One begins to wonder if Krushchev was right in 1959 when he said “We will bury you”. We just thought he meant economically rather than socially. I am beginning to wonder how many differences between the current Russian and American governments will be left if we have a few more years of an executive branch which ignores the Constitution. According to this article in World News Daily we are now going to have a biometric database on anyone that anyone in the adminstration does not like and it will have no oversight or means of challenge whatever:
Although the directives run over 1,700 words in length, Congress is not mentioned once, nor is there any specification of how the coordinated “framework” will be disclosed to the public.
and:
The directives also do not specify any procedures for citizens to challenge their inclusion in the biometric database or any resulting consequences, such as restricted travel or additional government surveillance.
I am certainly not anti-defense minded but I would humbly suggest that no CITIZEN should have such information kept on them and if a non-citizen becomes a citizen all such information should be destroyed forthwith and severe legal penalties should exist for violations.
I fully expect this will be as effective and as competently kept a database as the no fly list, which is to say real terrorists will walk through and free and sovereign Americans will get the treatment by some jerk with a rubber glove.
Isn’t a more nuanced translation of the words “we will bury you” said to be “we will see you in your graves”, with the implication of outlasting rather than explicitly putting people into the said graves by violent or other means ?
Of course Krushchev was very wrong in both meanings, but the “bury” you translation has definite overtones of violent suppression which may not have been present.
Ed, I’ll bet you pick nits professionally!
Get with the program! Biometrics is another level of bureaucracy! Leave Krushchev to sleep peacefully in his grave!
Biometrics means that if I have the shape and height and mass as a known terrorist, and the computer trips me up at an airport, instead of my preferred destination, I’ll be going to a whole new world of hurt, and my luggage will have a better holiday than I will (as usual)!!
I saw something else a while back. We Australians have a science show on TV called Catalyst, and one segment of one program was devoted to what a cunning criminal could do if he had some of your DNA. He could replicate it, commit a crime, and spray your DNA patterns all over the crime-scene! Even if the criminal’s DNA also happened to be there, it would be swamped by the other DNA! Perfect crime, eh? We used to think that DNA profiling would solve all crimes. I wonder what flaws biometrics has?
nick g. Getting a little OT here, but the technique you’re talking about is a variant of DNA Bombing. The base idea is, you spend a day riding buses, with a battery powered vacuum cleaner. Hoover up a load of DNA from the seats and spread it around your crime scene. Investigators will then get DNA matches from half of the city’s population.
I first encountered the idea in one of Jon Courntenay Grimwood’s novels.
While I understand–and largely agree with–the basic concerns surrounding governmental databases of biometric information on citizens, I honestly don’t see why this particular executive order is as egregious as Corsi wants it to be. In fact, upon reading through the EO, I think Corsi mischaracterizes an order to render more uniform the existing procedures of data collection and storage among various governmental departments, as a nefarious secret “framework” of personal information. Given that the recent intelligence failures in the US have been in part due to difficulties in information exchange among governmental departments and agencies, I’m more inclined to see this as an attempt to facilitate coordination and to clear potential delays, misunderstandings, and legal hurdles in data handling by making sure that all agencies are using the same standards and methods.
Moreover, Corsi’s breathless comment that, “The directives, however, do not require the federal agencies collecting, sharing and storing biometric information on citizens to disclose to the American people or Congress their criteria for identifying targeted individuals or their data procedures,” seems to completely ignore that the EO itself says, “(2) Existing law determines under what circumstances an individual’s biometric and biographic information can be collected. This directive requires agencies to use, in a more coordinated and efficient manner, all biometric information associated with persons who may pose a threat to national security, consistent with applicable law, including those laws relating to privacy and confidentiality of personal data.” In other words, the reason the EO doesn’t explicitly list the criteria Corsi wants it to seems to be that it doesn’t presume to alter the statutes that prescribe those criteria; listing such information in the EO would be off-point and redundant. In fact, if the EO had ordered a change in those statues, then that would mean that the president were overriding Congress, no? As things stand, though, I don’t see why this EO is so problematic in and of itself, especially when its critics fail to recognize (or worse, selectively misrepresent) its actual content.
Your trust is more than mine, and besides which I do not believe a government should be holding databases on large numbers of people for any reason whatever, period, full stop.
I would indeed like to see this process regularized. It should require a specific court order and probable cause to hold information about any free citizen; the court should require destruction of all of that data under severe penalty if the case is closed or by a specific and reasonable date. The number of such open cases should be severely limited to prevent ‘fishing’. Does this means some criminals or terrorist will get off scot free? Yes. Do I care? No. Liberty and individual rights are what we are about, not the improvement of case closure rates.
Free citizens are not indexed and cross-collated.
I might add that the very fact you accept that it is okay for the State to hold such data, so long as it is done by proper procedure, proves my point. This kind of thinking and acceptance would not have been the norm 50 years ago when this was a much freer country. The Founders would have been appalled and considered the persons collecting the data as worse criminals than those they were chasing because the criminal or terrorist only harm a relative few whereas the bureaucrat undermines the Liberty of ALL.
Dale, I completely agree with your assertion that a court order should be required before the government is permitted to collect and retain biometric information about free citizens. However, Jeremiadbullfrog’s observations are basically correct. This EO has nothing to do with whether such information should be collected (Congress has already decided that), but merely instructs the agencies charged with its collection to coordinate their efforts and employ comparable technological methods. In itself, that isn’t objectionable. The two of you are talking at cross purposes here.
The part of this EO I find most troubling is Section 17, here quoted in its entirely: “The Secretary of State, in coordination with the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security, the Attorney General, and the DNI, shall coordinate the sharing of biometric and associated biographic and contextual information with foreign partners in accordance with applicable law, including international obligations undertaken by the United States.” It is bad enough that our government is gathering this data; sharing it with other governments is truly frightening.
Thank you, Laird. I did not express a detailed opinion on the laws underpinning the EO (mainly because I haven’t read them), but I do find the notion of widespread data collection on citizens and especially its dissemination to foreign governments to be worrisome.
My point, Dale, is not whether we should or shouldn’t “trust” (whatever that means, in practical terms) the State with certain information; rather, it’s that we should focus our criticisms of Government policy upon exactly those elements of the State that are responsible for the infractions, lest we should appear to be crying wolf by railing against the presidential lightening rod when the members of Congress (or others) are the more direct culprits.
NB: I want to be clear that I’m not trying to defend presidential authority; rather, I’m saying that the conflation of the “the State” with the Executive branch (which error I think Corsi makes) is extremely problematic for a representative government of separated powers because it facilitates the public impression that you can fix everything you dislike just by attacking and getting rid of the sitting president. That may indeed fix some things, but it lets many others problems fester unnoticed. Moreover, it sets up a straw man of enormous proportions which can be easily manipulated for the purposes of increasing State authority and intrusion. Just look at the role that the specter of Bush is playing in the current campaign: Obama’s using it to avoid scrutiny of his actual record and policy opinions, and McCain’s using it to highlight his “Maverick” appeal with so-called “independents”. In neither case is it really a question of whether incoming policy will be any better, but rather it’s an emotional distraction from substantive policy debate. And it works because Bush has been so demonized for by having the collective fault of the US government laid at his feet for so long that there now exists a groundswell of support for “anything-but-Bush” as though that would be a categorically Good Thing. I find this kind of thinking to be very problematic for this country–perhaps not on the order of citizen information storage, but I never intended to make a comparison.
Point taken.
Presumably you agree with the overarching point of the “We Will Bury You” reference…. that the US population as come to meekly accept the machinery (albiet not yet full utilization) of a Totalitarian state.
The frog is half-boiled as it were.