the timboucher experience

I’ve been reading a little bit about this national ID card bill that the Senate is expected to pass today. What fun stuff! I don’t want to go into a big long thing about it right now, but I did want to reply to some comments made in this article:

After reading House Resolution 418, I fail to see how it will stop terrorists from entering the country. Our borders with Mexico are so porous, all they need is a guide, transportation and means to execute their act.

HEY NUMBNUTS! This national ID card has NOTHING, I repeat NOTHING to do with “terrorists.” Unless of course, you mean by terrorists, American citizens. Because guess what! That’s what the government means when they say it! They aren’t the least bit worried about international bad guys sneaking in through Mexico. What they want is to track your sorry white ass, build a profile about you, and use the data they collect to make money off you and otherwise limit what you do.

Though this article does go into that a little later on, they do a pretty piss-poor job of it. This article on Red Herring is much more explicit:

The government is likely to incorporate radio-frequency identification (RFID) into the new ID card, according to Bruce Schneier, a security expert and the CTO of Counterpane. The U.S. State Department has been pushing this technology for use in passports. An established government standard could easily be translated into the new ID cards.

RFID has several limitations, security experts point out. With some basic equipment, almost anyone can surreptitiously read all the ID Cards in an area, or track an individual as he or she moves throughout the day. The technology makes downloading someone’s personal data easy. “Once you have a machine-readable ID, it will be read by machines,” said Mr. Schneier. And some of those machines will belong to people you don’t want to read your data.

But it’s not just hackers, identity criminals, and government surveillance that have Mr. Schneier worried. “There’ll be a reader in the bar that you have to swipe to let you drink,” he said. The reader could collect demographic and personally identifiable information each time it is swiped. The information could then be sold to data-marketing companies that, in turn, could sell it to others.

I hate to say “I told you so,” but I’ve been saying this ever since they put together the TSA, and made the push towards connecting the databases of various agencies and companies. Sure they want to track you and squash your freedoms and blah blah blah… but where’s the money in that? People forget that government is a business, and they don’t just do shit without a financial motive. That motive is to increase the power of their continuing circle jerk with corporations. While terrorism is a fun way to freak people out into giving away their freedoms, what it really is is a clever buzzword that gets people to accept total profiling.

So is that cause to freak out though? I personally don’t think so. I’m reminded of an excellent column by Mark Morford, Amazon.com Does Not Know Me:

But this is what gets lost in the morass of e-commerce and credit cards and alarmist privacy concerns: They cannot touch me. They cannot actually reach me in any significant manner, ever. I am protected and secure and absolutely, thoroughly immune, forever. And you know what? So are you.

[...] They can go so far as to steal my credit card numbers and my Social Security number and make my life a living logistical hell. It’s true. And it’s goddamn scary and obnoxious and wrong on a hundred different levels.

But is this really me? Is this truly any sort of real danger to what I truly value, those things that engage my spirit and fondle my soul and melt the heart of my cockles? What sort of threat is some marketer’s data sheet to my ability to laugh and love and lick my lover, to enjoy dog parks and bath salts and huge ancient trees? Answer: nada.

This is their grand illusion. And this is our mass consumerist delusion. We confuse credit cards and shopping habits and Web-site histories with true personality, with spirit, with life. We think if we offer up too much personal data they will somehow use it against us, diminish us, finagle it so we can no longer run down the street in the sunshine or write bad poetry in a drunken haze or sing “Highway to Hell” at the tops of our lungs while driving under a full moon on a warm summer night.

[...] they cannot know me. Or you. They do not and shall not and it’s sort of laughable when you think about it, how there is nothing they can really do, how there is no way for them to know any of us in any authentic way because they don’t share a bottle of wine with you and they don’t sleep next to you in your bed and they have no idea as to the color of your id and the make and model of your fluxive wanton gorgeous cosmic aspirations.

I mean, maybe this is just pie-in-the-sky idealism. Maybe this is just dreamy hippy crap. But I tend to believe that you only get as freaked out by this stuff as you allow yourself to be. Sure they’re gonna do fucked up stuff with it, but the second you let it get to you, that’s when they really win.

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