But that's just it. That is not what this is about for serious people. It's not about fear, it's about the right to privacy. Bruce Schneier really says it best, which is why I'll link his essay again [1].tkobo wrote:If you say so...
To me,its a case of 'If your that fearful of your own country,your in the wrong country" type of thing...and that the" omg the black helicopters and the men in black suits" believing types continually display classic examples of mental illness,and firmly buy into the "Oh Noes,they can find me !" line of thought....says a lot....
If you have nothing to hide and don't want any privacy, why not just give me all your personal information, all your bank records, all your writings ever, everything you ever said or did? If you trust any other human being with all of that, the one with the mental illness is you, because you have too much trust in the decency and honesty of people. And that is who would be looking at all this data, people.
Do you really think everyone arrested in East Germany had done something wrong? Even according to the twisted and inhumane laws of that state at the time?
Power like that in the hands of people (like government workers) will always lead to abuse. And even the people who "have nothing to fear, because I have done nothing wrong" will find out the truth behind the words of Cardinal Richelieu: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."
Aside from that, again, RFID isn't even useful to track people. As stated before a range of 20 meters is really stretching it. So to continually keep track of people you would have to install RFID-readers roughly every 30 meters, in a grid of 30 meters by 30 meters. That's 900 m². We'll be generous and round that up to 1000 m². The USA is roughly 10 M km² in size, that is 10 T m². To cover that in a grid of RFID readers requires 10 B of them. A decent price today seems to be $ 100, so the infrastructure would be yours for the cheap price of $ 1 T. The cost of $ 3 B each year to fit every citizen with the newest encrypted RFID chip (which will still be cracked long before it's replaced) is pretty much free compared to that. You really think that's a good way to spend a trillion dollars?
And then you run into the problem all of the USA's intelligence agencies already have. Too much data, too few people analyzing it. Important information is already going neglected because there is so much data coming in that they can't keep up with analyzing it. You want to add thousands of times of more data on top of that? That would give you less security, not more. People have to get the notion out of their head that massive surveillance equals great security. It does not.
By the way... what are you so fearful of that you want everyone watched all the time? In retort to the classic "if you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?": If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me.
[1] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2 ... of_pr.html