Personal patches

[Allan Bowhill]

On  0, Brad Knowles <brad.knowles at skynet.be> wrote:
: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?

Good idea. That Old-Europe antiterrorism knowhow is just as fresh today
as it was during the Spanish Inquisition.

:> {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".
:

Exactly. Keeping the garbage out is a legitimate goal of the system.

:> 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?

But if we did that ... where would we get our slaves from?

:> 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.
:
:	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.

Batting 1000. The biggest act of terrorism in the U.S. was not performed
by insiders. 

However, you have a good point. Preventing domestic terrorism is another
aspect of homeland security.

:       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?

Yeah, false positives can be embarrassing. But what the hell.
Maybe Homeland Security can be persuaded to use SpamAssassin.

-- 
Allan Bowhill
abowhill at blarg.net

Concept, n.:
        Any "idea" for which an outside consultant billed you more than
$25,000.
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