The Poet's Eye
     commentary by Lightning Rod

The Poet's Eye is skeptical without being cynical,
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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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Watch where you put your fingers.

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