Stas Bush wrote:I guess the decision to do it or not depends on whether you envision your future life as that of a loyal citizen for its entire duration, or allow the possibility of you facing the state machine as an opponent if not an open foe. In the first case, IDs wouldn't be harming you at all. In the second, you wouldn't want them to have such stuff.
The problem is the State can simply require such ID's in order to claim any benefits the state provides which very quickly can bleed over until every new born citizen is getting all of those things taken along with issuing a birth certificate. And in thirty years people won't think twice about such an ID. The amount of ID technology I've run across in my time as companies and governments seek to ID people quickly is staggering.
PeZook scoffed at retinal scans but there already exists a convenience store install sized camera that can ID people who just look in the cameras direction. The whole movie business about sticking your head up to a slot as a nifty looking lasers scan your eyeballs is nonsense. There exists camera systems now that can scan people in less than a second at a full ten meters. Feel like wearing shades? Well I hope you studded at the Ministry of Silly Walks as people's height/weight/life experiences create unique enough variables for walking styles to be used as a semi-useful ID method. Not a good enough method on it's own but combined with any one of a half dozen other methods it vastly cut down on processing time to pick people out of the crowd by doing something as simple as dividing out genders.
Biometrics was never my field of choice but my time in security has run me across half a dozen and more methods of ID people without asking their name or getting them to touch something. Once all of these ID methods are combined by the state and installed in public area scanners tracking you will be a simple as typing in your ID number and seeing which scanners noted where you were and when.
"A cult is a religion with no political power." -Tom Wolfe Pardon me for sounding like a dick, but I'm playing the tiniest violin in the world right now-Dalton
Maybe I am mistaken (and I can be considering that text does not convey tone). But it seems to me that you say that as if it were a bad thing. Why?
It has become clear to me in the previous days that any attempts at reconciliation and explanation with the community here has failed. I have tried my best. I really have. I pored my heart out trying. But it was all for nothing.
You win. There, I have said it.
Now there is only one thing left to do. Let us see if I can sum up the strength needed to end things once and for all.
It is daunting. The amount of pressure exerted by such a state machine can be staggering, the level of violence as a last resort - extreme, since targeting (selecting, identifying and locating individuals) would be highly effective and most citizens would never see the targeted. Not necessarily a bad thing if you trust such a machine, or if it furthers the goals you find acceptable, but in all other cases good luck trying to deal with it.
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Put this way: this kind of technology makes it cheap and easy to run a totalitarian police state, because it automates the task of tracking everyone's movement and being able to identify all the potential subversives in a large crowd. You don't need huge networks of informants to do this either; you need unobtrusive cameras and server farms. If the USSR or the East German Stasi were still around they'd be wetting their pants at the prospect.
There is going to come a point, probably within the next decade or two, when we start to see the first genuine tyrannies using this technology as an alternative to 20th century secret police tactics. Some of the richer and more tech-savvy ones (like China) have probably started doing it already.
And this is on the rise at the same time that we see a growing desire among the lower class in the West for a change in the social order. By 2025 or 2030, it will be totally viable for the "one percent" (either the rich in the West, or the oligarchs in other countries run by military dictatorships or theocracies or whatever) to fund nationwide surveillance and control with a relative handful of human beings to target key individuals in a protest movement, as a way of suppressing any reform movement instead of actually reforming anything. Which is bad if you consider the system corrupt, or think it might become corrupt in the future. Because the people who control the surveillance system are at the top of the heap. They always favor not changing the system, and so the surveillance and control networks will predictably get used as weapons against anyone who wants them to change.
The Internet can make the weak strong, but it can also make the strong stronger.
Simon pretty much covered the broader moral implications of having always on easy 24/7 surveillance of your entire population.
Yes the simple fact is that the Stasi would be having the vapors at the thought of something like what Britain already has in place. All Britain needs to do is upgrade cameras to the smart kind, mate them with some audio matching software so when the mics pick up someone screaming or a gunshot or any one of the various sounds that are universally regarded as a sign of "bad things happening here" they can greatly shrink down the manpower requirements. After all you don't need the cameras monitored 24/7 if they can keep a copy of a weeks recording on site and only need to be accessed when sensors detect a possible crime or officers look through the cameras after an incident is discovered. Now add in biometric crowd scanning technology and unique ID's which will be tractable via RFI and unless your willing to go the mountain man route it will be dead easy to track and follow citizens at will. Troublemakers will be tagged and laws passed so not having your ID is a a serious hassle. For example if it's mandated that to use a credit card or atm card you must show your state issued Super ID card every time you buy you'll be tracked.
We won't be seeing cameras inside homes anytime soon, but considering prices I expect within twenty years every single intersection with a light will have a camera watching it. The scarey bit will be when it's cost effective to put them on stop signs with solar panels and WIFI to transmit the data.
"A cult is a religion with no political power." -Tom Wolfe Pardon me for sounding like a dick, but I'm playing the tiniest violin in the world right now-Dalton
I'm not so worried about ubiquitous traffic enforcement. Human beings aren't good enough drivers to stop periodically breaking traffic laws, so the legal system has no real incentive to make it impossible to function while occasionally breaking a traffic law.
Whereas the state has powerful incentives to do something about dissent- if only to tag troublemakers and make their lives so crappy with 'soft power' that people get the idea and quit trying.
Which is something that might easily happen if we start seeing corporate blacklistings of individuals, for instance...
Simon_Jester wrote:Which is something that might easily happen if we start seeing corporate blacklistings of individuals, for instance...
Already happens from time to time. Corporations monitor your political allegiances, your friends on facebook and anything you say. They're much more intrusive than some old autocracies.
I would say that even some of the current well-off democratic states sometimes are much more intrusive than some monarchies and empires of old. Simply due to tech progress and the desire to use it in a certain way. Rules that were there at the beginning of the XX century are profoundly changed, especially w/ freedom of movement, emigration-immigration and so on.
Lì ci sono chiese, macerie, moschee e questure, lì frontiere, prezzi inaccessibile e freddure
Lì paludi, minacce, cecchini coi fucili, documenti, file notturne e clandestini
Qui incontri, lotte, passi sincronizzati, colori, capannelli non autorizzati,
Uccelli migratori, reti, informazioni, piazze di Tutti i like pazze di passioni...
...La tranquillità è importante ma la libertà è tutto!
Simon_Jester wrote:I'm not so worried about ubiquitous traffic enforcement. Human beings aren't good enough drivers to stop periodically breaking traffic laws, so the legal system has no real incentive to make it impossible to function while occasionally breaking a traffic law.
On the other hand, municipalities that make money from fines for traffic violations have great incentive to install surveillance to increase revenue. The former Mayor Daley of Chicago more or less admitted that when, after years of saying "red light" cameras increase safety and a study proved otherwise, he said he didn't care, ticket revenues were up and they more than paid for themselves.
A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.Leonard Nimoy.
Now I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character so let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job. And then I get paid.- Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity, which sums up my feelings regarding the lawsuit discussed here.
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. - John F. Kennedy
Yes- but at worst that becomes a minor form of head tax. Which is bad for society, but not nearly as bad as having the IT-Stasi keeping dossiers on everyone and disappearing or breaking* troublemakers.
*Breaking, as in breaking their finances and relationships to the point where their life is effectively destroyed, without actually killing them.
Simon_Jester wrote:Yes- but at worst that becomes a minor form of head tax. Which is bad for society, but not nearly as bad as having the IT-Stasi keeping dossiers on everyone and disappearing or breaking* troublemakers.
*Breaking, as in breaking their finances and relationships to the point where their life is effectively destroyed, without actually killing them.
When it's so glaring those seem like isolated incidents, but many corporations do have a highly non-transparent decision making process and many of them actually use the "wait and have revenge" tactics - a month or two after protests are subdued or die down, the managers initiate a "reorganization" and fire those who have been noticed as participants for other reasons (such as "economic situation", "unfit for position" and so on). I've heard more than a few stories like that. Trying to prove this was political repression is impossible, especially if the nation or region (state for the US) has no protections for such firings. Many do not.
So you can be and will be wrecked by a corporation if they care about your politics.
Lì ci sono chiese, macerie, moschee e questure, lì frontiere, prezzi inaccessibile e freddure
Lì paludi, minacce, cecchini coi fucili, documenti, file notturne e clandestini
Qui incontri, lotte, passi sincronizzati, colori, capannelli non autorizzati,
Uccelli migratori, reti, informazioni, piazze di Tutti i like pazze di passioni...
...La tranquillità è importante ma la libertà è tutto!
I'm referring not only to companies that employ you, but also to companies that do business with you and so on. That makes it really hellish because it's worse than "find a new job knowing you'll get bad reviews from your old ones." It could, with a relative minimum of collusion and coordination, mean things like having your loan applications fail, having your mortgage-holder harass you, and so on.
The potential for abuse doesn't matter anyway if your country is Australia and has proper legal frameworks governing use of information, corporate behavior, job protection, etc
Laws are effective only if they are enforced. Part of the reason folks fear the "national ID" and biometric band wagon is not because of what governments and/or corporations are doing today, but what they've done in the past and might do again in the future.
A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.Leonard Nimoy.
Now I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character so let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job. And then I get paid.- Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity, which sums up my feelings regarding the lawsuit discussed here.
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. - John F. Kennedy
Also, the problem with consumer protection laws is that it's a disproportionate hassle to fight for your own rights, compared to the company which has an entire legal department to do it for them.
JULY 20TH 1969 - The day the entire world was looking up
It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small. - NEIL ARMSTRONG, MISSION COMMANDER, APOLLO 11
Signature dedicated to the greatest achievement of mankind.
MILDLY DERANGED PHYSICIST does not mind BREAKING the SOUND BARRIER, because it is INSURED. - Simon_Jester considering the problems of hypersonic flight for Team L.A.M.E.
The problem with laws that are supposed to protect employees from corporate abuse is that the employee is on his or her own whereas the corporation has cadres of lawyers and "human resource" professionals whose job is to understand and/or game the system to the benefit of the corporation. It's an unequal contest.
A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.Leonard Nimoy.
Now I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character so let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job. And then I get paid.- Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity, which sums up my feelings regarding the lawsuit discussed here.
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. - John F. Kennedy
JointStrikeFighter wrote:Which is why in au we have government departments to fight on our behalf.
That supposes said government is trustworthy, and hasn't been bribed/blackmailed/colluded/etc with the evil company in the first place.
Such a government would want you to think that they are looking out for you. It's also why you have disgruntled ex-employees taking matters into their own hands.
"A word of advice: next time you post, try not to inadvertently reveal why you've had no success with real women." Darth Wong to Bubble Boy
"I see you do not understand objectivity," said Tom Carder, a fundie fucknut to Darth Wong
Interestingly, the British government actually has fewer checks on the laws it can pass than the American one; I can't speak for other Commonwealth nations, but parliamentary sovereignty is rather clear on that point. For example, there is an actual rule in the US, one Congress cannot repeal on its own, which forbids Congress from abolishing the right to a jury trial.
That rule may not be enforced as consistently as it should, but it exists, and there is a judicial review mechanism that can reject a law which violates the written constitution. There is no such rule, no such written constitution, and no such judicial review in Britain.
So I do have to wonder why they weren't your target of choice.
Simon_Jester wrote: Other countries like Australia maybe too.
sadly Australia is going away from freedom towards a 'Nanny State', where everything you do is controlled by the govt, and they've been trying all sorts of ways to get a National card system into operation. It always begins with promises of streamlining various govt depts.
========================================
If you believe in Telekinesis, raise my hand.
Simon_Jester wrote: Other countries like Australia maybe too.
sadly Australia is going away from freedom towards a 'Nanny State', where everything you do is controlled by the govt, and they've been trying all sorts of ways to get a National card system into operation. It always begins with promises of streamlining various govt depts.
I see lots of buzzwords and little substance in that post.
"This statement, in its utterly clueless hubristic stupidity, cannot be improved upon. I merely quote it in admiration of its perfection." - Garibaldi
"Problem is, while the Germans have had many mea culpas and quite painfully dealt with their history, the South is still hellbent on painting themselves as the real victims. It gives them a special place in the history of assholes" - Covenant
"Over three million died fighting for the emperor, but when the war was over he pretended it was not his responsibility. What kind of man does that?'' - Saburo Sakai
PeZook wrote:Also, the problem with consumer protection laws is that it's a disproportionate hassle to fight for your own rights, compared to the company which has an entire legal department to do it for them.
Not much hassle in 'fire off email to consumer protection dept'. Individuals don't have to investigate compliance themselves; that's an obviously absurd idea. Trained investigators are ready to follow up on complaints, tipoffs and whistleblowers. Of course, it's more cost effective to simply communicate requirements beforehand to industry to ensure compliance, but that's easier if anything.
I mean, nobody had to personally take anyone to court when someone told retailers to jack prices and 'blame the carbon tax'. The bodies involved simply ruled them as a matter of procedure.
Will Australia's consumer protection people actually handle individual violations for you? For example, if you get a defective product and the company refuses to exchange it?
Over here they will just advise you and point you in the right direction (which court to go to, what documents you'll need etc.), unless the violation is systemic ; But I can hardly claim Poland's customer law and organization of its enforcement is the best in the world
JULY 20TH 1969 - The day the entire world was looking up
It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small. - NEIL ARMSTRONG, MISSION COMMANDER, APOLLO 11
Signature dedicated to the greatest achievement of mankind.
MILDLY DERANGED PHYSICIST does not mind BREAKING the SOUND BARRIER, because it is INSURED. - Simon_Jester considering the problems of hypersonic flight for Team L.A.M.E.
I'm pretty sure they're different bodies; the ACCC at federal level and the state fair trade guys work at the industry level to communicate requirements and investigate individual or systematic compliance, but there are other bodies (various industry ombudsmen etc) that you can call about single cases of unlawful behaviour. For instance, the ACCC and the state fair trade orgs will create training material for different industries to ensure they understand requirements under the law and to help consumers understand their rights, and substantiate complaints like 'that real estate agent did not disclose required information' and the like, but if a store won't do an exchange (particularly since AU has quite strong laws in this regard) there are so many bodies you could call I couldn't pick one. Many people always call the ACCC, who I guess are happy to trickle that down to relevant bodies, but I've never had anything like that persist beyond 'dont make me call the ombudsman lol'.
This can be seen in action at any EB store, where they have to have a sign explaining how games from other countries may contain material that suggests you do not have certain consumer rights that they cannot take away, and where staff will try on shit like 'you can't return that unless you join our store loyalty program' which wouldn't stand up to even the most basic challenge and is against company policy.
Thr biggest impact of consumer protection isn't stopping SHONKY DEALERS and hunting down non compliance; it's creating a culture where non compliance is not desirable.
