Notes from the Electronic Cottage 7/03/08

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Well, the Australians seem to have decided that a national ID card isn’t for them.   In the U.S., not only are we moving toward a de facto national ID card, we’re also spending a billion dollars of taxpayer money so the FBI can amass the largest biometric database in the world on U.S. Citizens – not just convicted felons or other criminals but hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of regular folks who need to apply for a job, whose parents think it’s a swell idea to register their fingerprints or iris scans when they are children, or people who are arrested by federal authorities – even park rangers – even if they are never even charged with a crime. Feel safer? Feel like you live in the land of the free?