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".

Comments

Hell in a handbasket

[rde]

To sum up one Irishman's impression of the US based on recent news stories:

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).

What about local lists similar to this?

[smkndrkn]

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.

Privacy

[_Spirit]

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"

Alternate theories ...

[fable2112]

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 ... you're obviously a terrorist." NOT good.

Anyone else got any to add to this? :)

Re:Alternate theories ...

[jabber]

The real reason for this, and other spooky things that have gone on lately is this (IMHO).

Job Security

Since the fall of the "evil empire" we have had lots of essoterically skilled people with nothing better to do. The government can't exactly have a layoff of people with these skills, since there are other countries - some of them adjacent to Kuwait and Iran, that would be willing to pay a lot of money for such skills.

So classifying, qualifying, quantifying and cataloguing the American public is the NSA/CIA/FBI/etc way of keeping their staff gainfully occupied with busywork. And as a side effect, the residual 'kill-a-commie' directors get another means of making a power grab later.

Not a big deal...

[Hobbex]

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.

-
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.

Fingerprints

[BradyB]

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

What exactly is so bad about this ?

[SimonK]

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.

In theory, Yes. In reality, Hah!

[Zach Frey]

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).