RFIDs embedded in your U.S. passport, encoded with your identity, and able to be read at a distance?
GPS devices mandated by law, installed in every single new car, so that the state can monitor your every movement and tax you based on the milage you drive?
It’s not 1984, the Sequel. It’s 2004, the Reality. Both of these measures seem likely before the end of 2005.
California is seriously considering requiring that every single new car in California be fitted with a GPS device which will enable the state to track where the car goes, and how many miles the car has driven between gas fill-ups. This will allow the state, which is seeing gasoline tax revenues fall as trendy, green Californians keep snapping up hybrid cars, to tax each and every motorist – at the gas pump – based on how many miles they have driven from the last gas pump.
And if you think that this is some bizarre totalitarian scheme which could only come from the mind of an Austrian who plans to change the United States constitution so that he can run for president, the prototype for this GPS tracking model is already in the works in Oregon, where Utah, New York, and the U.S. Department of Transportation, along with California, are “closely watching for the results”
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On the Federal level, it has been announced that all U.S. passports will have RFID chips embedded in them by the end of the coming year (2005), and that Congress is considering a similar requirement for all U.S. driver’s licenses.
Given that the embedding of identity chips has been used in pets for years, and that it was announced just last month that the FDA has approved embedding chips in people for “insurance identification purposes”, the only thing at which I’m is surprised is that it took so long to get to this point with paper and cars.
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You don’t want to die in some TERRORIST bombing, do you? So let’s put a camera in the bathrooms. Why? So no one plants a bomb. Let’s put a camera in stores. Why? So no one plants a bomb. Let’s put a camera in front of the mall. Why? So no one plants a bomb. Hell let’s go for true National Security and put a camera in your house. Why? So you don’t make a bomb.
I will not have RFIDs anywhere. I disabled them from my car already and put my phone in a metal box when travling about. Its not anyones damned business where I am or how many miles I drive.
per comment #3. you only think you “have nothing to hide”. there are so many laws on the books, regulating all sorts of things relating to motor vehicles that you can can be cited, and/or arrested for that a cop who wants to can lock you up in a heartbeat. even a broken tail light will do for a reason to stop, then comes the “consent search” and it goes downhill from there…
“gunner”
As the Word says,”We are all like sheep, led to the slaghter.” Say goodbye to the constitution all & say hello to the dictatorship.
I like Larry and RIttenhouse’s comments. It’s amazing what we’ve allowed to happen. But it reminds me of an issue of the Onion I read a while back… “Nation’s Liberals Suffer From Outrage Fatigue”. It doesn’t seem like trying to persuade people that this is wrong is really doing any good. It’s just a personal victory if it happens, because most people are too self-involved to have any motivation to muster the ingenuity required to take on this monsterous beast we’ve created. And as a result, nothing is protecting us. We’re just squabbling with ourselves. The system just keeps plugging away, doing god knows what (as Rittenhouse said “vaguely defined laws”), while we argue over whether we care or not. I mean, does everyone recognize this? Our main argument is whether or not we should be worried. I rarely hear people arguing over whether or not they should take any kind of action against what is going on. …it’s sad. … we are sheep.
If they install, that does not mean that I am required to keep the chip in order. If I carry it into a MRI, then douse it with a blast of static, what the heck? If I hose it in the microwave, so what?
When they installed a camera in my high school (1972), we responed by conducting our laser experiments in the hall. Amazing how every amp all the way to the monitors can be smoked…
So I have nothing to hide while in the toilet either, I just don’t agree that I should allow somebody – anybody to watch unless I so chose.
Not on my car! Never! Technology is creating a generation of bureaucratic peeping toms. We are no longer free if our every movement can be scrutinized, the next gadget out would be a scanner that would enable the user to stalk anyone from the comfort of their lazy boy. Everone should shout: “I’m not going to take it anymore”.
The flaw in the “I have nothing to hideâ€? argument that Gus uses is that in truth WE ALL have things we would prefer to hide. Who of us has NEVER speeded because we were running late somewhere? Who of us have ALWAYS reported EVERY SINGLE CENT with 100% accuracy on our taxes? In short, to borrow a phrase from Jesus, Who among us is without sin? Ayn Rand wrote some great stuff on how the government can turn ANYONE into a criminal simply by creating a vast morass of laws that are vaguely enough defined that it becomes virtually impossible to know, understand, and comply with them all. Gus’s problem is that he instinctively TRUSTS GOVERNMENT regardless of the circumstances. This is exactly the attitude that results from a generation of people sitting mindlessly in front of TV cop shows and being shown ONLY the situations where the cops arrested guilty people. After a few years of this brainwashing, is it any surprise that we have a conviction rate of approximately 90% when these kind of “Government-is-always-rightâ€? zombie-heads show up for jury duty? Fortunately, our country’s founding fathers were smarter, and set up our constitution with one overriding theme in mind…namely, you can’t blindly trust people simply because they work for the government. Our whole constitution was designed as a LIMITATION ON GOVERNMENTAL POWER. A person who is anti-constitution (a/k/a anti-American), will naturally see distrust of government as some deep seated desire to hide horrific evil, but that is simply their paranoia. Many people dislike traffic cameras for much more mundane reasons such as not wanting surprise pictures of them picking their nose showing up on the Internet or God knows where. I suspect that Gus’s “holier-than-thouâ€? attitude about not having anything to hide is really nothing but hypocrisy. I suspect that Gus uses envelopes to hide the content of letters to his loved ones, and that Gus’s house probably has curtains to hide the view of him walking through his house in his under shorts at 3AM to grab a midnight snack. Anyone who TRULY believes that they have absolutely nothing to hide should run for political office…even if they lose the race, the reality check they get from having investigators scrutinize their past would make them wiser about claiming to have “nothing to hideâ€?.
I’ve the microwave prepared.
We have given up an enormous amount of our privacy in the past 20 years. If you don’t mind telemarketers, identify theft, and such then I guess this isn’t so bad. BUT consider that most people don’t even have thier fingerprints in a file somewhere and now we’re going to give big brother and a data bank of computers the means to track us 24/7/365. How will we know who and when someone is looking over our shoulder. The Constitution and Bill OF Rights will just be an ancient paper with no meaning. Security is highly overrated if we willingly give up our freedom. The government is already blacklisting people for no actual reason and you can bet that it would only be a matter of time until the special readers would be in the hands of the wrong people. Would these special readers have “made in China ” on them? How many readers would it take to monitor 100 million people? Can you really think that everyone that is charged with needing one to do thier job would be 100% above board with them? The addage about power corrupting would be sorely tested and I have no doubt that we people would fail.
The privacy whiners (wieners?) are at it again. These are the people who object to being photographed when running red lights, people who think they have a ‘right’ to speed and object to event data recorders which can rat out their illegal and antisocial behavior. So why not mandate external speedometers so everyone can spot the speeder. Why not EDRs which are easily read so the forensics can clearly indicate what happened prior to and during an accident – the way airplane black (orange) boxes are used. Anonymity promotes crime – ‘protesters’ wearing ski masks are the ones who typically cause the violence and vandalism. If you don’t have the balls to say what you believe openly then take a bus – I don’t want you on the road. We can fight the free speech issues when the government actually does something instead of complaining that the sky will fall maybe someday. Put your belief in the second amendment, not in the ACLU. The trick with RFID is to make sure the technology works for the end consumer – tracking ownership to bust thieves and get your stuff back, insure you are notified about recalls, and protect consumers from fake products.
As Benjamin Franklin put it: “They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security”.
“Land of the free”. What a joke. Americans are as bad as the Nazis and Fascists. 8-(
As long as we have naive people like “Comment by Gus — 11/19/2004” who sez:
“I don’t care if the government knows where I go with my car …. law abiding individuals would have nothing to be concerned about.”
then we are in big trouble. People like Gus have no clue to anount of freedom they are giving up and have no clue to the amount of unchecked raw power they are giving to politicians. The old phrase, “give ’em an inch and they’ll take a mile” holds well here.
I don’t care if the government knows where I go with my car. I have nothing to hide. If I was a child molester, kidnapper or serial killer then I would not want anybody to be able to track where I have been. In fact most law abiding individuals would have nothing to be concerned about.
This is certainly distressing, but the concept isn’t really new. Virtually every car in the United States ALREADY HAS some big brother equipment secretly installed. Do a Google search for “Event Data Recorder”, or navigate over to to get more details. Isn’t it sick how these privacy perverting pinheads always seem to find some lame justification for their Nazi tendencies…saving gas taxes…what a sad joke !!