VIEWS FROM THE FUSE: Bad IDea

A few weeks ago, a young woman, we'll call her 'Jane', was traveling
from
Vancouver, British Columbia to meet with us at the DR HQ in Baltimore
to
discuss our upcoming documentary.

Thing is, flying from Vancouver to Baltimore is pretty pricey and Jane
had
been traveling a good bit in recent weeks. So, to save some money, she
opted to cross the U.S. border via a shuttle bus to take a flight from
Seattle to Baltimore, a much cheaper option.

While this seemed like a no-brainer at the time, Jane soon came to
regret
this decision. Being the only Canadian on a bus packed with American
tourists, the U.S. border patrol asked to look through her bag. Jane
complied. Then they informed her that they needed to go through her
day-planner and her laptop. Confused, but knowing she had nothing to
hide,
Jane agreed.

The U.S. border patrol then held her in their custody and interrogated
her
for hours. Apparently they had found some suspicious items in her
carry-on. No, not a gun...or scissors...or even a lighter. What they
found
was - gasp! - three hotel keys in the pockets of her bag.

To make a long story short, the geniuses working the border patrol
decided, based on their "evidence", (the hotel keys, various names of
hotels that she could stay at in Baltimore, and names and phone numbers
of
male contacts in her day planner) they could only come to one
conclusion:
she was obviously a prostitute.

They eventually googled her and found that Jane had been telling the
truth
- that she's a film producer that travels a lot and doesn't always
remember to return hotel keys. Two hours later, Jane was free, armed
with
a tale of American bureaucracy at its finest.

While it's a sadly amusing story, it is one that touches on a bigger
problem that we are facing in America right now: we are slowly losing
our
civil liberties to things like the Patriot Act and more recently, the
"Real ID Act of 2005."

This past Thursday, the House approved this set of rules that will
force
states to issue every adult American citizen an electronic ID card. The
bill was approved by a 261-161 vote.

"Passed without congressional debate as a rider tucked into the 2005
Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for Defense, the Global War on
Terror and Tsunami Relief," reports Detroit's Metro Times, "the act
seeks
to have states drastically overhaul procedures for issuing drivers'
licenses by increasing the amount of documentation required to prove
citizenship or legal residency and boosting the personal information
contained on each card, including the addition of biometric identifiers
such as fingerprints or retinal scans."

As if that wasn't creepy enough, University of Washington School of Law
professor Anita Ramasastry reported in a column for CNN.com, such tags
emit radio frequency signals that would "allow the government to track
the
movement of our cards and us."

"Private businesses," Ramasastry adds, "may be able to use remote
scanners
to read RFID tags too, and add to the digital dossiers they may already
be
compiling. If different merchants combine their data - you can imagine
the
sorts of profiles that will develop. And unlike with a grocery store
checkout, we may have no idea the scan is even occurring; no telltale
beep
will alert us."

What's next? Microchips implanted in our brains so that Big Brother
read
our minds along with the ability to listen to our phone calls, read our
emails, and know where we are at all times.

More to come...

Short Fuse
The Daily Reckoning

P.S. Another thing worth considering as far as the national ID card
goes
is the cost. The Congressional Budget Office says that by 2010 the
country's collective DMVs will pay about $100 million to implement Real
ID
systems...and many experts say this estimate is ridiculously low. Ah,
something else to add to our ever growing list of expenses.

Consider this - every hour of every single day, the United States racks
up
another $80 million of debt. A year ago, the annual deficits already
hit
$7 trillion, according to the U.S. comptroller. That's roughly $24,000
the
government owes for every American man, woman and child.