http://www.cnn.com/...
This is dangerous beyond belief. What does it mean? More below the cut.
So even CNN is carrying it now. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is compiling a nationwide database of fingerprints, palm prints, iris prints (and presumably DNA records), currently held 30 stories underground on computers in the Clarksburg, WV facility.
You know, I remember getting my fingerprints done as a first-grader. It was a class field trip, and I asked why we had to do this. I was told "It's in case anyone ever tries to take you away from your parents," and we got ice cream afterwards. Fifteen years later, I look back on that event with genuine fear - was permission asked of my father or my grandmother, who had custody of me, to put personally identifying information on record like that? They certainly didn't ask mine, and I have NO IDEA where that information is now.
Yeah, that information can be used to catch criminals. It's a tool. It can be used or misused. But power corrupts, and the means to personally identify the 300 million individuals and track their daily lives is a HELL of a lot of power. Do we really want to just blindly fork it over and hope that it will be used for our good, because we don't seem to know what best for ourselves?
Now I gotta ask this - when we can use DNA to link specific people to specific places and times and items, why is real-time facial recognition capability necessary? Do you realize that you, going about your daily business, are photographed over 30 times daily without ever realizing it? When I say tracking individuals, I'm not kidding - given a powerful enough computer and sophisticated enough software, it's possible.
Every time you give up personal information, you place yourself at risk. You have NO IDEA who the end user of that information is going to be. You have NO IDEA why they really want it or what they're going to do with it. And once you've given that information out, you cannot take it back! A certain amount of risk is necessary to life, but why does the government need to know about your private life? "To protect the public good" is a flimsy and all-too-vague reply: there is no substance to it.
And the hell of it is, we're sheep. eWe the sheeple of the United States are blind to this. These people who speak in favor of RealID and these massive, personally identifying databases seem to think that they won't be watched, that you have nothing to fear if you've done nothing wrong. But there are innocent people on Death Row even now. Remember the medieval witch hunts, remember the pogroms and Kristallnacht and all the horrors of WWII: all of these coming from the government having too much power over the daily lives of the citizens and the citizens living in GOVERNMENT-MADE abject fear of some vague and shapeless enemy - first of "the Devil," then of "the Jews," and now of "the terrorists."
Our Chief Executive is either a criminal or criminally insane: in either case he should have been removed from his duties years ago. But we have a Judicial branch that's busy rewriting the laws of the land to make his actions retroactively legal, we have a Legislative branch too cowardly or too divided to do its job, and we have a populace that is, by and large, too lazy to speak up as our rights are stripped from us one by one.
Habeas corpus is gone for certain individuals - people who are being held for indefinite lengths of time, without ever getting the chance to know who is accusing them of what because there is no formal charge. They get no access to legal counsel because they have been unilaterally declared outside the law - a form of pre-trial reminiscent of the Catholic Church's drowning of suspected witches (if you lived, you're a witch: if you died, oh well), and since they're outside the law, due process seems to no longer apply. How long until it's gone for everyone?
The idea used to be that you were innocent until proven guilty, and that the burden of proof rested on the State to provide. Now, it seems like we are getting closer and closer to a time in which the Federal Government can declare you guilty, and you have to prove yourself innocent (though that's tough to do when the deck is stacked against you to start with and you, being a "terrorist," are suddenly whisked into a legal no-man's-land where you do not really exist!)
The United States currently has the highest per-capita rate of incarceration in the Western World and the prison systems here are bulging at the seams where they're not breaking or already broken. Is the proposed solution at the highest levels really to enlist the public's own cooperation in turning America into a police state, a prison nation? Because that's where we're headed!
It can't all be blamed on the President that even the general population has picked up on this attitude - or maybe it can. For over fifty years people flew in aircraft with minimal security attached to them - you used to be able to greet your loved ones at the gate or give them that last good-bye hug as they boarded. Millions of flights every year, a comparative handful of accidents, a tiny, tiny, TINY, less-that-one-percent fraction of them brought down deliberately. Now, in response to a single outrageous tragedy that YOU had no hand in creating, when YOU fly an airplane, YOUR checked baggage will be searched by hand - the presumption that the TSA will find something to incriminate you of a crime they have NO evidence you were even contemplating, and the arrogance of a search and potential seizure without a warrant, is all wrapped up into one ball there. And the only proof of your innocence is when your plane arrives at the destination terminal safely.
I can't remember the last time I had a job interview that didn't require either a background check, a credit check or a drug screen (or all three). I mean, seriously! Why does a fast-food employer need to know my past purchasing habits or what credit cards or debts I carry? My boyfriend's workplace reserves the right to conduct random drug screens for no cause whatsoever, and that's hardly an isolated case. Even the American Red Cross tried to institute credit checks on its volunteers nationwide (and thankfully that got slapped down), but the point of this whole post up to here is this - that the danger to our civil liberties, and to our individual right to privacy, and most of all to the Constitution itself, has never been more dire.
Now I need the work - I can't very well refuse those checks should a prospective employer demand them. But when the society around me is all too willing to roll over and give up all the civil liberties that the Constitution once stood for, I find myself relegated to a lonely and hypocritical position of bellying up along with the rest of the sheep, all the while grumbling under my breath, furious with myself because I cannot find a way to stop this myself and not enough people care enough to stand with me. Divide and conquer - the strategy of tyrants throughout history.
If this keeps up, I fear it will not be long before the Constitution is reduced to a footnote in American history books that's not worth the parchment it was written on. So much history, so much debate, so much passion and care went into those words - so much blood has gone to defend them. And now the Domestic Enemy we call the Government is tearing it to shreds. And eWe the Sheeple are letting it happen.
A final note for tonight. It's occurred to me many times before, but I should state it here, that the people who serve in the uniform of the United States military put their own Bill of Rights protections into voluntary suspension and submitted themselves to the often-draconian rule of the UCMJ in order to defend us civilians in the way that they saw fit. They did so, trusting that the government would not send them into harm's way without due cause and that when they came back, the rights they gave up would be restored to them. THAT IS NOT A ONE-WAY AGREEMENT, as our culture so blithely teaches - we civilians have a reciprocal responsibility to those brave men and women.
It is our job as civilians to make sure that there's something left to be restored to them, and to ensure that the government is not sacrificing our loved ones for nothing. In both duties, we have failed our soldiers, and we have failed ourselves.
It's not too late to change that, but every day of inaction only adds to the inertia.
Ben Franklin ought to be quoted yet again here, or the timeless Thomas Paine, or so many of the noted revolutionaries of the Colonies or of France, but I'll choose another line from that same time to close this editorial.
"Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may!"