Personal patches

[Brad Knowles]

At 4:10 PM -0800 2004/01/06, Allan Bowhill wrote:

>  How so? There is nothing illegitmate, arbitrary, illegal, secret or
>  repressive about requiring fingerprints and photos of visitors who come
>  across our international borders. It is necessary record-keeping.

	Why not just torture them until they confess their obvious crimes?

>  {Personally I hope genetic fingerprinting ultimately replaces this
>  system. This method of identification has proven indispensable in
>  catching criminals who would otherwise have gone unnoticed. It works.

	Have you ever heard of "contamination" or "computer error"?  What 
about outright abuse of the system?

	We computer types should understand the concept of "garbage-in, 
garbage-out", as well as the concept of "no computer is infallible".


>  Again, why should we trust?

	I see.  Obviously all extranationals are criminals, so why don't 
we just nuke them all out of existence and solve the problem?

>  No organization (or nation) with plenty to lose will base it's practices
>  on institutionalized trust. It's always institutionalized mistrust that
>  makes it possible to conduct business. Like with banks.

	This says volumes for how little you actually understand security.


	The biggest crimes are always committed by insiders.  You or I 
would be unlikely to steal thousands of dollars from a bank, and 
totally unable to steal billions of dollars from a bank, but for 
insiders it could be very easy.  Indeed, for them the larger the 
numbers, the easier they are to hide.

	Or haven't you heard of Long Term Capital Management?

>  The point is to identify and catch people posing as travelers who
>  are known to be terrorists, or associated with terrorism. If the
>  system helps law enforcement catch other people on the lam, then
>  more power to it.

	They don't freakin' speak the bloody language of the people they 
are claiming to be terrorists.  They can't even properly spell the 
names of the supposed terrorists.  If they think that every 
"Mohammed" is a criminal, let's see them put every "Mr. Smith" in 
jail, or every Chang in China.

	Let them start spelling the names properly.  Let them start 
understanding the language.  Let them figure out that Mohammed ibn 
Saud (or whatever) is about as common a name as "Fred Smith", and the 
name alone is far from enough information to tell  you whether a 
particular person may or may not be a supposed terrorist.


	Or do you really want to turn this into a GATTACA, or maybe 1984?

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
     -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

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