A Real Life Minority Report...
 

Remember the nifty eye scanners that tracked everyone's identity in "Minority Report"? Well, apparently we have the technology to do exactly that, and it will be done, starting with Leon, Mexico. From the article:

Iris Scanners Create the Most Secure City in the World. Welcome, Big Brother | JK Technologies |

Personally, I think it's mostly about control, not security.

Of all the cities to launch that in! Mexico? Mexico doesn't need security in that manner, they need to get their other problems fixed first!
This isn't going to impact the rest of the world nearly as much as if they had found the heads of all the drug cartels and shot them.
OR found a way to give the thousands of poorer citizens real houses instead of cardboard and plastic shacks.
Not going to say anymore on that.
I live in San Diego, one of the more impacted cities on the border that deals with illegal immigrants. There are much bigger issues with Mexico than their security!

Easy solution: Mirrored sunglasses :)

I read something interesting recently, about gait-recognition cameras (yeah, stupid idea) and how they are in use, but very easy to fool... Living anonymously is possible, but it takes some caution and knowledge... the real trick is to just keep up with what is changing.

ossim.


Although my town doesn't exactly need them. (Actually, we had our first violent crime since early 1990 this year : / its pretty quiet most of the time) I can see bigger cities definatly going in for them though. Very handy for keeping track of dangerous people.

I wonder how obvious these eye scanners are. They were pretty noticeable in the movie. It wouldn't be long before all the scanners are mapped in the city so criminals can simply avoid them.

I bet they will make these scanners in places you cannot go around them. The're not fools. Anyways, this is absolutely horrible. As if it is not bad enough that everyone has a device with him all the time that can be used to track people, this kind of thing is just as the biometric detection they plan for European cities (basically cameras scanning faces and usind biometric data from the passport office to recognize people). Its just another step in taking away what little freedom is left to the people. And I can very well imagine why they do that in Mexico of all places - you can set up such a thing only in places where people are not aware or are not afraid of such things - or are too scared about other things. In Europe or even the US, people would probably protest and drag the project in fromt of the supreme court, in other countires the objections and/or possibilities to have them acted upon are more limited.

As always - more security comes at a price that one realizes only later if misuse starts to happen. And this is not only misuse by the officials like paranoid people think, but also misuse by criminals and terrorists if they manage to aquire that data. If you know, someone is in the city, you can enter his house in the suburbs, if you know someone walks at the same spot every day, you can attack him there.

Such measures should not be taken as a precaution ever.

Like I said, it's easy enough to avoid, you just need to know how... you just have to keep up with what they are doing, and fight it when necessary... At least if they tried that here, I know there would be huge protests.

I think that in the next 10 years there will be a big split in society between people who just accept more and more surveillance and government control and the people who want to live without fear.
An excellent book I'd recommend is Little Brother by Cory Doctorow.

Thats besides the point. I know how to avoid one or another of the things, but it is not always possible and it requires those who do it to keep up with new developments, meaning the circle of people able to do so is shrinking.
The things worst to avoid is surveillance coupled to useful things. Like cellphones - they can track you, in Germany there was a proposed law to store some of that data also - but with dwindling public phones an increasing dependency on them is evident. Or with public transportation - you'd have to use a car or bike to avoid that. Or with CCTV (video surveillance that covers for example much of the urban UK) - you can avoid biometric facial recognition only by covering your face or by strange makeup. Then of course there are laws against covering your face in public in general (Belgium) or when protesting (Germany). You can destroy the remote (about 10-20m) readable microchip in new Passports, but then you cannot travel to some places.
So - yes, one can do one or two things, but the costs get higher and these days people look at you like you're from the stone age if you say you dont use a cellphone and they'd declare you paranoid if you seriously start covering your face in public to avoid CCTV. And there was already a case of someone beeing placed under suspicion, because he did not have his cellphone with him!

The creepy thing is, that these things happen all under a banner of improvement and safety and seem harmless enough, but have the potential to be used in other ways. Like StudiVZ or Facebook - social networking, people share their secrets and find they are in the net forever and used for commercial purposes.

In Germany we have an increased awareness (or used to have that) for such things. In the third reich, jews first just had to get a passport - no worries about that, right? Ok, then they had to wear a badge - well, thats inconvenient, but does not harm anyone right - and how that was used after that is in the memory of everyone... Seemingly harmless things CAN and WILL be used to other means if the overall system changes.

That split is already there! Some people I know from the CCC try to raise awareness for the issue, but convenience, fear for the safety and simply regulations make it too easy for people to accept this. Of course people want a cellphone, travel everywhere, go everywhere, use convenient payment methods, have a navigation in the car, use a car, use the internet and so on - the strings attached to these become a web without people beeing even aware of it - or with people beeing aware of it and cherishing it for its possibilities (like a global village, a hive mind, a personal globalization).
Its really a ripoff. People are promised freedom and connectedness, but actually these are the things they will loose in the end.

So: "(true) freedom! not fear"

There's no need to destroy RFID chips, I just keep everything that has one shielded until I need to use it (yeah, I know, some still track me when I do e.g. the card for the Underground) but that's why I keep them unregistered. I do what I can to avoid surveillance - I don't really have a problem with there being a CCTV camera on a street as long as use is limited to actual crimes - evidence, capturing images that are later used for identification after a crime has been committed, but when it starts identifying people and tracking their movements, the potential for abuse is there. That said, it's always important to be cautious, as I always am, because governments are certainly never to be trusted. Most people just forget that the government actually represent them though... As V said, governments should be afraid of their people.

Yeah I know. They even sell you gadgetd that shield your RFID cards, but I hate it, that one has to keep up with this just to avoid the increased surveillance.

Well - If there are cameras in place, it is not a tough thing to change their use at any time or even use the data they stored for other purposes later. You never know. And I also hate it because nowadays people actually complain about not beeing under surveillance because they feel less safe. Thats completely nuts!

I also dont get why many people who dont feel so much beeing represented by the government at the same time accept such measures. I personally feel, the governments dont really represent the best interest of all people. They never can. Maybe if it would be like "V" said this may be all right, but the ones in power are the ones in power - they have that power for the time beeing, even if people can theoretically take it away after some years.
And power corrupts. Take our green party here. They originated in the 60ies - peace, ecology and social responsability - members climbed trees and stopped trains. In the past years, they voted for our countries participation in a war, they participated in cutting social benefits and their idea of saving the environment are not really as radical as tehy used to be. Or the sociodemocrats - they took part in getting on the way to higher pension ages, more surveillance and increased military activity. Representative democracy is a fail :(

Technically, what we have now is not actually democracy - we don't get a say in anything, only elect the least idiotic out of the people available... In actual democracy, we would get a vote on policy.

No objections here. In the US it is really ugly as there are basically only two realistic options in votes, in the EU it gets even worse, as there is a EU commission that is not democratically voted but determined by the governments. That commission makes new laws and regulations, the parliament can object but has little power to do anything about it and the governments of the member states then have to change their own laws to reflect "EU policy". EU member states that are in financial trouble shall in the future even loose their right to vote in parliament until they get financially well again.
This whole thing is going into a direction I seriously dont like and I dont take it lighty if I mention that this somehow reminds me of history lessons in school about the 1920ies...

There are MEPs (similar to MPs in our actual political system), AFAIK there is no american equivalent of those. Sure, it's completely broken by design, but I still think the american one is far worse.

IMO there is no Democracy.


they say we live in one. but in reality, it is not one, far from it.

Most of the "democracies" these days are constitutional republics to begin with instead of direct democracies. And from that, there is the trouble of lobbyism that degrades these systems further. I look with a bit of envy at Switzerland, which has as the only major nation a system that comes closest to a true democracy with assemblies of villagers and town citizens, extensive possibilities for participation of the general public in politics.

...But true democracy is mob rule, which is, to put it in simplest terms, not good. Better to have a constitutional republic, since it'd limit the government from going bad... at least, for a while. :grolleyes: Plus, it also keeps leaderless people from taking complete control, otherwise, the system would always results in chaos (anarchy).

The only alternative to actual democracy is for people with opposing views not to live within the same nation/legal system, with the exception of the few basics that 99.9% of people feel are right.

A good compromise makes everyone angry :P

Well - you said it - for a while ;)
No really - it would be all right to have people make decisions who really know about something, who are experts, who people/the mob entrust with knowing what is the right thing to do in their field of expertise. But to have a ruling class that trades posts like money and is based merely on the excertion of power is crazy. People are minister of defence one year and minister of health the next year - how is that related to beeing an expert - how is that person more inclined to do wise chioces than any citizen. Members of Parliament? They are lawyers, economists and doctors - they are regular people - why should their opinion be any more valuable, correct or less corrupted than that of the people? To the contrary I would say - power corrupts...

Before using the term Anarchy as an equivalent to Chaos, please look up what it means. It is not by far the dreary scary ghost conjured up by such statements. Leaderless societies, though only possible when a society is organized/divided in small circles/communities is a desireable situation. It is the only one free from most opression and has the least social stratification. Many native people are organized that way, cooperatives work that way - to have no rulers or other people given exceptional power is possibly the only way to be truely egalitarian and democratic actually

Well - I think people are too fixed on their egos. They feel unhappy if they do not get their ideals realized instead of thinking more humble at what others want and if what is desired really goes against what they believe in. But I dont have to make much arguments here - consensus decision making (looking for a compromise that fits all people of a group) is a reality. It worked for the Iroquis, it works for japanese companies, it works for the Amish and for many other people. The only argument one can bring against that would be to point at the differences between these people and the people you talk about having trouble accepting such a way exists. And I reckon these differences are mostly in the convictions, assumptions, presumptions and mentality of the people rather than concrete differences in the situation.