Christ, I miss the cold war." And although I would hesitate to take the Lord's name in vain, I wholeheartedly agree. This news from 007's home country:
Children aged 11 to 16 are to have their fingerprints taken and stored on a secret database, internal Whitehall documents reveal.
The leaked Home Office plans show that the mass fingerprinting will start in 2010, with a batch of 295,000 youngsters who apply for passports.
The Home Office expects 545,000 children aged 11 and over to have their prints taken in 2011, with the figure settling at an annual 495,000 from 2014. Their fingerprints will be held on a database also used by the Immigration and Nationality Directorate to store the fingerprints of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers.
Several points, in no particular order:1) The reason for the cold war quote, was that this is a direct play out of the Soviet play book. We may have won the cold war, but it turns out that it may have only have been a battle. Granted that western governments don't kill their own citizens as the Communists did. Yet.
2) The raison d'etre for a law like this is irrelevant. It always is. The Patriot Act was supposed to be used to defeat terrorists. Fine. Everyone hates terrorists. But a law should be judged based on the potential for abuse it could entail. Allowing the government to have a database with all the fingerprints of its citizenry does not strike me as a good idea. It might make it easy to frame a guy, not that government would ever do that.
3) It's always good to watch our cousins across the pond. We have a habit of following them.
Lastly, a less than sanguinary note from two of lovable Fred's columns:
The Sovietizing of America runs apace. It is not imaginary. The Department of Homeland Security? KGB stands for Committee for State Security...
The differences between Russia and America are small, and much fewer than those between France and America.
In sum, we have democracy that circumvents the will of the people; a free press in which only certain things may be said; education divorced from learning; and we have very nearly demonstrated that if people have comfortable lives, they will care about nothing else. Again, America is succeeding where the Soviet Union failed.
Maybe not yet Fred. Not yet. The Brits are doing their best to beat us to it first.
3 comments:
What? The government wants to keep track of us? NO WAY! Sorry about the snark but, if the boys with shiny black shoes wanted to pick up an old radical such as myself they would hardly need my fingerprints. Even a chip implant would only save them an hour or two.I had to give them my fingerprints just to work for the school lunch program this winter.
Does this worry you at all?
The chip especially worries me. I think it border-line obvious that the sign of the beast will be a microchip of sorts, implanted into either the forehead or the hand.
They've already got a start online with the data retention issue. This is one issue where the government might be able to make sweeping gains in surveillance without most people noticing or caring. The average major blogger hasn't even mentioned the issue, even though Bush has been pushing for it for about a year now. The surveillance that will end up upon us is far worse than what was even possible in the Soviet Union.
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