Posted on 10/05/2002 5:51:32 AM PDT by xsysmgr
Edited on 07/12/2004 3:57:37 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
A national Identification card
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
How about a law that says that your personal information is your property and no one is allowed to use it for any commercial or regulatory purpose without prior notification?
Of course this could be easily secured from prying. In the meantime, remember a common cause of iatrogenic death is someone with several doctors who has an adverse drug reaction. Also, someone with allergies faces a similar problem. Finally, you have a social security number --the federal government knows where you are everytime you draw a check or receive one. Has any one persecuted you through your SSN?
You raise an implausible straw man as an arguement. By the way, have you been persecuted lately through your social security number. The federal government knows where you are.
This is precisely why we need a national id card. With your fingerprint and retinal scan, no one will steal id.
The openess of the system reflects the modern mobile society and I remember having to carry cash when I left town before ATM machines. So only my hometown bank who knew me would give me cash and if I went on vacation I put my cash in my moneybelt.
So why not go back to the 50's? Why not carry and use cash? Why be so willing to give up all pretense of independence and privacy to the state? A simple solution would be to enact banking privacy laws like Switzerland. No one can have your banking information unless you let them. The centralization of the system with mandated use of the Socialist Insecurity number is one of the prime reasons for its failure.
That makes sense, IMHO. I can think of many legitimate and beneficial reasons for some sort of "national ID" system, with the caveat: it depends entirely on exactly what information would be made accessible to who (or is that "whom"? whatever, you know what I mean!)...
I am not sure I understand your arguement. The social security administration knows where you are paid from or where they send your check? Is this unconstitutional? I have never heard about anyone being mistreated by the government by virtue of having a driver's license. Perhaps you have some hard data on this subject.
How do you avoid the government each week when you pay social security taxes. Alternatively, if you are self-employed, do you intend to draw your check when you retire? I fail to see what people are worried about.
Congress has created so many laws that virtually every person is assured of breaking more than just traffic laws. Surely with all this supposed lawlessness people and society should have long ago run head long into destruction. But it has not.
Instead, people and society have progressively prospered. Doing so despite the federal government -- politicians and bureaucrats -- creating on average, 3,000 new laws and regulations each year which self-serving alphabet-agency bureaucrats implement/utilize to justify their usurped power and unearned paychecks. They both proclaim from on high -- with complicit endorsement from the media and academia -- that all those laws are "must-have" laws to thwart people and society from running headlong into self-destruction.
Again, despite not having this year's 3,000 must-have laws people and society increased prosperity for years and decades prior. How can it be that suddenly the people and the society they form has managed to be so prosperous for so long but suddenly they will run such great risk of destroying their self-created prosperity? Three hundred new laws each year is overkill, but 3,000 is, well, it's insane. Insane that the people allow their well being and prosperity be sacrificed so that politicians and bureaucrats can "justify" their unearned paychecks.
Here's how it works. Politicians and bureaucrats, aided by a complicit media and academics -- create a boogieman to scare the people with. Having foisted the illusion on the people the politicians and bureaucrats sweep in to save the day. Politicians thrive on saying, "I'm going to use government to help the little guy". With the boogieman in place they can justify creating more new laws and regulations.
That's how we get 3,000 new laws and regulations each year. And that's just from the federal government. State governments use the same ploy as do county and city governments.
Again, how is it that people's well being and prosperity has faired so well last year and the decades prior without having this year's 3,000 new federal government laws as well as a hundred new State laws? When I say "faired so well", that is in light of the fact that each year the people are burdened with sacrificing more of their hard earned paycheck and freedom to government just so politicians and bureaucrats can "justify" their unearned paychecks.
Day-after-day they're selling you the Brooklyn Bridge. Wake Up!
"If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind? The organizers maintain that society, when left undirected, rushes headlong to its inevitable destruction because the instincts of the people are so perverse. The legislators claim to stop this suicidal course and to give it a saner direction. Apparently, then, the legislators and the organizers have received from Heaven an intelligence and virtue that place them beyond and above mankind.
"They would be the shepherds over us, their sheep. Certainly such an arrangement presupposes that they are naturally superior to the rest of us. And certainly we are fully justified in demanding from the legislators and organizers proof of this natural superiority." -- Frederick Bastiat, The Law (1850)
"The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else." -- Frederic Bastiat
A simple solution would be to enact banking privacy laws like Switzerland.
Remove the negative -- government intervention -- and the positives -- free market demand -- will be met by the banks. The bank(s) with the best privacy practices/policies will get the most business.
Enormously, every paycheck. Every dollar that is put into that evil Socialist Insecurity system, that Ponzi scheme to buy votes for the Statist parties is a persecution. You might as well ask if anyone has ever had any mony taken from their paycheck by the IRS. This is a no brainer. You are living in a fantasy land if you think this system will not be abused. It is being abused every day.
Show me all the Clinton staffers that are in jail over the misuse of FBI records and IRS files, and then you might have a smidgen of credibility.
Let me tell ya somethin’! There’s no way the furiously individual liberty minded citizens of this great country would ever tolerate such an intrusive invasion of privacy as biometrics unless we had lost all control of our borders and were being invaded by hoards of foreigners!
What? We have lost all control of our borders and have been invaded by hoards of foreigners?
What makes you think that? Anyone with a clean copy of one of your fingerprints, a 600dpi scanner, and a few other reasonably-available materials can make a phony-finger with your fingerprints on it. Given that most people guard their fingerprints even less zealously than their credit card numbers, it would not be hard for a crook to get hold of one.
And once that happens, what then? Credit card numbers and even "Social Security" numbers, can be changed. If someone gets your VISA card number, get the old card canceled and a new one issued and you'll be protected from their further mischief. Suppose someone copies your fingerprints, however. Then what are you going to do?
As I understand it, the proposal also includes a retinal scan. Hard to imagine any way to fake that.
Oh ye of little imagination. Compromising a retinal scan would be a little more difficult, but still within the realm of easy possibility. Convince a merchant to let you 'borrow' his scanner for a little while (a few bribes may help, or else start up your own store). Add in a secondary capture device which gives you a copy of any scans produced and give it back to the merchant. Depending upon what you want to do, either just wire a "playback" device in place of the scanner (so you can make it look like the verson visited your shop again), make a fake eyeball and carry it to a shop where you won't be watched too closely, or else find someone who wears a glass eye and have them wear a "special" one which contains the desired "retinal image".
It took me five minutes to come up with those. Actual impllementation would of course be a little harder, but nothing insurmountable. And as I noted before, once someone's biometrics are compromised that person would be ruined.
Biometrics may look all well and good in science-fiction movies, but they are fundamentally insecure because they cannot be kept secret and yet cannot be changed if compromised.
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