Even as our new Public Safety Minister is conferring with his colleagues on the easiest way to kill the gun registry, Stockwell Day, fresh from a consultation with American Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, is musing out loud about a much more ambitious, and potentially much more invasive, project.
The new federal minister of public safety, Stockwell Day, is suggesting that a national identification card is inevitable for Canadians.Day suggested in an interview with The Canadian Press that a government-issued national ID card, which Britain could begin to phase in by next year, is likely forthcoming for Canadians.
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Now that the United States has dropped its demand requiring Canadians to show passports to travel across the border, the proposal for a national ID card appears to be back on the table."We also want to be able to stop people who are a menace or a threat from getting in or getting out, so that's the overall goal," Day said.
I figure there are two reasons why an idea like this looks like one whose time has come. The first is that someone stands to make a lot of money from it. A system with all the latest biometric bells and whistles could make the money we've spent on the gun registry look like pocket change. And let's not forget who one of the biggest boosters of such a system in the U.S. in the days following 9/11 was: Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.
The second reason is because such an ambitious undertaking would certainly make it appear as though government is doing something. Since it would obviously impact on every citizen, it makes a great political talking point. You'd be constantly reminded of the government that implemented it because you'd have to carry the damn thing around with you and use it to identify yourself.
The problem is that while politicians and database companies seem to love the idea, security experts like Bruce Schneier remain unconvinced that it would do any good.
Our goal is to somehow identify the few bad guys scattered in the sea of good guys. In an ideal world, what we'd want is some kind of ID that denotes intention. We'd want all terrorists to carry a card that says "evildoer" and everyone else to carry a card that said "honest person who won't try to hijack or blow up anything." Then, security would be easy. We'd just look at people's IDs and, if they were evildoers, we wouldn't let them on the airplane or into the building.This is, of course, ridiculous, so we rely on identity as a substitute. In theory, if we know who you are, and if we have enough information about you, we can somehow predict whether you're likely to be an evildoer.
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Profiling has two very dangerous failure modes. The first one is obvious. The intent of profiling is to divide people into two categories: people who may be evildoers and need to be screened more carefully, and people who are less likely to be evildoers and can be screened less carefully. But any such system will create a third, and very dangerous, category: evildoers who don't fit the profile.
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There's another, even more dangerous, failure mode for these systems: honest people who fit the evildoer profile. Because actual evildoers are so rare, almost everyone who fits the profile will turn out to be a false alarm. This not only wastes investigative resources that might be better spent elsewhere, but it causes grave harm to those innocents who fit the profile. Whether it's something as simple as "driving while black" or "flying while Arab," or something more complicated like taking scuba lessons or protesting the current administration, profiling harms society because it causes us all to live in fear...not from the evildoers, but from the police.Security is a trade-off; we have to weigh the security we get against the price we pay for it. Better trade-offs are to spend money on intelligence and analysis, investigation, and making ourselves less of a pariah on the world stage.
Now add this from a different piece by the same author.
But the main problem with any ID system is that it requires the existence of a database. In this case it would have to be an immense database of private and sensitive information on every American -- one widely and instantaneously accessible from airline check-in stations, police cars, schools, and so on.The security risks are enormous. Such a database would be a kludge of existing databases; databases that are incompatible, full of erroneous data, and unreliable. As computer scientists, we do not know how to keep a database of this magnitude secure, whether from outside hackers or the thousands of insiders authorized to access it.
And when the inevitable worms, viruses, or random failures happen and the database goes down, what then? Is America supposed to shut down until it's restored?
Proponents of national ID cards want us to assume all these problems, and the tens of billions of dollars such a system would cost -- for what? For the promise of being able to identify someone?
So does Day think this kind of system is inevitable because he knows something that experts like Bruce Schneier don't? Or does he think it's inevitable because Michael Chertoff told him it is? To be fair, if it's the latter it wouldn't make him any worse than his predecessor, Anne McLellan. But it wouldn't make him any better, either.
Yup -- scrap one large, invasive, ineffective program designed to pander to people afraid of the things under their beds for... well, something that fits all the aforementioned descriptions, only on a much larger scale. That's our Stockwell.
But if you think that's bad, check out Stockboy's newly-named special assistant: former Canadian Police Association executive director Scott Newark, who cranked off this gem in the Albert Report:
"Anything effective in law enforcement will inevitably be forbidden under the Charter [the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms]. As we always say, the charter helps only murderers, pedophiles and judges."
http://conservativeforum.org/authquot.asp?ID=1130
Googling up Newark's name, or better yet, going through a publications database, will turn up plenty more evidence that our top cop's right-hand man (and it takes work to be on Stocky's right) is no friend of civil liberties.
Now, I wonder how our friends who have been railing against the long-gun registry for the last ten years will react to this idea of Stocky's.
Yep. That's our Stocky boy. How long, O Lord, how long? Please may they not do too much damage before the Canadian electorate come to their senses and have a chance to reverse this turning of events.
These people -- Day, Harper, Ezra Levant, Alberta Report, Western Standard, et al -- are a very far cry from Progressive Conservative of yore. They are dangerous.
Brilliant, POGGE! Briliiant!
You hit enough nails on the head here to build an entire house!
Register guns = bad, register people = good
Wow, unfuckingbelievable. We sure continue our worldwide march to daddy knows best conservatism, don't we?
Maybe someone could suggest to Stockwell just to convince every Canadian to get a passport and carry it around with them.
It would have the side benefit of making me get off my butt to renew mine.
We are crossing the threshold into the creation of a new reality. While we study that new reality as judiciously as we wish, Stevie and Stockboy will be busy creating other new realities. Then we can study those new realities too. That's how things will sort out. They're history's actors, doncha know, and we, all of us, will be left to just study what they do.
we have to reject the id cards!
this is nothing more than big brother trying to collect personal information on his citizens, we are becoming a police state.
"if you got nothing to hide, then what are you afraid off", that is what they'll tell you or
"if your not a terrorist then you must accept the card"
this is nothing more than extortion
75% of britains are against the id cards, yet the plan is going ahead, people this is not democracy of the people, this is dictarship
http://www.no2id.net/
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1712998,00.html
It's no surprise the push behind this is coming from Britain. The Blair government has implemented an amzing array of police state legislation since it came to power.
When this really hits the US, it will be an interesting test of the extent to which the culture culture of fear has become embedded in that country. Ten years ago Americans would have about rioted in the streets if the government had attempted to intrude in this manner. We'll see if that still holds true.
I seem to remember reading that the estimated cost of ID cards in Britain was $5 billion. Lets see, our firearms registry was estimated to cost $2m and winds up costing $1b. Their ID cards are estimated to cost $5b. You do the math.
But you're missing the point.
It's important, vitally important, to know exactly who is and isn't white, christian, english speaking, rich and so on.
If we can't tell that when we can't actually see the person in question then what good is being in government?
I think I'll just blow my brians out now, and save myself the misery of watching these idiots rip this country to shreds!
This is profoundly depressing and worrying. On the one hand it will inevitably be ineffective, expensive, intrusive and will contribute to profiling. Also worth noting are the things we could lose because of it - like effective gun control or national sovereignty, depending on what this is meant to "replace" and who will get to snoop the files. The NSA flap in the states is the most gob-stoppingly shocking breach of privacy and domestic law in modern American history, and now is when we have to go big brother, while they're really hitting their stride? Ugh.
Effective crime control would be seriously preferable to effective gun control but we already have neither of those and still won't have either after the useless and obscenely expensive firearms registry is replaced by an even more obscenely expensive, more intrusive and just as useless national ID card.
The only difference the change in government makes regarding the national ID card is that it is being talked up by Doris Day instead of Alberta Orphan Annie.
NAFTA's a farce, you'll get no arguments there. But equating the parties on national sovereignty? I'm a little bit more concerned about 'light and inspiration' Steve than I am about the softness of the Liberals on the issue. Harper's already demonstrated an ability to gull people by professing regard for an institution (say, health care) while simultaneously working overtime to destroy it. I strongly suspect his newfound commitment to "arctic sovereignty" and tough talk vis a vis the Bushies is meant to be the matador's cloak obscuring the Americanization his base seeks.
"Crime control" will never be so effective as to obviate the need for gun control. Look at the United Kingdom; we do have the United States' arms industry to contend with across the border compared to them, but we're supposed to be tightening that anyway.
The same criticisms of ID cards (minus some of the concern they'd hand the database over to their Republican brethren without compunction) goes for the same proposal from any other party.
Well, what say we compromise. Since it's Conservatives who want it, what say we just have a national ID for and database of Conservative party members. That'd catch most of the more dangerous elements in Canadian society anyway.
. . . And let's not forget to make sure that name in the database is "Doris". We demand!
So, what, the real problem with the firearms registry was that it wasn't big and intrusive and broad enough?
The problem with the firearms registry is cost overruns, not "intrusiveness." My concept of libertarianism doesn't include NRA fiddlefaddle about the "freedom" to stockpile munitions anonymously and hassle-free.
Thre problem with the firearms registry isn't cost overuns - it's cynicism, arrogance and uselessness. Cynicism because the program never had anything to do with public safety. It was never anything more than a cyncical ploy to garner votes, especially from women and recent immigrants, in the Windsor to Quebec City corridor.
Arrogance because, since it was never intended to to what it was supposed to do, your favourite party completely ignored everything that those of us who actually knew something about firearms said about their plans. There were a number of proposals that actually would have provided enhanced public safety at a reasonable cost but didn't have optics as favourable to the Liberal Party so they were ignored.
Uselessness because the program always had one minor insignificant problem - it never worked. From the very beginning there were errors like the same firearms being registered to multiple people, firearms with the wrong serial numbers and different firaearms with the same serial number. The error rate in the registry was probably about 10% from the outset and has climbed from there. It would be no surprise to me if an independent audit found that the error rate in the registry was already pushing 25%.
What policy isn't a "cynical ploy to gain votes" if one chooses to so define it?
Perhaps I'm simply missing insights reserved for those who "actually know something about firearms," but I fail to see how registration of firearms - and striving to correct errors - isn't a good thing.
And as for those errors, I wonder if they don't have something to do with the political will of the firearms lobby? My sister, who helped administer the program, got her "speech about how Hitler took away all the guns" about 10 times a day. Administering a new bureaucracy that works with a hostile group of the population - especially with several provincial governments flouting the law - is neither cheap nor easy.
Of course it was " a hostile group of the population". A law abiding group of about 20% of the adult poplutaion of the country was singled out in a vote grubbing exercise they all knew wouldn't accomplish the stated goals at the quoted price. By what conceivable twist of logic would you expect them not to be hostile? And I really hope you aren't dense enough to be suggesting that it was firearms owners' hostility that was responsible for the little $2million to $1billion cost overun instead of the incompetence of the government and the people they picked to put this thing together.
We accept that motor vehicles require licensing and registration regimes - why not devices designed for killing?
I'm not some anti-firearm fanatic. As a matter of fact, I rather enjoyed target shooting when I tried it, and a year or two ago I debated doing it as a hobby, paperwork and licensing and so on notwithstanding.
There was and is no reason for hostility. Do we "single out" the percentage of the population that has licenses for cars? The special licenses required for certain other motor vehicles? Do we "stigmatize" people who require medications be insisting on a system of official prescriptions?
Gun registration is not oppression. Maladministered programs are maladministered programs, which is a seperate issue, but arguing that the idea of the registry is bad is seperate from arguing that it was poorly run. And do I think that the ideological opposition of North American gun culture - or, if you like, "people who actually know something" - has probably done an admirable job in spiking the "error" rates which they go on to parade so proudly.
Congratulations Jason. You have managed to take the argument full circle. Your arguments in favour of gun control are exactly the same ones that will be used in support of the national ID cards. Doris will be so proud.
Bit of a logical leap from licensing and registering the use of cars and guns to licensing all citizens' public life and free movement.
Don't we already have a national ID card?
One we present every time we use our Health Care System?
The problem with gun registration is that we are spending billions to fix a non existing problem. Has anyone noted that there are slightly over 600 homicides in Canada every year. Of that number, approximately 170 are killed with guns (last year 212 were killed with knives) . Yesterday, 15 women died from the ravages of breast cancer, 15 will die today and on and on ... (approximately 5500 anually) We are spending qver a billion to protect less than 200 people (not all were fine upstanding citizens) We are not getting an adequate return on investment. How much good would we have accomplished if an additional one billion were spent on health care ?. Money, to me, is a scarce commodity. We can not afford to get less than maximum return on our investment.