All Your Identity Are Belong To Us

I saw this in the news a few days ago and I'm surprised no one is making a bigger stink of it. Yesterday a bill passed that senate floor that creates a new, unified, all-purpose national ID that would replace your drivers license among other things.

Image Courtesy of UnrealID.com

The ID would have a mandatory address, no PO boxes allowed, among other information encoded on it in some fashion. Probably via magnetic bar, smart card chip, or RFID. I'm pretty sure they haven't designed anything yet. But the bill says it must be implemented by 3 years time. The whole purpose of the ID is to help combat security and terrorist threats.

We can only hope that George W. will not sign this bill. It's suppose to be on his desk tomorrow for him to sign or veto. I don't think this is constitutional at all, and it likens to the ID system that old China or Russia used. It invades your privacy. Every time you go to a bar or some other public venue that swipes ID's they would instantly be able to obtain all your personal information! They could potentially sell to other companies or it could be turned over to the government, giving them a tool with which to track any citizen with. I don't know about you, but that's pretty scary. Doomsayers might even say it's the Mark of the Beast, but that's a whole other tangent.

Too make matters worse, we'll probably end up with illegal immigrants driving around unlicensed without ID's since they can't obtain one. That makes things a LOT safer. Not to mention that it doesnt help the government track criminals. Just your law abiding citizens mostly. Anyways, there's a lot more wrong with this than there is right I think. There's some good info on UnrealID.com's website, you can also google some interesting stuff about Real ID as well.

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Ranting aside, I do have good news. I worked out the problem with my KVM switch and got it working again. I ordered a webcam last night too and I think I'll wait until I get a chance to try that out before I post the Mac review. I might as well be as thorough about it as possible because I probably won't revisit the subject again after I do that write-up.