EETimes: Sounding The Alarm as Big Brother Goes Digital

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

From the IEEE, not Rense:

EET: What, then, would the ACLU like to see in the e-passport spec? Is personal data encryption good enough?



Steinhardt: At a minimum, the RFID chip is an invitation to disaster. Any identity document that's going to be carried, including a passport, ought to be protected in the most robust way. One way is to require it to make physical contact with a reader, so you avoid the problem of eavesdropping, of unknowing interceptions. Why shouldn't we require contact with a reader so that at least there is some actual notice that data is being collected?



There are huge volumes of data eventually being collected, both because of data stored within the card itself and because of the database that the card will be linked to. It will enable essentially universal monitoring and tracking. It hurtles us down the path toward the surveillance society, where you will not be able to engage in any transaction without having your actions recorded, your background checked, violated.





EET: Is it true that there are no laws or regulations governing the requirement that you show an ID to get into a building or controlling what is done with data that is collected?



Steinhardt: In the United States, there's no regulation on what data is collected, what is done with it or how it's stored. We do not have the fair-information principles that exist in the rest of the developed world.

http://worldnewstrust.org/modules/AMS/article.php?storyid=257

Note: If this does not scare the waste matter out of you, you are over-medicated.

[EVDebs]

1. Total Information Awareness goes Offshore (Bahamas)

www.zmetro.com/archives/000901.php

outsourced thru CAPPS II and Ben Bell III :

"It began as one of the Bush administration's most ambitious homeland security efforts, a passenger screening program designed to use commercial records, terrorist watch lists and computer software to assess millions of travelers and target those who might pose a threat. The system has cost almost $100 million. But it has not been turned on because it sparked protests from lawmakers and civil liberties advocates, who said it intruded too deeply into the lives of ordinary Americans. The Bush administration put off testing until after the election.

Now the choreographer of that program, a former intelligence official named Ben H. Bell III, is taking his ideas to a private company offshore, where he and his colleagues plan to use some of the same concepts, technology and contractors to assess people for risk, outside the reach of U.S. regulators, according to documents and interviews.

Bell's new employer, the Bahamas-based Global Information Group Ltd., intends to amass large databases of international records and analyze them in the coming years for corporations, government agencies and other information services. One of the first customers is information giant LexisNexis Group, one of the main contractors on the government system that was known until recently as the second generation of the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening Program, or CAPPS II. The program is now known as Secure Flight."

I feel sooooo much safer knowing that my information has been offshored to a company outside of US Dept of Justice and/or Federal Trade Commission jurisdiction and control, don't you ?

[Tace]

3. NOT!

As I said below, this stuff is really hard to digest. Judging by the reponse to this thread, hardly anybody wants to know abou it.

[Tace]

2. Dang, This Stuff Is Depressing

[understandinglife]

4. Exactly when are our fellow citizens going to realize that they are....

....being treated like their pets (the ones wearing the tracking device in their collar or an embedded transceiver)?

This is mega-intrusion into one's privacy, obviously.

Peace.


www.missionnotaccomplished.us

[shadowknows69]

5. look, I'm not even a Christian anymore

but I'm still not getting the freakin number of the beast, just in case.