You’re ignoring the most important thing- that tracking citizens is an encroachment on liberty.
Secondly, of course I’m worried about a slippery slope. Worrying about the slippery slope is a hallmark of an understanding of the concepts of liberty and checks and balances, not a disrespect for them.
My argument wasn’t intended to be a “slippery slope” argument. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no difference between placing a tracking mechanism in my car, and forcing me to carry it on my person. Virtually all of my movements from one place to the next are in my car…if the government tracks where my car is, they essentially track where I am as well. My point wasn’t “once you start putting tracking devices on cars, the next thing you know they’ll be putting them in people,” it was more of, “if you are going to put tracking devices on cars, you might as well put them in people.” It’s pretty much the same violation of liberty, as far as I’m concerned.
Sorry to break it to you, but the state can already surveil you.
The thing is, we’ve already taken a few steps down the slope and it seems like things have gotten better not worse.
I’ve always been somewhat paranoid and worried about abuses of government power. But it seems like monitoring and recording peoples’ activities and movements has done more to check abuses of that power than anything else.
For example, it was cell phone and ATM records that started the process of bringing down Mike Nifong.
Sorry to break it to you, but currently they must do it actively and for a reason. RFID would change that. Significantly. I’m sure you can see how.
According to whom? Certainly not according to hundreds of Gitmo detainees or to that six-year-old child who was denied access to an airplane with his parents because he had the same name as a terrorist.
Your examples are of receipts for voluntary commercial transactions, which I’m sure you realize are entirely different from the government’s passive monitoring of its citizens. These two things are entirely different, and you must realize this.
(Never mind. Point already made by Happy Scrappy Hero Pup.)
Yes, let’s enact laws that increase the government’s power over individuals. After all, they haven’t abused the power yet, so we may as well let them go as far as they want until they DO abuse it, right? Sure, give them the ability to wiretap without a warrant…until they abuse it. Let’s let the government detain anyone, as long as they only detain bad people.
Oh. Wait. Power abused.
Hmm…
Are you really satisfied giving up your personal freedom until the government actually abuses their power over you? Isn’t that too late? It’s much harder to remove a law that’s on the books, or change a law, than it is to get it passed in the first place. Why should we give the government the chance to abuse power and then try to take it away from a now more powerful government?
If I was of a “criminal mind”, I’d figure out how to remove the device from my car and put it in someone elses while I commit my misdeeds. You can bet there’d be underground “chop shops” where you could get your device removed or whatever.
Related (sort of):
Why can’t the government put devices (cameras probably) on all the telephone poles and street lamps and track vehicles? That technology has to exist already. Just do a computer “playback” and you could follow any car right back to their driveway of origin. Getaway cars and even car bombs’ origins could be played back almost instantly.
It’s not a bad idea at all! We could have mandatory 5 MPH speed limits down the entire road!
Or essentially roof each and every single highway, byway, and dirt road.
Won’t work on even a technical level.
Yes. It’s a rudimentary actualization of the Panopticon.
Only with full, open, and easy access for everyone would this be close to permissable. And even then, I find it unacceptable.
How reliable could these systems be if they were mandated?
If the system could be hacked, then you still can’t prove that Homocidal Maniac was on I-90 at 3:10 am.
RFID tags are about as secure as the Britster’s panties. Cite. Cite. Cite.
Were I intent on committing a crime (or heck, just interested in being the usual kind of asshole that I am), I’d go around using those kinds of hacks to swap the data on RFID cards embedded in lots of cars, just to make it hard for them to catch me.
Private industry has spent billions trying to come up with hack proof copy-protection schemes for CDs/DVDs/software and hasn’t succeed yet. What on earth makes you think they’ll have any better luck with RFID tags? Tying it to things like speeding tickets (as Happy Scrappy Hero Pup jokingly suggested, but would no doubt come to pass), would only ensure that more people join the criminal class, as they hack the RFID units on their cars.
Next, you have the issue which I’ve faced, and I know that others have faced: Your license is suspended, but because there’s no mass transit, you still have to drive. While it’s a bit dated, I suggest you read Nobody Fucks With the DMV. Such a system simply serves to rapidly breed an underclass of people who effectively are forced to commit victimless crimes simply to survive.
Oh, and it just occurs to me that this idea, even if worked exactly like the OP imagined would do exactly nothing to prohibit the kind of crimes like the looting of Enron, MCI, etc. all of which combined probably caused more financial harm to more people than just about any other form of crime.
If law enforcement wants to follow somebody around, I doubt they have to justify it to anyone. As far as active/passive goes, your statement was as follows:
You made no qualification as to how the state obtains its knowledge.
I don’t see what that has to do with monitoring and recording of peoples’ comings and goings.
I don’t see what that has to do with monitoring and recording of peoples’ comings and goings.
I don’t see how they are “entirely different.” After all, the government can already track a person pretty well by subpoenaing his or her credit card records; cell phone records; ez-pass records; etc.
Here’s an idea for that: Let’s force publicly traded companies to file audited financial statements with a central regulatory authority. Sure, they will be giving up some of their privacy, but the public will benefit from disclosure and it may cut down on financial crimes.
Here’s a question for anyone who is reading this thread:
Does the government have access to more information or less information about peoples’ movements and behavior than it did 50 years ago?
Are people more or less likely to be abused by the government compared to 50 years ago?
Guess what? They already do! In fact, they file them with a couple of regulatory authorities, perhaps you’ve heard of them: the SEC and the IRS? Did these agencies prevent Enron, et al.? Nope. And until Sarbanes-Oxley was passed, you’d have a tough time arguing that the Feds were impinging on corporate freedoms, now, lot’s of folks are saying that Sarbanes-Oxley is a really bad idea. The paperwork is so onerous that it’s basically killed the IPO in the US.
I don’t know why this is so hard for people to understand: Laws do not stop people from committing criminal acts, they can only proscribe punishment for those who chose to ignore the law!
If laws really prevented crime, then as soon as murder was outlawed, there’d be no more murder, but as we all know, murders still happen everyday.
Oh, and the answers to your other questions is “Yes!” and “More!”
What the OP is proposing is no different than allowing the government to listen into any phone conversation it wants to. It’s the same as allowing the government to read all your mail, track your web traffic, and basically shove monitoring devices up your ass just for the sheer joy of it. And how many crimes a year will it help solve? A thousand? Ten thousand? A couple of million? And how many crimes will it prevent? And who is going to pay for all of this? (Oh, wait, I already know the answer to this, it’s everybody.) Why not put a breathalyzer in every car so you can “be certain” that no one will ever drive drunk. :rolleyes: If you honestly think that people won’t start hacking this shit en masse the moment it appears, you’re deluding yourself to the point of needing medication.
Actually the government should implant a chip up our ass when we’re born.
Wait… maybe parents won’t let them impant a chip. OK, put a chip in each penis on earth that alerts them when an orgasm is reached. That’ll catch em.
Reade Seligmann had detailed, time stamped video evidence that he was not in the house when the Liar claimed he raped her. Nifong ignored it for months, and then offered a tortured new timeline to account for it.
As long as people like Crystal Mangum and Mike Nifong exist, no one is safe from false accusations.
This doesn’t sound like the government I’m familiar with.
I think we need to be more focused on cutting back on the abuses of our liberty the government is already doing rather than giving them new tools to use for that abuse.
Cite, please? Remember this is a country of 300 million. Cherry picking is easy but not very convincing. What has the government done that compares to what the criminals have done?
Or if this makes it easier include any of the Anglo democracies. Cite stats from England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.