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| Australia Card part 2 Well it looks like we have been sleeping too long and the powers to be have been rather busy. This article is a month old now though.
»www.itnews.com.au/News/322040,th···all.aspx
The Gillard Government has, by cunning and scope creep, managed to put the final pieces in place to develop a citizen identity system as powerful as the Australia Card proposal of the 1980s.
The Australia Card, a unique identifier for Australian citizens for all their dealings with government, was abandoned after successive defeats in the Senate in 1987.
For 25 years, successive Australian Governments have attempted similar schemes under different names, usually without success.
The latest flavour kicked off in 2005, when the Howard Government commissioned the development of an online service that Federal Government agencies could use to check the validity of identifying documents (passports, drivers licenses, birth certificates) etc. But documents released under Freedom of Information late last month have revealed that over 17,000 organisations – mostly private sector businesses - have a legal obligation to verify the identity of their customers or clients under adjacent laws and are thus obliged to use the service.
The prospect of 17,000 large corporations, Federal and State Government departments all using the same identity system could conceivably achieve what Australia Cards of the past could not.
Roger Clarke, chairman of the Australian Privacy Foundation argues that the extension of the DVS to the private sector is essentially the establishing of another Australia Card.
“They are deploying a system for one purpose for which it was not envisaged,” Clarke told iTnews.
“They are just trying to build a massive web, multi-purposing data and turning things that are no part of identification databases into part of a macro identification database.
“That is dangerous for citizens. It creates too much power in the hands of the bureaucracy.
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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing - Edmund Burke
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 StuartMWWho Is John Galt?Premium
join:2000-08-06
Galt's Gulch
kudos:2 | I dunno why they bother with all this card stuff. Just insert an RFID into our bodies at birth. What's the worst that could happen?
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Don't feed trolls--it only makes them grow! |
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You have to wonder why it is so important really - what ends are that important they need to spend billions on this type of need. Especially when schools and hospitals seem to always be taking cut backs.
The negative world we now belong to.
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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing - Edmund Burke
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StuartMWWho Is John Galt?Premium
join:2000-08-06
Galt's Gulch
kudos:2 Reviews:
·CenturyLink
| Of course I was being sarcastic. Guess I should've put /sarcasm on at the start of the post.
I know why they want this. They want to know everything about everyone from cradle to grave. They want you to swipe that card every time you pee. They want to use some number (not sure what that'd be in Australia) so they can easily link all their databases together.
"Hello Mr Norwegian, we see you were born on x/x/x, blah blah blah, and post in the security forum at dslreports.com"
Its the wet dream of bureaucrats everywhere to have such an ID.
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| said by StuartMW:Of course I was being sarcastic. Guess I should've put /sarcasm on at the start of the post.
All good - understood that, you are not that US influenced yet.  |
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| reply to StuartMW
said by StuartMW:I know why they want this. They want to know everything about everyone from cradle to grave. They want you to swipe that card every time you pee. They want to use some number (not sure what that'd be in Australia) so they can easily link all their databases together.
It is really a big waste of govt funds and our taxes. Sure it might save funds and expenses in their eyes, but the more we keep cutting jobs the more criminal activity will rise due to not being able to feed ourselves and our families - we really are regressing to our past with such notions of cost cutting by linking everything to save on jobs and costs.
On the security side, the fact everything is linked - and costs and/or cost cutting for updating software, maintaining of the databases, employing people that actually are smart IT professionals etc, the implications of this database being exploited grow with it. That is a real concern.
My favorite comment of late - "logistics of decisions are never correctly researched" and the clean up costs even more than correct research and implementation in the first place. Ah but in commerce they are 2 different bills and allowed in wasting those tight budgets we all seem to have to deal with in today's world.
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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing - Edmund Burke
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StuartMWWho Is John Galt?Premium
join:2000-08-06
Galt's Gulch
kudos:2 Reviews:
·CenturyLink
| said by norwegian:It is really a big waste of govt funds and our taxes.
Well I don't think there's a politician anywhere that really cares about how much they spend. You may have heard about our "Fiscal Cliff" here in the US. Trouble is we have Thelma on one side and Louise on the other and both built the cliff in the first place. Probably won't get a good outcome there.
Politicians, at all levels of gummint, want power. If they have to tax and spend to get it then so be it.
So back to the point. Any kind of National ID Card is just another power grab. I'm not sure of the (public) rationale for it in Australia. Here in the US the two reasons I've heard are to better detect illegal immigrants and terrorists. Those, of course, are the public reasons. The real reason is to gain more control over citizens.
The NSA already has a huge database of data on US and other citizens. Imagine how much "better" that'd be if they could link all the stuff together via single codes (individual ID codes). Just enter a code and bring up everything on that individual. Big Brother was an amateur by comparison.
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StuartMWWho Is John Galt?Premium
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Galt's Gulch
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| reply to norwegian
Then again Gillard (Australian PM) has already said that the world is going to end in a few weeks. Maybe we should all just go down the pub, drink beer, and be happy
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Don't feed trolls--it only makes them grow! |
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 BlackbirdBuilt for SpeedPremium
join:2005-01-14
Fort Wayne, IN
kudos:3
·Frontier Communi..
| reply to norwegian
said by norwegian:You have to wonder why it is so important really - what ends are that important they need to spend billions on this type of need. ...
The negative world we now belong to. Governments are all about attempting to influence and "control"... after all, that's all governments can really try to do, however the money is spent. The ultimate method of evading governmental control, for thousands of years, has been for people to simply choose to disappear - either into the wilderness or into the anonymous mass of citizenry. Tagging everyone with unmistakable and unevadable ID offers governments the chance to block a citizen from disappearing into the amorphous crowd, and with habitable wilderness on the planet rapidly approaching zero, there is now little or nowhere for a citizen to flee. He either must submit to control or openly rebel. And with all the growth in surveillance and tracking, rebelling is becoming less and less an option.
The founders of this nation understood something profoundly basic: either you keep your government in chains, or it will eventually place you in chains. It would seem that we are losing our grasp of this concept, and with the rise of technology, the eventual chains will be more firmly placed than at any prior point in human history.
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“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.” A. de Tocqueville |
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| It does sound like we are pawns in a game we created ourselves.  |
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 HankSearching for a new FrontierPremium
join:2002-05-21
Burlington, WV
kudos:1 | reply to Blackbird
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
Really, all you needed to post was your signature line. It says it all. |
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StuartMWWho Is John Galt?Premium
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Galt's Gulch
kudos:2 Reviews:
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| said by Hank:"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
In the Controls Systems theory world this is known as "positive feedback". Such a system is unstable and will eventually destroy itself. The solution is to add "negative feedback" of sufficient quantity to make the system stable. This is often done with a PID controller.
In the political world this means stopping the ever increasing tax/spend cycle.
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BlackbirdBuilt for SpeedPremium
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Fort Wayne, IN
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| said by StuartMW:...In the political world this means stopping the ever increasing tax/spend cycle.
And, typically with nations, that expresses itself by "the money going broke" - namely, hyper-inflation... followed by great political upheaval and some form of reconstruction. Needless to say, this doesn't always work out well for those involved.
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“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.” A. de Tocqueville |
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StuartMWWho Is John Galt?Premium
join:2000-08-06
Galt's Gulch
kudos:2 | Yep As I said "will eventually destroy itself". Reality is unforgiving.
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Don't feed trolls--it only makes them grow! |
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