almighty dollar?
I live in New Hampshire and our new drivers licenses have a magnetic strip on the back that keeps track of all kinds of information. So when you get pulled over they can just swipe your card. But who is to stop them from keeping information other than Height Weight and criminal history. I'm not sure about the latest ones but the license I currently have has a digital image as well. I wouldn't be surprised to find that there is a list like this in NH or on a state level.
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
Are there no privacy laws in the U.S. ? I'm from the Netherlands and we have fairly strict laws on privacy. Organisations always have to inform the people involved that they are/will be registered. Organisations even have to show you what they've got on you if you request it. (This does not apply to all information, criminal investigation stuff for example is different)
When these laws came into effect all organisations had to inform you what info they had on you and for what purpose. This opened my eyes a bit. I never visited a church in my life and found out I had been registered there as a member all my life.
Could someone tell me how this works in the U.S. ?
Message on our company Intranet:
"You have a sticker in your private area"
beauty is only a light switch away
7) Illegal immigrants and terrorists segment of population most likely to get legitimate driver's licenses
6) Uncle Billy-Bob now more likely to stop bumming rides; learn to drive
5) Privacy concerns overstated due to overwhelming public appeal of having complete strangers gawk at your license photo
4) Police officers will continue to mistake your photo for your evil twin Volkar.
3) Criminals less likely to steal your particular identity if vast number is available in one place
2) Government less likely to raise taxes thanks to revenue gained by selling image database
1) Unflattering license photos show how people really look
We want endless gardens of data, where the bits can flower, flourish and reproduce. -- Andy Mueller-Maguhn
Illegal immigrants and terrorists AGAIN? Can't they come up with something original??
"We're making a national database of driver's licenses to crack down on underage drinking!" Yeah, that's it!!
Unfortunately, that might actually get someone's attention. Most people aren't illegal immigrants or terrorists, but I'd say most of us had a beer or two hundred before reaching the magical 21st birthday. And unless DWI was involved, I somehow doubt most people would want to turn a 19-year-old trying to buy some alcohol into a federal criminal.
Is this the real reasoning behind the program? It might be a component. Who knows? It could be an easier way to track "subversive elements" (like I've posted on other threads, the FBI probably has a good-sized file on me, but it hasn't interfered with my life YET).
Or here's another interesting and somehow frightening thought: IIRC, strict followers of Islam do not believe in taking pictures of anyone or having any pictures taken of them. "You're not in our photo database, and you look Arabic
Anyone else got any to add to this?
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
Here you all go talking about how the government shouldn't keep more information about it's people, the very day after you all were talking about what additional information Malda should keep on SlashDot regulars. ... Hmm... *whisper* Rob Malda Works for the CIA *
Yea, well, it's OK for SlashDot to do it, but not the US Government?
I'd say the key difference there is choice again. We can choose what info to give Rob, the Gov can just take whatever it wants.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
If your going to let this government rule over you, tell you what do to, how to live, what you are allowed to do freely and what you aren't, send you to prison, and even kill you, certainly they should be entiteled to having photographs of you.
I believe we already have something like this here, and while I'm against the whole idea of authoritarian government, if you are going to have one, it might as well know what you look like.
Lifting the Crypto restictions is SO much more important to your future as free men than this is, but I guess these sorts of issues tend to get spotlight because it doesn't involve mathematics. Sigh.
-
It seems to me that it boils down to a question of use. Will people treat this database as a tool or as an authorative information source. The latter can be very harmfull to individual freedom.
"The future is already here,
it's just not evenly distributed yet"
"The future is already here,
it's just not evenly distributed yet"
- William Gibson
Down here where I live in Texas there are someplaces that make you put your thumb print on a check to cash it. And you have to give up a thumb print digitally to the Drivers License place to even get one. I saw a guy in front of me refuse and they refused to give him a license. National ID card is kinda what this sounds like just twisted differently
Good is never enough, when you dream of being great!
what you guys didn't know is that the secret
...i can see it now:
...double plus ungood indeed brother.
service was actually working on the
world's largest personals and dating service ever!!
they were going to use your pictures and personal information to match
the whole country up with their prospective
soulmates. *hurt look* and you, rob malda and your damned
Electronic Privacy Information Center cohorts,
have ruined their birthday surprise!
a plaugue on both your houses!
453-28-7539! you will now procreate with 886-91-1027!
-adam
javanet.com/~user
Okay. Seems our "Land of the Free" is very quickly becoming the "Home of the Brave" *New World*.
/. affect on some country's immigration services would be pretty funny.)
Anyone wanna run over a list of countries with better privacy/crypto laws? I've heard Netherlands mentioned on this thread already...
We'll just have a Slashdot vote on the best country, and we can just pack up and leave for the number-one voted. (The real life
It's getting to the point where I don't want to be stuck in America when I am 30. *sigh*
This sig is false.
There's something I don't get here. I know its a long standing conviction of Anglo-American civil libertarians that this kind of thing is Bad News. I am more or less in agreement with that, but thinking about it a bit more, what exactly is wrong with it ?
It seems to me that measures like this increase the ability of the government to enforce the law, regardless of what that law actually is. That makes the assertion that this will help to catch drug smugglers/terrorists/child molersters/people with green hair/tomorrow's public enemy number one, reallistic. It also, of course, means it can be used to implement arbitary and stupid laws, such as, for instance drug prohibition (just to pick a nice uncontroversial example).
However the problem is not the databases and so on themselves, but the laws they are being used to implement. If the US had the sort of utterly minimal libertarian code of laws that many people here probably favour, would measures like this still be a problem ?
I'm concerned about this, because I do believe that if we stop relatively (note thats relatively) well-behaved governments from doing their jobs effectively, we may well be increasing our chances of getting larger, more unwieldly, more tyranical and more expensive governments in their place.
Oh, and please don't reply with some stupid platitude and privacy and freedom. I know that's what is believed, I want to know why it is necessarily true.
Sadly, there are systems that can id people quite well. When these become cost effective, and hooked into the CCTV systems widespread across much of the UK now, such an image database would let the Government monitor your movements quite effectively.
. htm
See: http://www.dss.state.ct.us/digital/news11/bhsug11
and
http://www.tao.ca/wind/rre/0587.html
and also
http://www.spy.org.uk/n-mandrake.htm
spy.org.uk have lots of info on CCTV and privacy concerns.
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could be real only when buildings have a GUI interface to their sprinkler systems available online.
It's simply that the government does not care about them. It's somehow gotten the impression that it is above the law somehow.
Look, once again their cover story is almost legit. But the fact remains, someone will abuse this. It's simply the law of averages; when something is ripe for abuse, someone will eventually come along and do so. Look at Germany in the 1930's and 40's; severe depression, extremely low confidence in the government, and other such factors. Along comes some unknown artist named Adolf, and suddenly you have one of the most hideous examples of abuse of power in history: the Third Reich.
So it will be with this. The nature of the abuse will probably be much different from the Third Reich (I seriously doubt the Secret Service is going to kill people based on race, though when you consider the Japanese internment camps of WWII I suppose it's a possibility), but the effects will be every bit as real. It's only a matter of time. I doubt its creators will abuse it; most people actually do start this kind of hideous obscenity with good intentions (hell; even the pro-censorship people mean well for the most part, not realizing just how selfish/lazy/deluded/evil their reasons for wanting it really are). But someone will come along. Who? I don't know. The most likely candidate in today's admistration doesn't have enough time left in office to do it (seeing as the database isn't even finished).
I used to live in US and I honestly couldn't understand
why there was not FAR MORE terrorist activity than there is.
It's not as though the US has not made a few enemies over the
years. For instance the IRA may cause the British government
a few problems, but Irish catholics have received wonderful treatment
over the years compared to American Indians.
Then there are large sections of Muslims, various central american
countries, not to mention miscellaneous crackpots who don't
really have a legitimate excuse, but would just like to kill Americans
out of some misguided jealousy.
I came to the conclusion that there must be a massively higher
amount of surveillance going on than was generally acknowledged.
Since hearing about Echelon and various other NSA activities I think
this conclusion is correct.
Don't misunderstand - I'm not saying that all this surveillance is
a good thing, but don't write off terrorists as a threat just because
you don't often get bothered by them. There are plenty of
potential terrorists out there.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
I don't believe it IS necessarily true.
Privacy is very subjective. Is it an invasion to have your picture taken and stored ? There are many equally valid views about this. (Someone mentioned orthodox Islamic people who certainly would have problems with such a law.) But where does our sense of ownership begin... do we own our image?
It often seems that this sort of belief of ownership does not crop up until the "evil, conniving, capitalistic" government is involved. How many of us complained about having our pictures taken, printed in a book and handed out to everyone in our school (yearbooks)... likely very few. Admittedly, we DID have a choice about this and we knew that it was being done, but is that the only difference ? Is the real issue that we feel our CHOICE has been taken away from us ?
I think that people are not so riled up about lack of privacy and freedom, since this is not really new... I think people are bothered because the knowledge about it was hidden.
---
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
If anything, the media is perfectly happy for Americans to focus on distractions like sports, work, etc., than to worry about politics. Hell, most Americans are completely sick of politics and only care about the scandals the presidency has.
What a sad state of affairs. The war on its citizenry with the drug war, the war on encryption, the war on the freedom of speech on the net, etc., and no one knows or cares. They're too busy working or watching sports.
In theory, we ought to have privacy rights in the U.S.A. The federal constitution is one of enumerated powers; and the right to pry into and compile the details of everyone's life isn't one of those powers. And the U. S. Supreme Court has held that privacy is a right of citizens (see here for a quick summary).
In practice, we have been suckers for any come-on which promises security, to be "tough on crime" or to protect us from those lurking terrorists. ("Why do you care if you have nothing to hide" is a common attitude.) So there's very little (practically, none) legislation to actually apply that right of privacy to government or private data collecting. The only place that the right to privacy has been actually applied vigorously is as it relates to sex, or to the ability to kill unborn children (the in/famous Roe vs. Wade case where the Court declared the ability to abort a child a fundamental American "privacy" right).
> It seems to me that measures like this increase the ability of the government to enforce the law, regardless of what that law actually is.
> However the problem is not the databases and so on themselves, but the laws they are being used to
implement.
I'll try to give my opinion, expressed very badly I'm sure, of why I disagree. I believe you are right in saying that measures like this increase the ability of the government to enforce the law. And let's also assume that you can have a good or a bad government. So the four choices would be
1. A weak good government.
2. A strong good government.
3. A weak bad government.
4. A strong bad government.
It seems to me that the only totally unacceptable choice would be four. If you have a strong bad government you're pretty much screwed. At this point you can't really change anything and you're stuck. Once a government becomes strong, it is very difficult to make it weak again, governments do not like to give up power. So a lot of the effort in the US is directed toward keeping our government from getting too strong. This way if, at some point in the future, the people decide that the government has become unacceptable we can still do something about it.
Problem is that we elect officials that look the other way or outright allow the intellegence community to abuse our percieved rights. Though I'm not actually convinced that a national photo database in and of itself is a bad thing, if it were, I'd rather holler at my congressional reps rather than CIA, SS, NSA, FBI, etc...
It's their jobs to collect information. If congress/senate/president insist on bending over backwards to accomodate their requests, we should oust them from office. I'm actually quite comfortable with all those 3 letter agencies existances... I just wish that our elected officials would say no to them (at least once in a while
Two things I'm curious about are what the bar code on the front is for, and what the mag stripe on the back is for..