Sunday, July 22, 2007

Your Reading Assignment for the Day

This is as good a story as you will find as this point on the unfortunately inexorable future of TECHNOCORRECTIONS and "the surveillance society." Has all the basics, focusing on the injectable RFID chips sold on the promise of all things wise and wonderful (tracking Alzheimer's patients, providing harder-to-steal ID in security facilities) which turns out, surprise, surprise, not to be all that it's cracked up to be. In the meantime, the community is placed on the slippery slope, with righteous rationales for injecting probationers, parolees, mentally challenged, then other aliens we want to know who they are and what they're doing 24 hours a day. (Got into a conversation with a very bright gay person the other day who's a strong supporter of civil commitment for sex offenders without this person once indicating understanding that the next deviants to get the treatment someday might be gays if history is any guide. "Can't happen here." Oh, yeah, tell that to Reverend Niemoller. Or those guys in Guantanamo. Or readers of this blog someday now.) In any case, this is a very good overview and warning that, again if history is a guide, will be the proverbial frog-in-boiling-water if the safeguards aren't built in from the beginning. Just the thing to end a weekend.

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