The Real ID Act (1 Viewer)

[Chu Gai]

Edwin-S said... Indeed, Edwin, we must be vigilant. However, where is the documented torture and what is its nature? Is it on a par with what befell Danny Pearl? Does it rival the torture that Castro inflicts on the prisoners just a few miles away at Club Gitmo? The popluation as a whole is not being incarcerated without due process. There are some enemy combatants that are being held but then we held German prisoners for some time in Florida during WW II. So what? The illegal wiretapping and surveillance is debatable. While its been the fodder for news organizations and members of congress running for election, I'm aware of no serious efforts by either party to hold hearings on this matter. While they may seek to pander to their respective bases, they also know what's needed for the US to ensure safety. If it's spying you're objecting to, I'm not in the same boat. I want a good, effective, spy agency whose mission is to safeguard the freedoms of our country. If that means they kidnap a known terrorist and fly him over here, fly him over. F*ck him. Administrations are critiqued for not doing enough and then when they start doing enough, they're critiqued again without any tangible, implementable alternative.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

Unfortunately, my own ancestry followed much the same path. The only evidence is family lore and an old faded photo of my G/G/G grandfather with (according to lore) a Choctaw princess (probably exaggeration on the princess thing ). I have seen the photo, but being my father's maternal side was French by way of Canada and New Orleans, much of the old correspondence was in French (she came from Arcadian/Canadian trappers) and not understood. My paternal grandmother did speak fluent French, but it was not carried on in my dad's generation and much of the detail (via my great Grandmother, who spoke no English) was lost because of it. Picture a bunch of elders sitting around speaking about family "scandals" in French with 6 kids who know only English futilely listening in and you get the picture.

Luckily, on my mom's side, she understood spoken German, but never told her mother about it, so we get to hear all the juicy tidbits that would have been lost if she had not been so sneaky.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

Castro doesn't torture people, Jimmy Carter told me so.

 

[Mary M S]

Jeff were they all 'princess's back then? Very common comment made by family members in the generation involved or the very next gen., - at the time the bloodline entered, then passed on orally. Maybe that made it more palatable to some (well ....after all...she is royalty) )

Just to be on record, I’m no ‘bleeding heart’.
My husband once asked me (during a movie) would I personally (if I had it in my power) physically torture a bombmaker in an attempt to retrieve information regarding its planted location? Emphatic YES.

But that is my making a moral judgement beyond law and really non-applicable (since I will doubtful ever have an explosives expert in my living room). Does asking myself this question concerning my personal ethics influence how I feel about what might (or might not) go in intelligence gathering during an attempt to protect lives. Yes, it does.

I don’t feel our administration is planning on taking over the world, and/or my mind.

I don’t know the answer, we need to do ‘something’ but if we can’t leverage the tools we currently use ...what makes any think we shall do better with new ones?
Having Air Marshals wear a (see security force here arrow on their forehead) et al.
If we have ‘people’ and identities RF tagged, do you think organized crime, could come up with some tracking system to decipher the reissued one, in an attempt to locate someone in the wittiness protection program? With a little GPS tweaking find that hotel room rather handily?


While setting up this system which allows them to mine deep for criminals they are risking all because inherently any such complete ‘tagging’ of a population, is a two edged sword in free society.
Creating means which did not priorly exist, which could, in a far off future be used by the yet unborn during any attempt by a corrupt “few” to seize totalitarian control of the ‘many’.

 

[Randy Tennison]

So, I guess my original assesment of your position stands? We should not take any strides forward, for fear that someone will be able to exploit those stands. We should remain stagnant? We should be on paper and pencil ledgers for banking, because computers can be hacked?

Again. Wow!

 

[Mary M S]

No, Randy...I am saying certain technologies are not worth the risk they expose everyone to. There is no 'free lunch'.
Who says carpal tunnel syndrome is better than writers cramp? sorry Randy I'm being deliberatly flippant in a attempt to say my piece without getting too intense when trying to relay my personal thoughts & concerns regarding the posted topic.

Having the capability to collect and access every bit of information not least of which is our current physical location at any given time. All in a central database, which includes our charted life (from birth to death) encompassing medical records to political affiliations to sex life to purchases to viewing habits. IS DANGEROUS. Do we have an enforcable equaly evolved system of checks & balances in place to protect this kind of powerful system? What about a husband who buys something black market to 'find' his 'protective order in place' wife. Everything we create has a cost and an abuse potential, the secret (as I see it) is to finding the medium.. of a system which IF abused will cause the least damage. A system which will be effective in the largest percent of cases possible, while incorporting the largest safety net possible to 'do no harm'.

And I’d give a lot to have had every abducted child implanted with GPS, so I’m in a quandary here.
But to say.. Whatever it takes do it if it helps to catch two terrorists is not factoring all the consequences which in incremental steps following certain paths, would be capable of deconstructing a established society.

We’ve introduced a lot of critters and plants in an attempt to reduce a threat posed by a single irritating organism in a selected geographic arena. Whereupon, the import promptly ate the entire local ecosystem.

 

[Steve Felix]

Weighing the big data mining attempts specifically, including the national ID (sorry, Real ID), there is no reason to believe they'll reduce the risk from the tiny number of competent terrorists, but plenty of history to demonstrate the risk from growing governments.

There is no benefit to this "advance" from the citizen's perspective, unlike with computers replacing pencil and paper.

A good article on the subject: http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,...ory_page_prev2

"Finding terrorism plots is not a problem that lends itself to data mining. It's a needle-in-a-haystack problem, and throwing more hay on the pile doesn't make that problem any easier. We'd be far better off putting people in charge of investigating potential plots and letting them direct the computers, instead of putting the computers in charge and letting them decide who should be investigated."

 

[Chu Gai]

Some of the computers that have been put in charge have used rather sophisticated algorithms to track the movement of monies. I believe there have been some successes in that regard.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

Imagine that, our "fascist" system isn't so fascist at all. Seems to me those who are worried about the downfall of our representative republic can breathe a sigh of relief, for the system actually works:

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/06/29/D8IHUVMO0.html

Something tells me we won't be hearing those sighs very soon, though. Cheers, maybe, for the system that "beat" their nemesis, but not sighs of relief for the system that actually works

Me, I'm proud I live in the US and see this only as more proof why I'm proud.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

Yes, I read about that top secret program in the New York Times. Unfortunately, so did the rest of the world.:rolleyes

 

[BrianB]

How is it top secret when the President announces it? And the documentation you fill out for wires etc states it goes through the SWIFT system?

 

[Jeff Gatie]

 

[Lew Crippen]

I’m not sure of the classification of the program—or if indeed it was classified at all (no doubt it was, as that is always a convienent way to escape outside scrutiny).

It is possible that the program could be secret in the sense that it is not public or closely held, but not in strict security sense of the word.

 

[Mary M S]

The same afternoon I was last posting this topic, I was startled by a troubling movie chosen by my SIL to watch while I was visiting her delivering flowers and checking up on her home recovery after surgery.

It was the DVD, Syriana with George Clooney. I spent the whole film with dropped jaw thinking how much this film elevates (to a visceral equivalent of getting the wind knocked out of me) the troublesome concerns I have and was attempting to voice in this thread.

Rent it, if you have not seen it. Forget that it is a Hollywood fictionalized version of oil, Arabic special interests, Government watchdogs, Government intelligence activities, all being stirred into a grim unpalatable ‘mix’ of combative agendas, by a giant silver Corporate spoon.


Apply this movie (in its condensed intensity) to any modern office, with its simmering mix of staff which include both moral hardworking Joe’s and back stabbing corporate climbers. Provide the human resources department in this office with a database, which collects (normally non-utilized and secure collection of) data which includes verifying your location after-hours. (included during setup , - for security reasons, to protect CEO’s and critical staff positions since this companies employees travel extensively) It only takes one scheming co-worker who wants to win lead position on a project you are both hoping to be assigned, who wants to beat you to a partnership when both are up for consideration, etc, to ...leverage (anything) (maybe) your proclivity for strip joints of a weekend, (to your wife), to complicate your business day.

Now expand the little office up to Syriana styled global levels, (Governments) and ask yourself can any entity safeguard (and guarantee the non-abuse) of the technology, - in the pipe now, being considered for rollout in layered, incremental, acceptably small-dosed steps?

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

"Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; ... and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." There's a reason that this was the first Amendment. Calls to prosecute the Times for publishing are utterly riddiculous, and much more dangerous than the original article. The question then becomes whether the New York Times was being irresponsible or acting in the public interest. I believe the U.S. government peeking into formerly secure global financial transactions is knowledge the people have a right to know. Your mileage obviously varies.
I hope that the recent Supreme Court decision will at last open a meaningful dialog about where the line should be drawn in the interests of national security. The War on Terror is a battle of ideologies, there are no concrete conditions for victory. That being the case, it's hard to give the president a blank check for an indefinite period of time. What concrete results have we gotten from the president's staggering expansion of powers? It's a question that needs to be asked, because unless there have been dramatic breakthroughs impossible under the pre-9/11 balance of powers, there seems to be little justification for any change in those balance of powers at all. At what point does our drive to win a war on radical islamofascism leave us with a secular breed of fascism of our own?
Of course, I've always been terrified, perhaps unduly so, of slippery slopes... but then again, perhaps not.

 

[Chu Gai]

In order for governments, all governments, to do business they need an effective spy agency. Spying involves secrecy and has to be limited to a need to know basis. Hence, if the public knows then the efforts of the agencies are severely compromised. There is a big difference between my actually looking at financial records and software that looks for patterns developing that may be of a suspicious nature. There is also a difference between the president having once said we are going to look at financial records and then having disclosed information that gets into how those records were examined. When you start to get a handle on the latter, then forces whose intentions are not the safeguarding of your lives, will be able to study the methods we use to circumvent them.

I don't know whether the Times ought to be prosecuted. I think the government ought to give thought to finding out who leaked the information and go after them. If that involves hearings, grand jurys, subpoenas to the editor, then go for it. Back in WW II, there was a Chicago paper editor who had it in for FDR. He published that we had cracked the code by which the Nazis transmitted their information. FDR, as I recall, jailed the prick. What became of the matter later, I don't know. I think though that the editor did not have the public's interests at heart and it's not hard to imagine that as a result of that disclosure, there are people out there today who no longer have a father or grandfather as a result.

 

[Chu Gai]

If every terror plot that's been thwarted and the means made public, how would that benefit the public Adam? If it became public knowledge that we've got people who work for Al Jazeera, that the cooperation between Jordanian secret service and ours is very intimate and here is how it's done, how does that benefit the public? Once you remove the cloak of secrecy, governments and organizations become exposed and the information dries up since we can't manage to keep a secret. The public knows that Jordan or Egypt or some high level scientists in Iran have been aiding us. The public in those countries now also knows and that makes life more difficult to them. Would the public interests have been served if the secret information obtained on the Rosenburgs had been made public during their trial?

 

[Lew Crippen]

I too read Adam’s post and without commenting on its merits, this statement is far, far from what he wrote or suggested.

In your zeal to prosecute leakers, you might look up the numbers of people prosecuted who leak to advance the government’s case. In the particular case under discussion, there so far is only rhetoric to suggest that New York Times has actually broken any laws.

 

[Chu Gai]

Is this the same zeal that the NY Times and others exhibited with regards to the leaking of the Valerie Plame matter?

 

[Lew Crippen]

Not limited to that incident—administrations of both parties routinely leak (and have leaked) information when it has been advantageous to do so. I think it disingenuous for either party (or side) to call for prosecution on the one hand and ignore, condone or encourage the same conduct on the other.