Beginning Jan. 1, 2007, all citizens will be tracked from cradle to grave in a single database — including health, education, family and police records — the health ministry said Tuesday.
As a privacy safeguard, no single person or agency will be able to access all contents of a file. But organizations can raise "red flags" in the dossier to caution other agencies about problems, ministry spokesman Jan Brouwer said.
At the base it's a good idea, but I'm afraid it's prone to abuse. Not in the least from hackers.
yea, that's a real good privacy safeguard if only the national admins collect and access all kinds of records about you and keep dumb hackers away from your files.
so, when do the dutchees get a ministry of truth? ;-)
Beginning Jan. 1, 2007, all citizens will be tracked from cradle to grave in a single database — including health, education, family and police records — the health ministry said Tuesday.
As a privacy safeguard, no single person or agency will be able to access all contents of a file. But organizations can raise "red flags" in the dossier to caution other agencies about problems, ministry spokesman Jan Brouwer said.
At the base it's a good idea, but I'm afraid it's prone to abuse. Not in the least from hackers.
"protect troubled children" - oh yeah, they went right for the sweet spot with that pretext.
it's as i've long thought: this big brother stuff will be implemented because it can, as the technology makes it possible, for no good reason. if the state could do minority report-style iris scanning at every street corner and building, they would.
and predictably, all the claims made for the usefulness of these orwellian technologies will be quickly forgotten once they turn out to be false. by then it'll be too late of course.
It might seem a bit like going on the defence or being naive when it comes from me, but to be honest I don't look into this as "big brother technology". It's more a system to assist different agencies communicating with each other about people with certian troubles.
I bet that a lot of agencies, not only government agencies, but also child care agencies and such work with their own information gathering systems. Reinventing the wheel, and that for every patient they get. That sort of information gathering overhead is eliminated with this system.
That, however, still leaves the doubt about it's security and the abuse that could be made of it.
Eraser wrote:It might seem a bit like going on the defence or being naive when it comes from me, but to be honest I don't look into this as "big brother technology". It's more a system to assist different agencies communicating with each other about people with certian troubles.
I bet that a lot of agencies, not only government agencies, but also child care agencies and such work with their own information gathering systems. Reinventing the wheel, and that for every patient they get. That sort of information gathering overhead is eliminated with this system.
That, however, still leaves the doubt about it's security and the abuse that could be made of it.
like i said, if it can be done, it will be done. things like this start out all innocent, but once they're up and running, someone will think "hey, now we have this system, let's do more with it" and so on and so on.
it's pretty much a truism that anyone with power will always want more power
(erm yeah i realise that sounds like the oracle from the matrix but i think it's true)
For those who don't speak Dutch, here's the explanation:
The European government wants to force all ISPs to keep a record of all data traffic at all times for at least a year. Among other reasons, this plan will be impossible because of technical limitations. The politicians are blind to this and want to force through this ruling.
XS4ALL, one of the biggest ISPs in the Netherlands have always been fiercely against these sorts of things. The counters show the number of incoming packets (on average at 630 bytes each) and that number of packets translated to the number of 700MB CD's required to store that data. The second row shows the same info about the outgoing data and the third row show the totals of incoming and outgoing combined. They started counting on September 5th 2005.
Eraser wrote:It might seem a bit like going on the defence or being naive when it comes from me, but to be honest I don't look into this as "big brother technology".
I think if this were absolutely identical, only in the US, you would be crowing over how fucked the US is.
The whole idea is fucked up.
"Maybe you have some bird ideas. Maybe that’s the best you can do."
― Terry A. Davis
For those who don't speak Dutch, here's the explanation:
The European government wants to force all ISPs to keep a record of all data traffic at all times for at least a year. Among other reasons, this plan will be impossible because of technical limitations. The politicians are blind to this and want to force through this ruling.
XS4ALL, one of the biggest ISPs in the Netherlands have always been fiercely against these sorts of things. The counters show the number of incoming packets (on average at 630 bytes each) and that number of packets translated to the number of 700MB CD's required to store that data. The second row shows the same info about the outgoing data and the third row show the totals of incoming and outgoing combined. They started counting on September 5th 2005.
Those are real-time numbers from 1 single ISP.
good thing every isp is against this for the obvious reasons (other than the cost of storage). some even won this battle in court :icon14:
