At the time, all I had was a Hawaii state ID. The cops couldn't find me in the computer system, so they said, "Well, legally, we can hold you for up to three days while we try to find out who you are."
This is a story that is often repeated in jurisdictions that have had photo ID cards for a long time. For some reason, at some point, the photo ID isn't all that trusted anymore by law enforcement, and so its value drops tremendously, and you get into the odd position that the card is essentially worthless.
I have heard of this in central/south america, Italy, et cetera. Cops suddenly decide that they don't like your ID, haul your ass in, and keep you for a few hours until some other identity check is made.
Oh, I guess it's a form of harassment as well, though the above situation I call a "photo ID trust failure."
taking advantage of state benefits (except in the form of tax-breaks) shows your willing to parasite off of tax-payers
I read "state benefits" to refer to unemployment, not welfare, medicaid, food stamps, et cetera.
Unemployment is an insurance that you (and your employer) pay to cover you if you lose your job. How much you get out of it is directly related to how much you put into it. There are no tax payers paying for you here, its insurance (and in some cases, a few states have the unemployment system privatized.)
Insurance fraud is interesting. It happens mainly in states with very uncompetitive insurance environments, and therefore have high prices.
Car insurance is terribly important, but often people feel like they aren't getting anything out of it, which is the point, it's property insurance. So the more people pay in car insurance, the more they feel ripped off, the more likely it is they will consider insurance fraud.
New Jersey spends all its time trying to figure out why it has an uncompetitive market, and reducing insurance fraud. The problem is one in the same.
Which airlines will carry a person, who tells them - up-front - that they have a heart or other serious medical condition?
All of em. Very common situation; in some instances they may prefer to have a doctor on board in case they need to operate the electrical paddles, but airlines fly people with all sorts of special conditions every day (I imagine after signing a few liability documents.)
The exception to this is a person who is getting ready to give birth. It's a combination of they don't want that happening in air, and, sometimes, the receiving country doesn't want to deal with granting the child of a non-citizen citizenship.
(If a baby is born on an airplane in international airspace, the convention is that the child is eligible for the citizenship of its parents in addition to the citizenship of where the airline is based.)
you're saying that a hard drive full of kiddie porn images shouldn't be admissable?
There are quite a lot of issues with kiddie porn prosecution.
So I read about this article saying they got person X on kiddie porn charges, and yet I wonder how much of that is real kiddie porn, as opposed to
*photoshopped kiddie porn *18 and over porn, but with really young looking girls
the latter is of interest to me, there's a lot of really young looking girls used in porn, and I assume that the photographer and webmasters have done their duty to make sure the person is 18. However, those credentials don't pass over the net to the photo sitting on the hard drive, how does law enforcement know or not know if the girl really is over 18, though she could pass for 14?
As for the former, the idea of photoshopped kiddie porn is that it's kiddie porn without, hyptohetically speaking, having hurt a chlid in the process. Should that be illegal in that a person who consumed photoshopped kiddie porn is very likely to commit such an act? That's an ugly precedent.
Of course, this doesn't even touch the surface of what the difference is between kiddie porn and children who happen not to have any clothes on. Apparently the standard is some sorta fuzzy concept of one type of pic was taken specifically for the purpose of getting off, and the other was not.
Really odd case from Australia: a guy there makes videos of himself getting kicked in the jewels--that's the sexual fetish. He made one of a 14 year old kicking him, and was brought in on kiddie porn charges (though the girl was completely clothed.) The idea here is that a girl was being used for sexual satisfaction, though, under normal circumstances, it hardly is a sexual situation. (Dunno what happened to the case.)
Honestly, this is a mine field of questions that no one wants to talk about or answer.
I suspect that, at the level of financial complexity of Bill Gates, he no longer has a standard type credit record, but something that looks more like a business trust credit record.
It is entirely possible that he has a regular SSN. Indeed, that 1995 SSN may reference him, but that credit record may be blank/unused.
A friend of mine and her husband were/are in porn. She got models and did photography, he did website stuff.
They lived quiet lives in the suburbs, worked hard (actually, if you ask me, very hard for the money they were making) and felt they were doing honest work.
There was actually an interesting sterility to it all...there was nothing dirty about what they were doing, it was their livelyhoods. If anything, she in particular, thought of it as an artform (and there definitely is a large market for much more sophisticated artistic porn.)
I understand why you say what you say...and a lot of people also dont think of it as an honest enterprise, and I entirely understand that. But, the people in the industry do, and that's what I'm disagreeing with in your post.
Civilization is a great number of people living together.
And for civilization to work, you need to have a basic level of trust and respect for people. If you don't, and all your resources go into putting together the rules and the tools to enforce those rules, then you have a civilization who figured out what the problems are with those tools and how to evade them. (My example to prove this point is a little odd...but its politicians and campaign finance laws. Plenty of rules, plenty of tools, but the more rules and tools you put together, the more politicans seem to go out of their way to creatively raise money.)
In this light, two examples come to mind. One is that of the Japanese, a highly rule based society, but one where the people have an intense need for privacy--something about so many people in such a small space, and the people just go crying out for a little bit of privacy.
The other example works well with the speeding camera issue.
here is quite a lot of fighting in the Airbus v. Boeing arguments, different attitudes toward building airplanes.
The Airbuses have computing systems which will preven a pilot from making extreme manoevres if the computer believes the action will have severely negative results.
A lot can be said to defend this concept, pilot eror does cause accidents. On the other hand, a lot can be said against, sometimes a really evasive maneovre will save the ship, that would normally crash it.
But I think that a lot of pilots also just wanna be treated as professionals...and they should be the ones making the decisions, either bad or good. Its not the plane's role to decide that.
I think that's the case with speeding cameras...it's an idea of a lack of trust and respect to the driver. It's also very removed from people...for many people, their only dealing with government may be what happens when they get pulled over. That officer's fairness and treatement will decide how that person thinks of government, to me it's essential to have real people involved in this process, as opposed to hiding behind cameras.
Lets compare like with like after all. our choice guys, but frankly I'd rather be roughed up than killed.
Then tell me what's the likelyhood I will be mugged in London over the likelyhood of being killed in Washington. If they are sufficiently close to each other, then your post makes sense. But if the likleyhood of me being killed in Washington is very very low anyway, and while I am more likely to be killed in DC over London, there still is a higher likelyhood that if i I spend time in either city, I'll be mugged in London and not killed in DC.
the idea of photos on driver's licenses was anathema
Lots of different reasons for this...beginning with
a.) there was already concern that the photo license would pave the way to a national ID card
b.) the current non photo license was more than adequate, and fraud really wasn't an issue
c.) tying back in with a.) there really wasn't any particularly great reason for why the photo was needed (actually the reason it was added is in d.) and, unlike cctv, it didn't seem to be solving any problem in particular
d.) the reason why the photo was added was because of european union regulations to make licenses all over europe standardized...the UK had no interest in having a photo license, nor did law enforcement, parliament, et cetera. it was a rule promulgated by those outside of the UK
You can be watched and photographed by anybody legally in public
Yes, I can be watched in public. Whether I can be photographed in public is a slightly different issue.
Whether I can be photographed by the government in public is an even more complex issue.
Canada basically has no CCTV because of an interesting reading of the federal privacy act.
"section 4 of the Act states that "no personal information shall be collected by a government institution unless it relates directly to an operating program or activity of the institution." Personal information is defined in the Privacy Act and includes any "information about an identifiable individual that is recorded in any form."
There can be little doubt that capturing information within the range of the video surveillance camera about an individual, such as his whereabouts and behavior, amounts to collecting personal information within the meaning of the Act." (From http://henrykeyserlingk.bravepages.com/2002_HENRY_ JULY3.htm)
So the basic idea here is that the government is prohibited from collecting information that its not authorized to collect...in order for police in Canada to use cctv in a criminal situation, they have to have a warrant first. (Which makes sense...yes a police officer could watch you do your daily activities, but their ability to archive information is tremendously limited.)
I have to wonder if the Columbus data is for city of Columbus, or the surrounding areas. The suburban/exurban schools do not pay nearly as well.
I also wish to disagree on something...I don't consider Ohio "midwest." The midwest starts for me west of Central time/Misssippi river.
I do have friends who work for Columbus school as teachers, and they make $75k. They would only make $60k working in suburbia though, they have masters, and 15-20 years of experience.
Now the principals on the other hand, they make easily $120k in Columbus.
There is quite a lot of fighting in the Airbus v. Boeing arguments, different attitudes toward building airplanes.
The Airbuses have computing systems which will preven a pilot from making extreme manoevres if the computer believes the action will have severely negative results.
A lot can be said to defend this concept, pilot eror does cause accidents. On the other hand, a lot can be said against, sometimes a really evasive maneovre will save the ship, that would normally crash it.
But I think that a lot of pilots also just wanna be treated as professionals...and they should be the ones making the decisions, either bad or good. Its not the plane's role to decide that.
In my mind, it's not the printers role to decide what I print on it...I bought the damn printer, why can't it give me the benefit of the doubt?
Teachers salaries won't be increased much in our lifetimes (we have wacky priorities) and it doesn't matter.
A lot of this can be blamed on the oddness of the priorities of teaching unions.
Their preference is to have start teacher's pay very low, and then make marginal increases until year 10 or year 15, at which point huge increases will occur. (At least, this is what happens at many large urban systems, like here in Columbus.)
So a teacher may start out at $25k-$30k (an ok amount of money for the great lakes region) but with twenty years teaching experience (and a masters) could be making $75k.
Which is regrettable for many reasons, there are few really great teachers making that amount of money. Many who make that kind of cash have just stuck around long enough, get to work ontime, and don't molest anyone.
I guess that applies to many other jobs too, but teaching is not a job you can suddenly decide you want to go into...the rigamarole makes the DMV look like a trip to the sweets shop.
Some states encrypt the data before they put it in the barcode on the back of your license. It helps to prevent fake IDs
All the instances (I've heard of ) regarding encrypted machine readability was due to privacy concerns and not to prevent counterfeit cards.
Though I could see law enforcement/DMV agencies believing that line. But it makes no sense, at the very least, I could find someone with a similar body type and then just copy and past their barcode onto my counterfeit ID.
Here in Ohio I've actually got a few legislators entertaining the idea of introducing (or at the very least co-sponsoring) legislation to prohibit machine readibility on driver's licenses.
I've done it by convincing them that machine readability will cause more fraud. How?
The experience is that when a human has a machine that does scanning, the human will take a quick glance at the photo (or no glance at all) and then swipe/scan the card...and the card will say X and the human will believe it. Based just on that, remagnetizing the card or even an overlay sticker over the barcode can be very successful.
Indeed, the only thing separating the cheap plastic card from being an other cheap plastic card is the hologram and other visual/tactile elements that humans detect, but machines don't. If humans have to examine the card in depth before scanning it, then there is little reason to actually have the scanning machinery.
Which is cool...because the Ohio BMV does pay a touch extra for the plastic card blanks with magnetic stripes, so getting rid of the stripes saves a touch of money...at least enough to keep the conservatives listening.
And then I hit the privacy arguments...which I save for last.
These things take time incidentally...especially here in Ohio where legislators are deathly afraid of making a mistake, and the full year calendar means that they can take their damn time doing things.
But I was quite honored the other day...as I walked by one of the senior administrators of the BMV she stopped talking...she didn't want me to hear anything she was saying. Quite the compliment.
Machine readability is also discused on my New Jersey driver license privacy site, listed below.
I'm amused and depressed by this post...we can sent hundreds of thousands of troops to liberate a country several times the size of Texas in a very short time...and the head people still don't realize that Courier faxes not worth a shit.
On a side note, many states have moved to flat license plate printing (at least for special plates.)
Here in Ohio we're gonna be getting a special plate that has a kids theme, and I've suggested that the numbers for the plate be in lower case comic sans, or lower case first grader font. I know the BMV is gonna holler and go crazy about it, but the law will be written so that the organization can dictate what the plate will look like and I take that as we can dictate the font as well.:-)
I admit though, messing with the BMV is a personal past time.
But I mention this because states have been using upper case font since license plates were made, and it makes no sense. A lot of upper case letters are very similar to other upper case letters (in Ohio "D" as in dog "O" as in opera and the number zero are pretty similar looking.) By going to all lower case fonts, it would be much easier to figure out the license plate number from afar.
I remember several years ago my cousin from Costa Rica filed documents with INS to get her student visa extended.
What we received back was a hand written note from INS...the note was on a form explaining that, as part of an INS program towards efficiency, many correspondences would be handwritten instead of typed.
I wonder if that program is still in effect....it was in blue, and nice handwriting.
Well then the obvious soluition is to tun around and charge US makers in participating in civil rights abuses in the United States.
This to me is not all that far fetched. With all the crap going on in the US, you could very well defend the idea that companies should not be actively participating in it.
The boycottdelta.com project did a good job at this, by holding Delta responsible for being the first airline to participate in CAPPS II. That, at the very least, delayed the implimentation of CAPPS II.
Now having said that, I've had an issue with the Ohio BMV collecting and retaining driver information that they were not authroized to collect. I could say the invasion of privacy is a civil rights abuse, and that some company has participated in this abuse, it seems that, at the very least, a company supporting technology to a government should know if the government has been authorized and is permitted to collect the information.
As far as I'm concerned, some doors have been open.
or perhaps Her Majesty would decline to sign the act of parliament for it...
It is my understanding that this has not happened for hundreds of years. We have probably come to the point that royal assent is guaranteed and there exists no way for the queen/king to not grant it.
If they did not grant it, it would likely mean the start of the dismantling of the monarchy.
The vast majority of this information has been readily available to practically anyone for ages.
Quite a lot of changes have occurred concerning some of these databases.
Lexis Nexis no longer carries a lot of that data that it once did. The driver's privacy protection act (DPPA) passed in the late 1990's basically elminiated the dissmeination of motor vehicle/driver's license records to anyone except law enforcement. States are beginning to withhold birth/death records, and are slowly moving away from doing anything with disclosing the SSN.
Still, a lot of data, either from your credit bureau or Axciom, et cetera, is available. And I suspect they are keeping more info these days.
The issue many people are having with MATRIX is that it combines the databases for law enforcement...it was generally considered neither ethical or appropriate for law enforcement to go through commercial databases unless they were doing more advanced investigations.
Here we could be getting to the point where an officer could pull you over and see if your credit is in good shape simply be running your license plate. Is that appropriate for them to know at that stage of "investigation?" Is it appropriate for them to have that information at all?
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At the time, all I had was a Hawaii state ID. The cops couldn't find me in the computer system, so they said, "Well, legally, we can hold you for up to three days while we try to find out who you are."
This is a story that is often repeated in jurisdictions that have had photo ID cards for a long time. For some reason, at some point, the photo ID isn't all that trusted anymore by law enforcement, and so its value drops tremendously, and you get into the odd position that the card is essentially worthless.
I have heard of this in central/south america, Italy, et cetera. Cops suddenly decide that they don't like your ID, haul your ass in, and keep you for a few hours until some other identity check is made.
Oh, I guess it's a form of harassment as well, though the above situation I call a "photo ID trust failure."
taking advantage of state benefits (except in the form of tax-breaks) shows your willing to parasite off of tax-payers
I read "state benefits" to refer to unemployment, not welfare, medicaid, food stamps, et cetera.
Unemployment is an insurance that you (and your employer) pay to cover you if you lose your job. How much you get out of it is directly related to how much you put into it. There are no tax payers paying for you here, its insurance (and in some cases, a few states have the unemployment system privatized.)
insurance companies vs. fraud.
Insurance fraud is interesting. It happens mainly in states with very uncompetitive insurance environments, and therefore have high prices.
Car insurance is terribly important, but often people feel like they aren't getting anything out of it, which is the point, it's property insurance. So the more people pay in car insurance, the more they feel ripped off, the more likely it is they will consider insurance fraud.
New Jersey spends all its time trying to figure out why it has an uncompetitive market, and reducing insurance fraud. The problem is one in the same.
I believe his hobby is "swimming in pool of money filled by severance package."
Holy Crap! It's true! Scrooge McDuck is Eisner!
Which airlines will carry a person,
who tells them - up-front - that
they have a heart or other serious
medical condition?
All of em. Very common situation; in some instances they may prefer to have a doctor on board in case they need to operate the electrical paddles, but airlines fly people with all sorts of special conditions every day (I imagine after signing a few liability documents.)
The exception to this is a person who is getting ready to give birth. It's a combination of they don't want that happening in air, and, sometimes, the receiving country doesn't want to deal with granting the child of a non-citizen citizenship.
(If a baby is born on an airplane in international airspace, the convention is that the child is eligible for the citizenship of its parents in addition to the citizenship of where the airline is based.)
While I think it's true that any company could have been in IBM's place in WWII, I don't think we should ignore the fact that IBM played both sides.
I read the book (err, listened to it on tape) and was fascinated. But one question remains.
If this is the case, has IBM had its pants sued for participating in the holocaust?
you're saying that a hard drive full of kiddie porn images shouldn't be admissable?
There are quite a lot of issues with kiddie porn prosecution.
So I read about this article saying they got person X on kiddie porn charges, and yet I wonder how much of that is real kiddie porn, as opposed to
*photoshopped kiddie porn
*18 and over porn, but with really young looking girls
the latter is of interest to me, there's a lot of really young looking girls used in porn, and I assume that the photographer and webmasters have done their duty to make sure the person is 18. However, those credentials don't pass over the net to the photo sitting on the hard drive, how does law enforcement know or not know if the girl really is over 18, though she could pass for 14?
As for the former, the idea of photoshopped kiddie porn is that it's kiddie porn without, hyptohetically speaking, having hurt a chlid in the process. Should that be illegal in that a person who consumed photoshopped kiddie porn is very likely to commit such an act? That's an ugly precedent.
Of course, this doesn't even touch the surface of what the difference is between kiddie porn and children who happen not to have any clothes on. Apparently the standard is some sorta fuzzy concept of one type of pic was taken specifically for the purpose of getting off, and the other was not.
Really odd case from Australia: a guy there makes videos of himself getting kicked in the jewels--that's the sexual fetish. He made one of a 14 year old kicking him, and was brought in on kiddie porn charges (though the girl was completely clothed.) The idea here is that a girl was being used for sexual satisfaction, though, under normal circumstances, it hardly is a sexual situation. (Dunno what happened to the case.)
Honestly, this is a mine field of questions that no one wants to talk about or answer.
I suspect that, at the level of financial complexity of Bill Gates, he no longer has a standard type credit record, but something that looks more like a business trust credit record.
It is entirely possible that he has a regular SSN. Indeed, that 1995 SSN may reference him, but that credit record may be blank/unused.
A friend of mine and her husband were/are in porn. She got models and did photography, he did website stuff.
They lived quiet lives in the suburbs, worked hard (actually, if you ask me, very hard for the money they were making) and felt they were doing honest work.
There was actually an interesting sterility to it all...there was nothing dirty about what they were doing, it was their livelyhoods. If anything, she in particular, thought of it as an artform (and there definitely is a large market for much more sophisticated artistic porn.)
I understand why you say what you say...and a lot of people also dont think of it as an honest enterprise, and I entirely understand that. But, the people in the industry do, and that's what I'm disagreeing with in your post.
Civilization is a great number of people living together.
And for civilization to work, you need to have a basic level of trust and respect for people. If you don't, and all your resources go into putting together the rules and the tools to enforce those rules, then you have a civilization who figured out what the problems are with those tools and how to evade them. (My example to prove this point is a little odd...but its politicians and campaign finance laws. Plenty of rules, plenty of tools, but the more rules and tools you put together, the more politicans seem to go out of their way to creatively raise money.)
In this light, two examples come to mind. One is that of the Japanese, a highly rule based society, but one where the people have an intense need for privacy--something about so many people in such a small space, and the people just go crying out for a little bit of privacy.
The other example works well with the speeding camera issue.
here is quite a lot of fighting in the Airbus v. Boeing arguments, different attitudes toward building airplanes.
The Airbuses have computing systems which will preven a pilot from making extreme manoevres if the computer believes the action will have severely negative results.
A lot can be said to defend this concept, pilot eror does cause accidents. On the other hand, a lot can be said against, sometimes a really evasive maneovre will save the ship, that would normally crash it.
But I think that a lot of pilots also just wanna be treated as professionals...and they should be the ones making the decisions, either bad or good. Its not the plane's role to decide that.
I think that's the case with speeding cameras...it's an idea of a lack of trust and respect to the driver. It's also very removed from people...for many people, their only dealing with government may be what happens when they get pulled over. That officer's fairness and treatement will decide how that person thinks of government, to me it's essential to have real people involved in this process, as opposed to hiding behind cameras.
Lets compare like with like after all. our choice guys, but frankly I'd rather be roughed up than killed.
Then tell me what's the likelyhood I will be mugged in London over the likelyhood of being killed in Washington. If they are sufficiently close to each other, then your post makes sense. But if the likleyhood of me being killed in Washington is very very low anyway, and while I am more likely to be killed in DC over London, there still is a higher likelyhood that if i I spend time in either city, I'll be mugged in London and not killed in DC.
the idea of photos on driver's licenses was anathema
Lots of different reasons for this...beginning with
a.) there was already concern that the photo license would pave the way to a national ID card
b.) the current non photo license was more than adequate, and fraud really wasn't an issue
c.) tying back in with a.) there really wasn't any particularly great reason for why the photo was needed (actually the reason it was added is in d.) and, unlike cctv, it didn't seem to be solving any problem in particular
d.) the reason why the photo was added was because of european union regulations to make licenses all over europe standardized...the UK had no interest in having a photo license, nor did law enforcement, parliament, et cetera. it was a rule promulgated by those outside of the UK
You can be watched and photographed by anybody legally in public
_ JULY3.htm)
Yes, I can be watched in public. Whether I can be photographed in public is a slightly different issue.
Whether I can be photographed by the government in public is an even more complex issue.
Canada basically has no CCTV because of an interesting reading of the federal privacy act.
"section 4 of the Act states that "no personal information shall be collected by a government institution unless it relates directly to an operating program or activity of the institution." Personal information is defined in the Privacy Act and includes any "information about an identifiable individual that is recorded in any form."
There can be little doubt that capturing information within the range of the video surveillance camera about an individual, such as his whereabouts and behavior, amounts to collecting personal information within the meaning of the Act." (From http://henrykeyserlingk.bravepages.com/2002_HENRY
So the basic idea here is that the government is prohibited from collecting information that its not authorized to collect...in order for police in Canada to use cctv in a criminal situation, they have to have a warrant first. (Which makes sense...yes a police officer could watch you do your daily activities, but their ability to archive information is tremendously limited.)
A friend of mine is a computer security specialist and made a parrallel between computer security and CCTV.
CCTV can be thought of as the equivalent to audit/logging. To have only CCTV would be akin to putting all your security resources into audit/loggin.
Meaning that, you can possibly catch people after they've done the crime, and nothing else.
I have to wonder if the Columbus data is for city of Columbus, or the surrounding areas. The suburban/exurban schools do not pay nearly as well.
I also wish to disagree on something...I don't consider Ohio "midwest." The midwest starts for me west of Central time/Misssippi river.
I do have friends who work for Columbus school as teachers, and they make $75k. They would only make $60k working in suburbia though, they have masters, and 15-20 years of experience.
Now the principals on the other hand, they make easily $120k in Columbus.
Think of it more as a professionalism issue.
There is quite a lot of fighting in the Airbus v. Boeing arguments, different attitudes toward building airplanes.
The Airbuses have computing systems which will preven a pilot from making extreme manoevres if the computer believes the action will have severely negative results.
A lot can be said to defend this concept, pilot eror does cause accidents. On the other hand, a lot can be said against, sometimes a really evasive maneovre will save the ship, that would normally crash it.
But I think that a lot of pilots also just wanna be treated as professionals...and they should be the ones making the decisions, either bad or good. Its not the plane's role to decide that.
In my mind, it's not the printers role to decide what I print on it...I bought the damn printer, why can't it give me the benefit of the doubt?
Teachers salaries won't be increased much in our lifetimes (we have wacky priorities) and it doesn't matter.
A lot of this can be blamed on the oddness of the priorities of teaching unions.
Their preference is to have start teacher's pay very low, and then make marginal increases until year 10 or year 15, at which point huge increases will occur. (At least, this is what happens at many large urban systems, like here in Columbus.)
So a teacher may start out at $25k-$30k (an ok amount of money for the great lakes region) but with twenty years teaching experience (and a masters) could be making $75k.
Which is regrettable for many reasons, there are few really great teachers making that amount of money. Many who make that kind of cash have just stuck around long enough, get to work ontime, and don't molest anyone.
I guess that applies to many other jobs too, but teaching is not a job you can suddenly decide you want to go into...the rigamarole makes the DMV look like a trip to the sweets shop.
Some states encrypt the data before they put it in the barcode on the back of your license. It helps to prevent fake IDs
All the instances (I've heard of ) regarding encrypted machine readability was due to privacy concerns and not to prevent counterfeit cards.
Though I could see law enforcement/DMV agencies believing that line. But it makes no sense, at the very least, I could find someone with a similar body type and then just copy and past their barcode onto my counterfeit ID.
Here in Ohio I've actually got a few legislators entertaining the idea of introducing (or at the very least co-sponsoring) legislation to prohibit machine readibility on driver's licenses.
I've done it by convincing them that machine readability will cause more fraud. How?
The experience is that when a human has a machine that does scanning, the human will take a quick glance at the photo (or no glance at all) and then swipe/scan the card...and the card will say X and the human will believe it. Based just on that, remagnetizing the card or even an overlay sticker over the barcode can be very successful.
Indeed, the only thing separating the cheap plastic card from being an other cheap plastic card is the hologram and other visual/tactile elements that humans detect, but machines don't. If humans have to examine the card in depth before scanning it, then there is little reason to actually have the scanning machinery.
Which is cool...because the Ohio BMV does pay a touch extra for the plastic card blanks with magnetic stripes, so getting rid of the stripes saves a touch of money...at least enough to keep the conservatives listening.
And then I hit the privacy arguments...which I save for last.
These things take time incidentally...especially here in Ohio where legislators are deathly afraid of making a mistake, and the full year calendar means that they can take their damn time doing things.
But I was quite honored the other day...as I walked by one of the senior administrators of the BMV she stopped talking...she didn't want me to hear anything she was saying. Quite the compliment.
Machine readability is also discused on my New Jersey driver license privacy site, listed below.
So what country are you talking about?
:-)
The one with the weapons of mass destruction of course.
I'm amused and depressed by this post...we can sent hundreds of thousands of troops to liberate a country several times the size of Texas in a very short time...and the head people still don't realize that Courier faxes not worth a shit.
:-)
On a side note, many states have moved to flat license plate printing (at least for special plates.)
Here in Ohio we're gonna be getting a special plate that has a kids theme, and I've suggested that the numbers for the plate be in lower case comic sans, or lower case first grader font. I know the BMV is gonna holler and go crazy about it, but the law will be written so that the organization can dictate what the plate will look like and I take that as we can dictate the font as well.
I admit though, messing with the BMV is a personal past time.
But I mention this because states have been using upper case font since license plates were made, and it makes no sense. A lot of upper case letters are very similar to other upper case letters (in Ohio "D" as in dog "O" as in opera and the number zero are pretty similar looking.) By going to all lower case fonts, it would be much easier to figure out the license plate number from afar.
I remember several years ago my cousin from Costa Rica filed documents with INS to get her student visa extended.
What we received back was a hand written note from INS...the note was on a form explaining that, as part of an INS program towards efficiency, many correspondences would be handwritten instead of typed.
I wonder if that program is still in effect....it was in blue, and nice handwriting.
n 1994, the US government imposed...
Well then the obvious soluition is to tun around and charge US makers in participating in civil rights abuses in the United States.
This to me is not all that far fetched. With all the crap going on in the US, you could very well defend the idea that companies should not be actively participating in it.
The boycottdelta.com project did a good job at this, by holding Delta responsible for being the first airline to participate in CAPPS II. That, at the very least, delayed the implimentation of CAPPS II.
Now having said that, I've had an issue with the Ohio BMV collecting and retaining driver information that they were not authroized to collect. I could say the invasion of privacy is a civil rights abuse, and that some company has participated in this abuse, it seems that, at the very least, a company supporting technology to a government should know if the government has been authorized and is permitted to collect the information.
As far as I'm concerned, some doors have been open.
or perhaps Her Majesty would decline to sign the act of parliament for it...
It is my understanding that this has not happened for hundreds of years. We have probably come to the point that royal assent is guaranteed and there exists no way for the queen/king to not grant it.
If they did not grant it, it would likely mean the start of the dismantling of the monarchy.
The vast majority of this information has been readily available to practically anyone for ages.
Quite a lot of changes have occurred concerning some of these databases.
Lexis Nexis no longer carries a lot of that data that it once did. The driver's privacy protection act (DPPA) passed in the late 1990's basically elminiated the dissmeination of motor vehicle/driver's license records to anyone except law enforcement. States are beginning to withhold birth/death records, and are slowly moving away from doing anything with disclosing the SSN.
Still, a lot of data, either from your credit bureau or Axciom, et cetera, is available. And I suspect they are keeping more info these days.
The issue many people are having with MATRIX is that it combines the databases for law enforcement...it was generally considered neither ethical or appropriate for law enforcement to go through commercial databases unless they were doing more advanced investigations.
Here we could be getting to the point where an officer could pull you over and see if your credit is in good shape simply be running your license plate. Is that appropriate for them to know at that stage of "investigation?" Is it appropriate for them to have that information at all?