ext_18723 ([identity profile] prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] thessalian 2005-08-02 03:09 pm (UTC)

Radio tags. Good lord. I love the things we don't hear about our own country.

To an extent, it seems like a useful idea. A little swipe-card that contains all the necessary border-crossing crap would probably speed things up and de-inconvenience people. It would make law enforcement feel a bit better, because like American driver's licenses, it'd give them something to reference quickly if a foreign national were to commit a crime (or need help, for that matter!). But oh, wait! None of that requires wireless access!

That's just stupid. We've spent the last 10 years learning that wireless devices aren't secure. Totally aside from government privacy violation issues, what keeps some random yahoo from snagging all the information and committing identity theft? The news article says, "a UHF freqency that makes it impossible to locate a specific person." Okay, in that case, why bother? Is that not the point? Is this gizmo not meant to bleep the information to the border guards so they don't have to haul you aside and make you fill out questionnaires? What do these things do: blip the number and locations of non-Canadian visitors in a 30-foot radius?

Obviously that's the fear, and it seems to be the only logical conclusion. I really can't decide whether the US actually means to be that insidious, or if they're just being stupid and completely disregarding the problem of how these things actually work. Either is quite possible.

If they do mean to be insidious, then I'd imagine that the idea is to have devices planted on government buildings and stuff that essentially tell security guards, "There's an international tourist in the building," at which point they can look them over and decide if they've got a bomb.

The only comfort I can offer (and it's a frigid one) is that they're really not after your average Frenchman on the street. The government is worried about 'homegrown' Muslim radicals coming into the country by exploiting their 'safe country' citizenship, and then blowing themselves up along with the Superbowl. In our usual inimitable style, the US manages to offend everyone else whenever we broach the topic of dealing with this concern, so we've obviously decided to wire up visitors like endangered bears as a stop-gap measure.

And I'm really sorry about the Scientology.

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