Passports within the US

[johnridley]

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/08/16/real.id/index.html

Apparently there's this idea that if you live in a state that's dared to not jump in bed with the federal government on RealID, you'll need a passport to visit federal areas, possibly including national parks.

I found this very interesting quote in the Slashdot discussion on the matter:

"What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believe that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. " ~ an anonymous German Professor from 'They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1939-1945', by Milton Mayer

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Oooo. Nice quote.

B

[madtechie2718.livejournal.com]

yes. At first sight, I assumed it was from '1984', sadly, however, it was from the real world.

[rmeidaking.livejournal.com]

Every time I point out a parallel between our current government and the one in Germany in the 1930s, someone slaps me down for bringing up Nazis.

I just think that Goebbels and Himmler must cry in their graves that they were six decades early, and that they didn't have super-computers at their disposal.

But we're headed there, and sooner rather than later.

I am sorely tempted to stop carrying ID; I wish I had enough money to pay for the ensuing trip to the Supreme Court. We're not supposed to need internal identification in a "free country".

[madtechie2718.livejournal.com]

As prominent American Noam Chomsky once said:

"That's one of the reasons why fascism would be so easy to institute in the United States. It's deeply rooted in everybody's mind already."

(interview on 1/28/88, printed in Language and Politics, pp. 747-8)

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I rarely have ID on me anymore, but that's because I'm rarely operating a car anymore. I'm not really proving anything either, since I'm also not doing anything like writing checks. I do use my debit card but you don't need an ID for that.

I haven't flown for 9 years now. I don't really look forward to it in the future, and it'll have to be a long trip for me to not drive.

Nobody in our immediate family has ever had a passport. My parents and older brother got them for one trip when my brother was in high school and the choir toured europe. Apart from that, and my dad's time in the army during WWII, neither of them, or as far as I know anyone in my family apart from a cousin who flies for the CIA and the army has ever left the U.S. Not that I wouldn't like to do some travelling, it's just not something my family has ever done.

It would be a shame if the very first time I had to get a passport it was so that I could go to Yellowstone or something. If I got one to go to England or Spain or Australia, that would be pretty cool. If I got my very first passport in order to go somewhere in the U.S., well, that would just be sad.

I'd like to be able to say I'm just not going to fly, not going to do anything that requires a passport within the U.S., not going to visit Disney World if they insist on fingerprints, etc, but I don't know that my foolish idealism is worth denying my family of going to our wonderful natural areas, or forcing them into dozens of hours in the car.

I think I'd also consider such resistances about as useful as voting for a 3rd party candidate. Nobody would even notice (except possibly to laugh at me), and in the end I think we'll be submitting to biometric identification with or without our approval; we're almost there now...

There was a woman on NPR a couple of weeks ago that was working on a system that did iris identification in crowds using high resolution cameras mounted on buildings and posts. "Of course" she said, "it's only to be used for looking for criminals, known terrorists, and the like." Yeah, that's YOUR intention. But once the technology exists, it's a done deal that it'll be used to see who's going to the anti-war rally, who met with that reporter yesterday, etc.

There's technology in the field right now that reads and stores license plates that a cop car drives by, and they say openly that they can use the database to retroactivly scan backwards and see where you were yesterday, last week, last year on June 18.

I just don't think there's any stopping it. I'm all for fighting it, but I don't have much hope that the fighting will, in the long term, be successful.

[madtechie2718.livejournal.com]

Interesting - especially with regard to national parks and such public places frequented by tourists.

So, as a foreigner entering a state park without RealID, will I have to submit to some extra indignity such that your federal government is trying to hasten the demise of (currency-bearing) foreign tourist traffic to the USA?

The existing measures are already having an impact - look to the dramatic fall in the housing market in the 'touristy' areas of Florida. Local newspapers in the UK are littered with adverts either trying to sell holiday villas in Florida at a discount there or exchange them for ones in Spain. In the last couple of months I've seen 3 adverts like that on the staff noticeboards at work.

I've had plenty of my American friends poke fun at me for enduring a government that presides over a country with the highest rate of CCTV systems in the world (and denies its citizens private ownsership of guns) but at least I can go for a walk in the park without a passport.

For the moment, at anyrate.

I'll never understand American politics (and the whole left-right description seems to have become so fragmented as to be of no real value) but is it not the case that self-proclaimed gun-owning freedom-seeking citizens are a bug chunk of supporters of the party of government?

I suspect, however, that America will find that the worst has yet to come - it'll be just the same under Democrats.

Why do I say this? Simple, it is your civil service that, having tasted more real power than ever before, will never want to give it up - same as here. Same as the whole bloated bureaucracy of the EU.

OK, at home it is fashionable to place the blame on Blair (and I have enjoyed doing so) for recent erosions in civil liberties, but do I expect *any* future government to roll *any* of this back?

Dream on....


The other problem is that enhanced electronic 'security' can be made so attractive: irritated at how long it takes to get back into our own country, P and I signed up for HM Gov Iris recognition system - cut the delay from up to 15 minutes down to 10 seconds.

[tceisele.livejournal.com]

Here's a question I've been wondering about: what would be the legalities of a private foundation implementing surveillance technologies at the same level as the government/police, only using them preferentially to keep an eye on government employees? The reason I wonder about this, is it seems to me that most of the problem with surveillance is the asymmetry of it: if the world is divided into "watchers" and "watchees", the watchers end up with all the advantages, but if *everybody* is being watched then the opportunities for abuse become much less.

I think this is like global warming: it's too late to stop the change, so instead of trying to halt the flood, I think we need to roll with it and try to make it come out OK.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

People have tried it. There were some people who tried to put public-access cameras in that pointed at police stations. People have called for police to put cameras inside the police station, since certainly they have nothing to hide. Police don't like camcorders rolling when they're around.

They do have a bit of a point; police don't really want it to be super easy for people to find out where they live and when they're not home. Some police work undercover and they shouldn't be exposed (but at the same time, they should be accountable).

Individuals acting on a local level are really at a disadvantage here. I don't know why a company would set up surveillance, not sure what the motive is, but it would be interesting if a company with some clout and money offered to legally stand behind individuals who wanted to, for instance, set up a web cam on their apartment window pointing at the police station across the way, or the senator's driveway, assuming that the rules were followed (only stuff visible from a public area).