Loss of Privacy

A new program in Boston, aimed at high crime areas, is using people’s fear of increased violence to circumvent the law and search homes for weapons. No warrant will be needed when parents give consent to police to enter their children’s bedrooms.

The program, which is already raising questions about civil liberties, is based on the premise that parents are so fearful of gun violence and the possibility that their own teenagers will be caught up in it that they will turn to police for help, even in their own households.

In the next two weeks, Boston police officers who are assigned to schools will begin going to homes where they believe teenagers might have guns. The officers will travel in groups of three, dress in plainclothes to avoid attracting negative attention, and ask the teenager’s parent or legal guardian for permission to search. If the parents say no, police said, the officers will leave. If officers find a gun, police said, they will not charge the teenager with unlawful gun possession, unless the firearm is linked to a shooting or homicide.

Wow! Just wow! Where do you even start with this? Most people don’t even fully understand their rights to begin with, now you’re going to show up at someone’s home in groups of three, making the parents feel ambushed, resulting in the parents thinking they have no choice but to let the police in.

The safeguards written in the Constitution are being chipped away by the end run around it, while fearful Americans sit idly by and let it happen.

“I understand people’s concerns about this, but the mothers of the young men who have been arrested with firearms that I’ve talked to are in a quandary,” he said. “They don’t know what to do when faced with the problem of dealing with a teenage boy in possession of a firearm. We’re giving them an option in that case.”

Fine, I understand parents who end up with out of control kids and don’t know what to do. How about you make a simple program whereby a parent can call the police and have the police come pick up the gun, no questions asked. By creating this “Safe Homes” program, you are encouraging the elimination of the law. You will see abuses of the law. Soon, many children will be “suspected” of having weapons in their homes. What are you going to do then?

In a recent speech, the DHS border chief displayed his stupidity by saying that he knew more about potato chips than RFID chips, claiming that he had no clue what the difference was between the two.  Despite his obvious ignorance, he continued to push his technology agenda, stating that there are no privacy worries with RFID.

During his talk, he described each of the RFID-chipped identification programs and sought to dismiss the need for privacy worries about the tactic. That’s because the chips don’t store any “personal information,” Basham said–just a unique identifying number that’s read from a distance by a border patrol agent’s reader and transmitted through the air. He said such “vicinity”-read ID cards were a proven means of vetting people at the borders and had been used in trusted traveler cards since 1995.

“We are tagging a number, not a human being,” he said. Referring to the Canadian and Mexican border-crossing cards, as well as the program for commercial truck drivers, he added: “SENTRI, NEXUS and FAST members do not have to worry about their personal ID or identity being stolen.”

What a buffoon!  He boasts that 325,000 truckers, who regularly cross the borders, have RFID based cards, yet he hasn’t a clue how they work, their degree of safety, or how easily they can be cracked.

These are the morons running our country and, yet, we still wonder why the world now hates us.

Over at Releaselog, there’s a blurb about the movie, Man From Earth.  The producer sent along a nice little email about how thankful he was that piracy, in particular bitorrent, was raising awareness and sales of the movie.

Our independent movie had next to no advertising budget and very little going for it until somebody ripped one of the DVD screeners and put the movie online for all to download. After that happened, people were watching it and started posting mostly all positive reviews on IMDb, Amazon and other places. Most of the feedback from everyone who has downloaded “The Man From Earth” has been overwhelmingly positive. People like our movie and are talking about it, all thanks to piracy on the net!

With guys like this and musicians, like Radiohead giving away their album for a pay-what-you-want fee, people are finally starting to get it.  Piracy isn’t all that bad.  Word of mouth is good.  If you make something good, people will see it, and, most likely, spend the cash on such worthy endeavors.

Hot on the heels of “Fortress Britain” comes the news of a terror crackdown, requiring anyone entering or leaving Britain to give up 53 pieces of personal information before they can fly.

For every journey, security officials will want credit card details, holiday contact numbers, travel plans, email addresses, car numbers and even any previous missed flights.

But there’s more. Much more. And you’re also going to pay more money for the privilege of having that leash shoved up your ass. This information will be taken upon purchasing an airline ticket. It will then be shared with “police, customs, immigration and the security services for at least 24 hours before a journey is due to take place.”

Anyone, and I mean absolutely anyone, who is considered questionable can be denied access to their flight. This includes people with parking tickets or speeding tickets, even if they pose no security threat and aren’t suspected of being a terrorist.

The e-borders scheme is expected to cost at least £1.2billion over the next decade. Travel companies, which will run up a bill of £20million a year compiling the information, will pass on the cost to customers via ticket prices, and the Government is considering introducing its own charge on travellers to recoup costs.

Ah, isn’t it great that you get to pay for such a system that isn’t necessary and will do nothing except increase paperwork that will, most likely never be used by police but sold to data miners who want to sell you junk?

You now have the exciting prospect of paying more for your ticket, more to your travel agent and, quite possibly, more to your government as soon as they think up a random number to charge you.

Critics warned of mayhem at ports and airports when the system is introduced, beginning in earnest from mid-2009. By 2014 every one of the predicted 305million passenger journeys in and out of the UK will be logged, with details stored about the passenger on every trip.

You got that right. Airports will be clogged with pissed off people. Oh, but don’t worry. If you’re pissed off, then some stupid behavior recognition program will cite you as suspicious and you aren’t going anywhere anyway. Problem solved. No clogged airport.

The other end of the spectrum results in no one traveling anywhere and the United Kingdom losing billions of tourist dollars.

The scheme will apply to every way of leaving the country, whether by ferry, plane, or small aircraft. It would apply to a family having a day out in France by Eurotunnel, and even to a yachtsman leaving British waters during the day and returning to shore. The measure applies equally to UK residents going abroad and foreigners travelling here.

I hear and Ayn Rand quote echoing through my brain. You’re all criminals now.

The information will be stored for as long as the authorities believe it is useful, allowing them to build a complete picture of where a person has been over their lifetime, how they paid and the contact numbers of who they stayed with.

Here we go again. So much for keeping the data for a specific amount of time and destroying it. We can’t do that when you could possibly commit a crime somewhere in the distant future.

The Home Office, which yesterday signed a contract with U.S. company Raytheon Systems to run the computer system, said e-borders would help to keep terrorists and illegal immigrants out of the country.

I am so sick of this defense. Let me repeat it AGAIN! This will not keep out terrorists and illegal immigrants. They will find a way to enter the country if they are determined to do so. This system is designed to keep track of normal citizens. Stalin would be so proud of the UK right now.
If the British citizens will not rise up in revolt against such a scheme, then we can hope this will fail due to the government’s own track record on not delivering things on time. It’s not going to happen for a long time, due, quite simply, to incompetence.

A new vending machine from Fujitaka Co. is making the claim that it can tell when a minor is attempting to purchase cigarettes.

People wishing to buy cigarettes have to look at a facial recognition camera in the upper section of the machine and press a button. In about three seconds, the machine determines whether the person is 20 years old–the legal age to buy cigarettes–or above. The purchase will be allowed if the machine is satisfied.

If the machine is not satisfied, the 20 year old will grab an old guy and get him to purchase the cigarettes instead.  If no old guy can be found, a mask or print out of an old guy will probably work too.