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Locks
Are for the Honest
for release 01-06-05
The Washington
Times tells us that,
The
Department of Homeland Security has met a congressional deadline to
establish a new biometrics-integrated fingerprint system at the nation's
50 busiest land ports of entry, but its effectiveness has been challenged
in a Justice Department report.
I spent enough years in the business of exploiting the porosity of the
Texas/Mexican border to know that in many places the only security barrier
between our countries is about a foot of water. I've smoked bales of tea
that came to me on the backs of intrepid waders. The same is true of the
Canadian border. If you can step through a barbed wire cattle fence, you're
in.
Even at times when the Mexican border was nearly closed during periodic
drug crackdowns, friends of mine had no trouble getting to Dallas with
semi-trucks full of herb. One of those trucks could have just as easily
carried a nuclear device. If you can smuggle 4,000 pounds of pot, you
can smuggle 10,000 pounds of nitrate fertilizer. With a short hike across
North Dakota, one man can import fifty pounds of hashish, heroin or anthrax
powder.
My point here is that if you are trying to smuggle yourself, or contraband,
or terrorist intentions, across our borders, it is no large feat because
our borders are long. The US borders with Canada and Mexico amount to
5,317 miles. And this doesn't count our coastlines or the Alaskan border
with Canada. If you are serious about what you are doing, you can manage
to avoid 50 checkpoints where you know you are gong to be fingerprinted,
especially if you have a name with Al or Bin or Mohammed in it. Do you
think Osama bin Laden would try to slide through the biometric fingerprint
station at Niagra Falls? Not likely. He would have a better chance of
hiding in a coffin like Dracula with a bed of native Arabian sand and
placing himself on a container ship.
But the concept of gated communities appeals to Republicans. If they don't
live in one already, they would like to. This is part and parcel of the
siege mentality. Build medieval walls around yourself for security. Put
yourself in prison as protection from all the imagined bad actors out
there. They want to rob you or hijack your car or rape your wife or put
anthrax in your latte. If I wanted to burn your house down all I need
is a match. Snappily uniformed guards with high school educations in little
tile topped kiosks won't stop me.
This is a truth that any burglar knows: Locks are for honest people. They
only work if you believe in them. Thieves don't believe in them. In the
same way, the biometric fingerprinting system will only work for honest
people. It is not a good tool for monitoring the movements of criminals
and terrorists. They are going to move under the radar. It's you who are
being monitored. Every time you step across the border you will be subject
to fingerprinting. So, you don't have a criminal record and you are not
a terrorist. They don't have your fingerprints in their database. Guess
what? They do now.
There are scams all over the internet that use this same principle. The
con site will ask you for your email address and your password in order
to insure your 'security' before you can read the card that a secret admirer
has sent you, or before you can get the 32 million dollars that is waiting
for you in a Nigerian bank, when what they are really after is just your
email address and password so they can use it to send spam email to, and
even from, your account.
The Times article continues:
Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said in the report
that the US-VISIT system takes two fingerprints from each visitor and
checks them against a Homeland Security "watch list" that
contains records from its own automated fingerprint system, known as
the Automated Biometrics Identification System, or IDENT.
Mr. Fine noted that a recent study by the Justice Department comparing
the performance of IDENT at identifying immigrants with criminal records
at Border Patrol stations and ports of entry found that conducting checks
using only the IDENT watch list failed to identify more than 70 percent
of the criminal immigrants encountered by border authorities.
So, we see how well this show-biz type of security works. We can stop
terrorism just a efficiently as we've stopped drugs.
The Homeland Security business is the greatest boondoggle in history.
In the name of it, our whole government has been overhauled, agencies
have been created, wars have been launched, people have been killed and
most importantly, money has been spent. Tens of billions in government
money has been spent. State and local governments alone have spent close
to five billion dollars to be prepared as first responders during elevated
security alerts. This means that the money that could have been spent
on county hospitals and textbooks and teacher's salaries, instead is being
blown on gas masks and flack jackets and haz-mat suits.
If Osama bin Laden is really the evil genius behind the 9/11 attacks,
then he has landed a miraculous blow. Using only nineteen soldiers and
the most primitive weapons, he has cost the mightiest nation on earth
its confidence, its integrity, its wealth and probably its democracy.
Our lifestyles and our whole national spirit have changed since 9/11.
It's a real David and Goliath story, you know, Biblical proportions.
If I were George Bush I would be putting Osama bin Laden up in a resort
hotel somewhere outside the tsunami zone. I would give him all the gin
he could drink and all the dope he could smoke and hot tubs full of cheap
Western whores. I'd even let him tape a speech now and then, like two
days before an election. Osama has been a gold mine for Bush's 'political
capital.'
The Poet's Eye sees that the biometric chip is the only answer to our
immigration and identification problems. The Emperor George could decree
that a census should be taken and every person in the world should go
to his city of birth to be taxed and implanted with a small chip that
would be immediately locatable by Global Positioning Satellite. That way
the government can plot our every move and transaction. America will be
even better than a gated community.
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