I've already seen FBI fraud warning signs at my bank. This is what is so worrysome about the nanny state on a practical level - crime. How hard would it be to con someone out of vital information. Heck, Kevin Mitnik was doing this well before 9/11, before people lived in such fear. When I heard about the FBI issuing NSL's *verbally* this came instantly to mind the number of ways someone can be conned (including a bank).

Couple that with the way people are more weary of Muslims, one could probably con bank info for a Mohammad So-and-so quite easily. In fact the faith doesn't matter - just the Muslim sounding name (You could easily be Chrisitian and fall in this camp).

I mean verbally? I didn't even vote for the FBI agent running for the association board I belong to - because of stuff like this. That is arguably to far, but I simply don't like this. I don't want it.

I've worked in European countries with strong privacy laws, some embedded in their Constitutions. (Germany is particularly strong in this regard, mostly as a result of how the Nazis used written public records to sniff out Jewish ancestry.)

It's true - as is often the case - that Europeans limit much more stringently what corporations can do with such information, but it's also true that they are far less sensitive to ways their governments can maintain such information. As EPIC says:

National ID cards have long been advocated as a means to enhance national security, unmask potential terrorists, and guard against illegal immigrants. They are in use in many countries around the world including most European countries, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Currently, the United States and the United Kingdom have continued to debate the merits of adopting national ID cards.

That's to say nothing of the news law the EU is about to mandate be enacted by all member countries criminalizing whole new categories of "hate speech."

Europe is definitely more attuned to privacy and government intrusion issues in some areas, and much less attuned in others.

For more on this issue I'll once again throw out a plug for Bruce Schneier at www.schneier.com

Schneier is a long-time cryptography and digital security expert (and general data security), and has lots of insights into how security works, what it means to be secure, the relationship of security to privacy and the issues that it generates, and so forth. He's testified before congress, written his own security software, and has a good newsletter/blog type thing that can help lay people (technical nincompoops like myself) get a better grasp of alot of the technical issues. He also has good insight into some of the political aspects, for example, "Security Theater" and so on.

Anyway, I recommend checking Schneier out (I don't work for him or anything, just another site I admire alongside Glenn's).

No kings,

Robert

The entire country, except those of us who live in Glenn's sane world, seems to have forgotten that FBI officials KNEW about the identity and plans of at least one of the September 11th hijackers. Remember the FBI official in Chicago (I think?) who was suppressed, oppressed, and nearly fired for trying to do her job and stop the hijacker before the plan went through? Clearly, electronic government IDs, not to mention medical records, wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference.

It is clear to those of us who live in reality that more Big Brother-ism and IDs are not an answer; they are simply a nice bonus to those who want to turn this country and the world into ... what? What's going on here? What are these people on? What is it they WANT? What do the neo-cons imagine the world will look like, and to whose benefit, when they've finished?

It is the people who enact these laws who caused the problems in the first place by keeping FBI agents from doing their jobs at a time when it could have made a difference. But there's no hope in convincing the American populace (except my sensible compatriots in the mountain West) that the Bush government has anything but their best interests at heart.

What's next? Viva la revolucion? God, I hope not, but they sure seem to be asking for it.

Glenn writes: It's true - as is often the case - that Europeans limit much more stringently what corporations can do with such information, but it's also true that they are far less sensitive to ways their governments can maintain such information.

Good points. I have noticed that Europeans tend to be notably more suspicious of their corporations than they are of their governments. (Note I'm referring to the western continent here, not necessarily the UK and certainly not the former Eastern Bloc.) This probably is because their electoral systems tend to produce more responsive and open governments.

On the bright side,the right's embrace of government intrusion into our privacy,particularly as it regards medical records,removes one of their stock arguments against a national health care plan.

My boss, who's forgot more about PCs & data processing than I'll ever know, mentioned to me that the government was buying a bunch of supercomputers. He opined that maybe the government is trying to use the computers to calculate every prime number up to the 30th or so power (enormous numbers).

He said that if they knew all these prime number values, they could crack the encryption methods used by most computers today.

I thought I'd throw this out there & see if any of our more computer literate posters would agree with the conjecture.

"Europeans tend to be notably more suspicious of their corporations than they are of their governments... This probably is because their electoral systems tend to produce more responsive and open governments."

And because those more responsive and open governments respond better to the plight of their average citizens than to the whining of the elite corporations, and act accordingly.

What's so frustratingly ironic is how tenaciously the Administration clings to its claims of privacy for the Executive Branch. Of course they frequently make "national security" arguments -- some bogus, some less so. But they also do this out of "principle" -- separation of powers and Executive Privilege.

Once again the Bush Administration and their enablers have it backwards. Citizens' private lives should remain private, and the machinations driving public policy should be public.