Why I love Rob

Rob over at To The People cracks me up. I appreciate a man who doesn't mince words.

Does anti-war activism make it harder to get a passport?

Activist contends passport stall tied to anti-war efforts

Thomas Hays, 38, says he applied for a passport with his birth certificate, Social Security card and Washington state identification card in February. He then received a surprise in the mail at the end of the month when the government said it needed much more documentation -- some of which is difficult to quickly obtain -- to give him a passport.

The State Department says it wanted Hays to provide "school transcripts, high school yearbook pages showing your name and photograph, religious records, medical records, (and) tax/employment records."

(Thanks to lewlew, who tipped me off about this article.)

Something sure sounds fishy here, and of course the State Department thugs will never give a reason for requesting all this additional information.

For a couple of reasons, I bit the bullet and got a passport early last year.

My mother and I were planning a long weekend to Canada, and though a passport still isn't needed for a trip to Canada and back (the requirement is coming), we both figured it'd be a little easier than bringing along an original birth certificate.

I also wanted to get a passport before they became "enhanced" with RFID. The state department offices here were due to start issuing RFID-enabled passports by the summer of 2006, so I beat that deadline by a few months.

The decision to get a passport wasn't an easy one, and because of the RFID deadline, I felt a bit pressured to make a choice. Though the idea of having to produce citizenship papers on demand is morally repugnant to me in every possible way, I'd still rather have one more tool at my disposal if the shit ever hits the fan. I can choose whether or not to show it, and having one might make a few situations easier than if I didn't have anything to produce.

Now I'm glad I didn't wait. With situations such as Mr. Hays', and Homeland Security now sharing available personal information with the Canadian border guards, I can only think obtaining passport approval is bound to become increasingly difficult.

Round up the usual suspects!

Disgusting.

Bills would require samples of DNA from crime suspects

A bill in the House would require police to take DNA samples from anyone convicted of a felony or a gross misdemeanor, while a more aggressive bill in the Senate would require a DNA sample from anyone arrested for those offenses. Existing law requires DNA samples to be taken only from convicted felons.

The Washington State Patrol's DNA database feeds the one used by the FBI.

But this quote is really a gem:

"The problem we have is that in our justice system, people are assumed innocent until proven guilty," he said. "I support the idea of the bill, but you can't help law enforcement all the time."

I can't pretend we still operate under "innocent until proven guilty" as a standard in our judicial system, but even if we did, that's a PROBLEM?

Additionally, requiring DNA upon arrest for crimes that have nothing to do with DNA evidence on the theory that the arrested individual will likely commit more severe crimes is more than Draconian - it brings us into the era of Thought Crime. You might become a more violent offender, so you, Mr. Shoplifter, deserve to be in our little database for life, just in case you decide go career in your criminal life.

It's shit like this that destroys my faith in America. The fact that this would even be proposed seriously (by more than one person, no less)... I can't even go on.

All I can do is hope that in 30 or 40 years we'll look back on this period in American history with disgust and shame. Wishful thinking, I know.

And I'm not placing any bets on the possibility that if such an attrocity were to become law, we'd suddenly find police abusing their "round up the usual suspects" powers just to collect more DNA profiles.

Murder investigator: take babies' DNA

DNA swab ... Should samples from babies be added to the National Database?

Britain's most senior murder investigator has called for DNA to be taken from babies.

Commander Dave Johnston said it would build up a database to SOLVE crimes and PREVENT others.

He said samples could also be taken from Britons renewing passports and from migrants arriving here. The head of the Met Police's Homicide and Serious Crime Unit, went on: "We have 300,000 unsolved cases where we have taken a profile at a crime scene but have not yet matched it.

"As well as solving crime, it would really make someone think twice about committing crime if they knew their DNA was on a database.

"There is also a compelling case for taking DNA from people when they die, so that we can cleanse the database."

And this is from the nation in whose footsteps the US follows when it comes to invasive surveillance techniques. Comforting, isn't it?

Monkeywrenching the data miners

A great one from the Seattle P-I today.

As threats to privacy grow, many fight back

As more businesses and government agencies hunger for personal data, many people are fighting back.

Sure, there's fancy encryption software and phone scramblers available, but many people prefer to wield an arsenal of low-tech, time-honored gestures: deception, denial, stonewalling and occasional pettiness.

Why not? Big corporations use those tactics every day.

His company used to require people to give their names and e-mail addresses in order to download free trial software. But many people registered their first and last names as "Screw" and "You" -- or something worse -- followed by a bogus address.

"It became an unmanageable system," Sampson said. His company now offers software without registration. While it's lost the ability to track people, it's had a huge increase in downloads.

"It's in our best interest to ask for less information," he said.

Gee, you think? I lie my ass off every time - unless there's a good reason for the company to be able to find me. Fake names, fake phone numbers, fake email addresses. I'm sorry, but Best Buy did NOT need my phone number in order for me to purchase a stand for my DVD player. So, they got a bogus one. And most of these companies accept a lie far more easily than they accept a curt "no, you may not have my phone number." We privacy-minded folk are damn tired of being viewed as aliens or paranoid freaks because we refuse to share that info.

Perhaps one of the biggest targets of ire are the "loyalty" cards groceries use to track shopping habits. The Internet, for example, froths with tips on how to monkey with Safeway's Club Cards, by encouraging shoppers to swap card numbers or punch 800-SAFEWAY on the checkout pad.

One Seattle man, Keith Gormezano, was so incensed about Safeway's eight-year-old program that he posted his card number online for others to use, in an effort to pollute the company's data.

Safeway's weak explanation of using the data to track shopping trends is... well, crap. Stores can track shopping trends by tracking what happens to their inventory. They don't need personal data for that. It's the same ruse Walmart tried to employ to justify putting RFID in their inventory. Exactly how does RFID enable better shelf stocking than, say, the bar codes they scan when you make a purchase?

Good for Mr. Gormezano, and I really do like this idea of sharing club card numbers... sort of a BugMeNot for shoppers. I've generally avoided getting those loyalty cards for that very reason, but I'm wondering if maybe a group of friends and I could just get one of those and share it - preferrably friends in multiple states. Our fake multiple-personality shopper could be visiting a Safeway here in Seattle one minute, and at a safeway register in Los Angeles 20 minutes later. I love it. Anyone else interested in this?

We make no apology for screwing you

Mix-up brands innocent citizens as criminals

The British government, already under pressure over a series of blunders in its immigration and prison services, has confirmed it wrongly branded around 1,500 innocent people as criminals due to a computer mix-up.

It said the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB), which carries out checks on people who have applied for jobs working with children or vulnerable adults, had confused the innocent people with convicted criminals because they had similar or identical names.

The names were stored on a police database....

"We make no apology for erring on the side of caution. We are talking about the protection of children and vulnerable adults," a Home Office spokesman said.

So (not surprisingly) no apology is offered for screwing over innocent, vulnerable job applicants. Sorry, but the CRB didn't err on the side of caution - it simply erred. Big-time. The CRB has just as much obligation to the job applicants as it has to those more vulnerable citizens it's supposedly trying to protect. A greater obligation, actually, when one accounts for the tax dollars those job applicants provide to fund such a service.

How much more evidence condemning the idea of government-controlled national databases is necessary before people stop believing that this time there will be no mistakes? These kinds of people-tracking services are NEVER mistake-free, not even in the private sector where quality is often notably better than government performance.

What really ticks me off is the complete lack of apology combined with a glaring absence of acknowledgment of the possibility that other errors were made. You know, the kind of errors that would, say, put a child molester to work at an elementary school. Unstated is the admission of bad data and data handling policies, and the simultaneous insistence that the CRB's performance is A-okay. Again, none of this is astonishing, but that doesn't remedy the irksome level of smug incompetence wrapped up in one little quote.

The government is here to screw protect us. Now was it wearing a condom when we all grabbed our ankles?