Re: More info that US passports will get RFID and digital signatu res

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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Roland Perry [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Sunday, October 31, 2004 11:13 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: More info that US passports will get RFID 
> and digital
> signatures
> 
> Nah, that would never work.

Well, I might argue it's never been tried, since our "representatives"
actually suffer a system in which the whips tell them which way to vote,
irrespective of any debate,  failure to toe the leader's line is regarded as
party disloyalty, and in fact large amounts of the key decisions are
effectively made by a separate professional set of services who
substantially control the representatives' access to key information.

Add to that the issues of regulatory capture within those professional
services, (as well as the representatives themselves, where it shows up as
house-training), vulnerability to various forms of financial pressure,
corruption....

And to drag this ramble vaguely back to topic,  it has to be said that this
is a major factor in issues of privacy and crypto legislation - what we see
is largely the last vestiges of human feeling in our elected
representatives, battling with an overwhelming pressure from the services
and a few core leaders, to implement systems and regulation that serve to
further concentrate power in their hands.

In the case of crypto,  either the services gave up and recognised that the
genie was already too far out of the bottle (hence perhaps the pressure for
increased powers of surveillance in other ways in order to compensate),  or
they allowed widespread encryption because they recognised the benefits it
could bring to commerce might outweigh the problems,  or they allowed it
because they already have mechanisms that might break it - an explanation
can be chosen based on viewpoint and tinfoil hat-size.

In the case of ID cards, centralised databases and related technologies, the
powers that be do seem to be pushing altogether harder to get what the core
has decided we should all want,  and there seems very little likelihood that
our "representatives" will actually take any opportunity to "represent" us,
but will, as so often, merely follow the policy dictated by a core for
reasons and on bases that are unlikely to face external scrutiny.

Democracy sounds like a great system - maybe we **should** try it some time.
Until then,  the power of the whips and the power of the services mean that
what we actually have is a system of electing front men for an interlocking
set of semi-permanent power oligarchies.

Dave.