Considering that I probably already have files with the FBI, the DEA and the Secret Service, and I know that credit agencies and background checkers like Axiom and ChoicePoint have files on me, I can't imagine what else the security-industrial complex needs to know about me.

But public and private intelligence services are hungry to find out as much as they can about me, and you, too. See, data collection is a multi-billion dollar industry in the U.S. between Homeland Security and target marketing efforts.

The industry will grow now that Congress just gave a gift to data collection agencies last week - Thursday, Feb. 10 - that will streamline this information mining. The House of Representatives plunked national standards for driver's licenses in an immigration bill ostensibly designed to prevent terrorists from driving cars (which every month kill more Americans than died in 9/11).

The bill mandates that within three years, all driver's licenses must contain an RFID - Radio Frequency Identification - chip. RFID's are straight out of a dystopian sci-fi novel. These chips - which one day may be planted in our skin - can track where we go via readers or global positioning satellites.

Investigative journalist Robert O'Harrow in his book No Place to Hide argues that these chips can provide security because they can determine exactly who is coming and going in airports, etc.

This surveillance has a dark side, though, and in an interview on Democracynow.org last week, O'Harrow explained why these chips and other collection methods like biometrics (retinal scans, facial scans) are scary.

He said: "In a free society, we want people to be as non-conformist as possible. We want people to sort of feel free to express political opinions that are unpopular. We want them to be artistic. We want them to, you know, just be themselves. When you have a sense of being watched, a watched society where biometrics are used to watch everywhere you go, where your data is picked up, at some point we begin to realize in a way that we haven't to date [understood] how much we're being watched, and there'll be the people who don't care, and they'll do whatever; but the reality is that the rest of us are going to feel this chill that maybe if we misstep, we could be taken away for questioning, that -- you know, it might be recorded that we did something foolish. And so, to avoid embarrassment or those kinds of questions, or the sense that we're somehow suspect, we're going to all become a lot more conformist, which I think -- I know it seems amorphous, but I find that a tragic idea."

I don't really care that the spooks at Seisint know I bought gas at BP, that I prefer organic toothpastes, that I drink beer, or that I live alone. Figuring out what I read at the library is easy enough, too (sci-fi like Ringworld by Larry Niven and lots of graphic novels, like Blankets by Craig Thompson). Nor do I hide my political proclivities.

Yet the concept that public and private agencies are compiling a daily dossier on me, and that it may someday be used against me violates the sanctity of the Fourth Amendment. And while it may help catch terrorists, I think we'd best stop terrorism by stopping the president and the U.S. military machine that kills children and civilians.

2/16/05

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"RFID's are straight out of a dystopian sci-fi novel."

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"RFID's are straight out of a dystopian sci-fi novel."