National ID Delayed & What is y2k remediation about?

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National ID Delayed

"The law prohibits states from issuing driver's licenses unless they comply with the new requirements beginning Oct. 1, 2000. The new licenses must use the Social Security number as the driver's license number, for example.

"The act also calls for digitized biometric information to be a part of each license, or "smart card." The biometric information will include fingerprints, retina scans, DNA prints and other similar information."

Implementation will take place automatically unless Congress takes action in 1999.

Find out what is on Bill Gates' mind about controlling info flow, your benefit or his? What is his track record so far?

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We have seen over the years various ways in which people using computers, and the computer's own errors due to bad programs and random quantuum flux can raise havoc with people's lives. We already have a track record of one of the big grocery card chains attempting to blackmail someone into an out of court settlement over an injury, by looking at that person's database of purchases. Do you really think that a national DNA database will not contain the smart card ID info, and that that info will not become used in ways, ie. insurance, jobs, perhaps even to the level of whether or not you can have children, that you were assured that the info would never be used?

So here we are. Triage according to Hamasaki is too late, and of course anything less than triage was too late months, perhaps years ago in some cases. We are at the point where working only on the core system, or as Harlan defines it, the austere infrastructure, as the only real way to guarantee our overall Life Support System sustainabity, yet there is no concerted move in that direction apparently, nor is there any real move overall to define the core systems.

Given the human propensity for the need to control the environment, machines, and most of all, the fellow human is it too much of a leap to assume that the core systems which are seriously being worked upon will be those systems which tag, brand, and track you, me, and our neighbors? A career programmer buddy working for Cal State told me that the Criminal Records and tracking setup has been Y2kOK for several years and is _very state of the art, the CIO in my county told me that all of the District Atty's Criminal Records database were compliant two years ago. Yes, I know that most of us aren't in those particular databases, but given the national drive by our politicians and law enforcement people to create a national tracking system, and the court's and law making body's slow erosion of our personal rights, I do not think it a very large leap, certainly not into paranoia, to envision most of us finding ourselves in those compliant databases post y2k soft landing. The reason, as is always given by those who wish to control the freedom of others, being that it is for our own good and safety.

What are we trying to save here with y2k? We have a situation, which unless you are one of the real Pollyannas, where it is apparent that the Food Chain (Cynthia) or (Yardeni) has a very high probabality of major disruption, and it is apparent that our vaunted elected officials don't give diddley. Do you hear of any programs to stock food in the big cities? Did you hear of any budget debates involving US$275B for emergency food rations? Anyone hear of our elected official and the bureaucrats coming to terms with the health problems over lack of good water and the two pounds of droppings each of us leave behind every day?

Is y2k remediation designed to save a system which doesn't care about us, the common folk, or is it designed to keep some real fat cats fat off the continuing labors of you and I?

Regards to all,

mitch



-- Mitchell Barnes (spanda@inreach.com), October 16, 1998

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