Just a quickie roundup of TWAT news buzzing around the blogosphere.
British schoolchildren are being fingerprinted without parental approval, and on pain of suspension for non-cooperation. So Guido was late to it; I’m later than anyone, but not too proud to post!
Ah yes, and they’re being fingerprinted by the same corporation that trains interrogators for Abu Ghraib and Gitmo. We all love a strong corporate culture, don’t we? Mind you, this isn’t the same company that’s being sued by all those war widows for the wrongful deaths of their husbands. I know, it’s just so hard to keep them straight!
A Florida company is looking for permission to stick RFID chips in all service personnel in the US. Look for legislation making it an offence to remove these chips, if such legislation’s not on the books already. And don’t expect an out when you retire. We’ve already covered in this blog the fact that there IS no meaningful retirement anymore.
VeriChip Corp, based in Delray Beach, Fla., and described by the D.C. Examiner as “one of the most aggressive marketers of radio frequency identification chips,” is hoping to convince the Pentagon to allow them to insert the chips, known as RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips under the skin of the right arms of U.S. servicemen and servicewomen to enable them to scan an arm and obtain that person’s identity and medical history. The chips would replace the legendary metal dog tags that have been worn by U.S. military personnel since 1906.
And if they can’t get your children or yourself, they’ll at least get your garbage cans. Fighting TWAT in the back alleys, in the Rubbermaids…Churchill would be so proud.
Half a million household wheelie bins have been secretly tagged with hidden electronic “bugs”, it has been reported.
The tiny devices identify each bin so that records can be kept on the waste disposal habits of its owners, and up to 500,000 bins in council districts across England are thought to have already been fitted…
A similar controversy also emerged in Ryde, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, earlier this week.
Residents accused the local authority of acting like “Big Brother” after workers suddenly began fitting the devices to the rims of an estimated 90,000 bins.
The devices use Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology which have also been used to identify objects as diverse as animals, vehicles and expensive goods.
Like cannon fodder units.
raincoaster 
The bins thing is nothing to do with the War on Terror, it’s to do with the ever more stalinist bureaucracies that are local government in the UK finding new ways to extort money for their bizarre projects.
They are already touting the idea of on the spot penalty fines for people who put the wrong stuff in the wrong recycling bins. Perhaps this technology could be used to speed up the process.
Think about it, they contract out the bins service to an army of illiterate migrants, the contractor paid on commission for every fixed penalty notice given. When the empty your bin into the wagon should they notice low and behold a glass bottle in the household waste bin they use their handheld device to ead your bins ‘ID’ number and three days later the fine comes through your letterbox.
Of course the illiterate migrants will be trained just to rack up as many fines as possible like they do with parking tickets in the ‘War on Cars’ that is being fought by left wing lunatics in London at the moment.
It’s all about taxin the evil middle classes to fund more pointless non-jobs to tax the evil middle classes more, as punishment for voting tory.
Well I for one don’t believe in the right to privacy. But it’s also a legal fact that once you put your garbage out for collection, the garbage no longer belongs to you.
BUT it’s also a legal fact that the bin does. And if you haven’t authorized anyone to alter it, then doing so is probably against the law. Perhaps you should just put the garbage out in teflon or magnetized bins? Easy and not illegal in any way shape or form.
The councils provide the bins here, the council giveth the bin and the council taketh awayeth the bin once they realise theres no money in recycling corrot peelings
Ah, then these people are being inappropriately proprietary of an item which belongs to the people!
Council officers don’t see themselves as working for the people, in fact councils are not run for the benefit of the people. They are run for the benefit of the officers that work in the council, nice easy jobs, flexitime, work-life balance, extended holidays. In fact people who get involved in local politics on the side against all the stupid initiatives from John Prescotts old office are seen as a ‘pest’ or a ‘pain in the arse’. Councils consult the public when the guidelines of whatever silly initiative they are doing says to do so, but they only minute those members of the public that agree with the initiative in the records of public meetings. You are allowed to state your opinions where the money should be spent provided that you don’t suggest that is it given to a different department. If you dare criticise the initiative itself as a waste of money then you will be subject to criticism (behind your back in the pub) and anthing you said will be deleted from the minutes. That’s how local democracy works raincoaster.
Ah, I see you have crusty old unions. The people who need unions (retail and domestic service workers) never get them. The people who’ve had them for ages were supposed to have moved past them.
Mind you, I’d give five bucks to any union that slapped Rupert Murdoch around, just on general principles.
Unions are very weak now raincoaster, because Gordon Brown (their hero) has hoodwinked them into thinking that printing a bit more cash and devaluing the pound to give them an ‘inflationary pay rise’ is a bad thing that the tories would do, so trade unions no longer try to get pay rises for thei members.
You see Gordon Brown asked the banks to run our economy because he is economically illiterate. So the banks do whats good for banks (i.e. keep inflation down and send house prices through the roof so they have lots of equity to secure loans on) and tell Gordon Brown that inflationary pay rises will ruin the economy.
So all the nurses and policemen that can’t afford homes don’t get ‘inflationary pay rises’ because the unions won’t argue against their hero Gordon Brown.
But hopefully the high price of oil should see an end to all this nonsense. When interest rates go up to 5.5% (I would say within the next 6 months) we should see some fun though when the nurses and policemen (and local government officers)can’t afford their mortgage repayments.
5.5%? That’s nothing. My student loan was at 13.75%! Do I have a sense of timing or what? That was the highest in history.
Re. Soldiers’ ID. With the reservation that the chip should be removed upon completion of service, I’m generally in favour. Of course you’d have to have an independant authority to confirm that it was out. But it shouldn’t be in a defined location. Otherwise, captured soldiers might wind up missing bits. There would also need to be defined provisions for using it when soldiers were “off-duty”.
Re. Fingerprinting kiddies–seems like a direct violation of several rights, but particularly the parents’. I’d sure as hell have words with a kindergarten that fingered my kid. I might go for an RFID chip in the kid’s baby tooth–that way we’d be sure it was leaving eventually, and before the age at which a kid needs to keep secrets from adults, really.
Unfortunately, since the regulatory framework that would satisfy me as to the line between safety and privacy is not yet in place, I have to thunder against.
Re. Garbage cans: If the council provides the bins (as they do in parts of my old home town, Victoria), then I think it’s really up to them.
But honestly, no-one cares about garbage privacy. Otherwise they’d take more care with what they put out and how they package it. Garbagemen already know all your secrets; I can still give you family size, members’ ages, and approximate income levels, from seeing the contents of a trash bin.
Throw in the recycling bins and I’ll tell you their shoe size, number and type of valid credit cards and the number of cell phones in the house.
Speaking as someone who slung bins for a living, I think people don’t get half the kicking around they deserve vis-a-vis wrong stuff in bins. We used to leave a happy little sticker on the bins explaining that actually, used auto parts weren’t supposed to be left out with the tin cans and no, styrofoam egg cartons were not actually cardboard … no-one paid a blind bit of notice.
As for charging by weight, I say hell yeah. On a side note: WCB regs said the most a bag should weigh was about 60 lbs. I leave it to you to decide whether clients A) Slavishly followed this rule or B) Ignored it when it proved inconvenient.
@ Steven_L: As for the “war on cars”–the Economist, that left-wing loony journal, seems to think it’s a good idea to actually make people pay for what they use, including the streets of a crowded, high-density city whose road infrastructure was well-established long before the advent of the car.
Canada need more ideas like this. In 2005, as the bottom dropped out of the SUV market in the states, our “green” countrypersons bought more of them and drove them farther. How bad are we at saving energy? The latest rush of home “reno” is the driveway heater.
That is, in a country where 80% of us see snow each year, people are opting to pour electricity into their driveways to save on getting exercise or paying someone (less) to do it.
It’s time we started making people responsible for their consumption directly. We’d soon see some savings, and a lot of savage bitchery. Imagine if you had to pay a congestion charge for crossing the Port Mann or the Lion’s Gate bridges at 7:30 AM!
Metro, part of the ‘war on cars’ in London involved contracting parking enforcement to private firms. Their modus operandi involved hiring an army or migrant vehicle clampers who would clamp legally parked residents cars. An hour later they then tow them away, if the poor unfortunate resident had not noticed the clamp by then, and impound it – charging hundred of pounds to give you your car back that was legally parked inthe first place.
Re: tagging soliders, what if the enemy catch onto the technology and can use your tag to aim at you in the dead of night?
Raincoaster – does your student loan not change rates to reflect world energy prices / interest rates / inflation etc? Or have you been well and truly screwed?
Base lending rate was 3.5% not long ago, about that time property was rising at up to and sometimes over 20% / year. People were getting all worked up thinking that if they didn’t buy they would never be able to and that property would keep climbing like that because Gordon Brown was so good at keeping interest rates low.
Oil was $40 a barrel then, it’s over $70 now, interest rates have crept to 4.75% and think they will creep to 5.5% at least. If it kicks off with Iran oil will rise more and so will interest rates and those poor fools that didn’t listen to me will get their houses repo’d. I won’t have any sympathy for them because I’m fed of of listening to people talk about house prices. I’m hoping for 6% base lending rates this time next year at least. It’s the same people watching their house prices are sayinghow good mass immigration is – it’s good for thei house prices bad for low paid workers and people struggling to find somewhere decent to rent even. Send them home, invade Iran!
People certainly are concerned about the privacy of their garbage. There are always a handful of cases in any given courthouse where people are suing other people for either putting things into their garbage or taking things out. Honestly, people are hysterical about the contents of their bowel movements when they flush in a public washroom; I fully expect that someone out there has developed a product so you can take it with you!
As a former Greenpeacer, I’m in favour of charging by weight. For one thing, it’ll encourage recycling, and for another it’ll penalize those people who throw away food (it’s quite heavy) and buy overpackaged stuff.
I would be in favour of the chips if I thought for a minute that they’d be removed upon the conclusion of the service period. But they won’t be; you KNOW they won’t be. And this is what the government will use to encourage everyone to get chipped (“Saves lives! Look at these brave soldiers; if not for their chips, they’d be dead!” etc etc).
War on cars? I’m there, baby! The only downside is that it does tend to split people along class lines, with the rich paying the congestion fees, etc. I would be all about having an “entry fee” for downtown.
As for the examples of criminality Steven L lists, they could be avoided by having this a public service, rather than handled by private corporations. This is a perfect example of why such things shouldn’t be contracted out.
Steven, my student loan was taken out in an earlier age, at a time of record high interest rates. The junk-bond era. But I really didn’t think it would apply to the study of chemistry and philosophy, but it did.
As for the effect of oil on mortgage rates, I am proud to say that I seriously, really and truly do not give a rat’s ass. It would be worth a great deal to me if every real estate conversationalist in the world dropped off the face of the planet immediately.