Just because Orwell missed the date, does not mean the entire concept was wrong.

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I too thought of the book 1984. That was the scariest book I have ever read. It seems like our personal freedoms and rights are just slipping through our fingers like dust in the wind. The Patriot act just makes me shiver. Is this just happening in England or is in the US? I have a child who is almost school aged and I want to know if this is could happen to me.

Orwell’s 1984 should be part of the curriculum and required reading in high school.
It’s a great profetic insight into the current era of spin, media manipulation and social hysteria.

Wait until you have to give a full set of prints and a mouth swab to DMV to get a driver’s license. You will need ear plugs to filter out the screaming.

The issue is not one of privacy. Since each of us leaves prints and itsy-bitsy genetically identifiable pieces all over the place, they are “public domain,” so to speak. Moreover, labeling the issue that way interferes with any attempt to consider the pros and cons dispassionately.

At least some of the benefits to society — e.g. catching criminals — are obvious. On the other hand, exactly what are you afraid that the state (or someone who steals it from the state) will use this information for and how likely is it that that will happen? Most likely the information will be used for finding lost children and catching criminals. Or is that what you’re afraid of?

Apparently the term Innocent until proven guilty never occurred to these lawmakers. With a national database being searched for criminal activity you are assuming everyone in that database guilty until proven innocent. ie the computer rules them out. Is anyone out there still under the impression fingerprints can never be faked? How long before a false match shows up? or worse… How long before the government systems starts tracking how many close hits a set of fingerprints has had and after a certain number you are upgraded to higher criminal likelyhood status? Sound insane? Is it any less insane than current statistical anaylasis methods of determining if a person is at higher risk of criminal activity?

Pros and cons, you must be joking. Criminal acitivity will continue unabated and unchecked because crime will always find ways around the system. So who are you protecting. You are protecting government from its people. No one else.

The idea of a DNA swab for the DMV is particularly scary as they can’t get it right anyway. I live in Connecticut, we just had a huge problem with DMV folks selling drivers licenses to illegal aliens. Extrapolating such a problem could leave them proving that they are indeed you! Forget 1984 this is “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”!

I heard a national talk show host who lives in CT talking about his experiences with the CT DMV a few months back last year and he made no bones about it, he took CT DMV to task on his coast to coast nationally syndicated program.

Evidently that was the only way he could make the voice of the common man heard and they say talk radio is bad, who is they?

If biometrics are used in the future for security, how secure can it be when the Govt. has your biometrics? In this case they promise to “encode pupils’ fingerprint information and destroy the information once the pupil has left school.”. Most people who understand security know that any encryption can be cracked, but most likely it can be obtained by human mistakes and errors.

Even discounting that and allowing that the people advocating this are indeed doing so for the highest of moral reasons. Not everyone working for the Govt. is ethical. What happens when someone decides the data is too useful to delete? Or they decide it can be used to track the activities of “persons of interest” to use a newspeak buzzword. Once the data is collected how can you control it? You can’t.

So how can you control it? Don’t give it in the first place. But this works around that by taking the data from children who have no understanding of what they’re giving. It’s also being done without parental consent. It seems to me that if it were above reproach parental consent would be easily achieved. So it begs the question, why isn’t it being subjected to that?