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Since the Bush Administration has been proven to be a bunch of terroist-supportrs and traitorous criminals the bullying element on this board has dropped off quite a bit...but then, most of the users here are superapathetic drones who affect a radical edge by consuming Sonic Youth, an edgey product.
heres the real hitech bullying-
Tessera Americana
In ancient Rome, a tessera was an identification tile that every slave was forced to wear or face possible execution. The tessera actually indicated ownership of the slave. There are current proposals by a number of companies eager to make a mint, to institute a national ID system for the United States, a tessera Americana. In this effort the companies are supported by a chorus of members of Congress, including Senators Richard Durbin, Dianne Feinstein, and Jon Kyl.
One of the leading proponents of a national ID card system is Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, Inc., the world’s largest database vendor that owes its very existence to a Central Intelligence Agency contract awarded it in the 1970s. The CIA needed a database to help it organize and retrieve large amounts of information. The agency awarded the “Project Oracle” contract to Ellison, hence the name of his multi-billion dollar company. In September 2001, Ellison told San Francisco television station KPIX, “We need a national ID card with our photograph and thumbprint digitized and embedded in the ID card.” Ellison even agreed to provide the U.S. government the software to run such a system free of charge. However, Ellison’s altruistic offer should be viewed with a healthy dose of suspicion. He knows that if the U.S. government bases a national ID system on his database product, every hardware and software vendor who would interface with it would be require to license his software, which would become a de facto industry standard. Ellison stands to make billions of dollars if such a system is adopted.
Also waiting to cash in are the dozens of smart card vendors that are responding to congressional clamor for a chip-based national ID card containing photographs, fingerprints, retinal patterns, and even DNA data. In addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars that could be made from manufacturing smart cards for the U.S. population (the cards costing between $6 and $10 each), stand alone smart card reader terminals costing around $300 each would be required at hundreds of thousands of locations around the country.
Ironically, because the United States has been slower than Europe to adopt smart cards for pay telephones, health care, vending machines, and transportation, most smart card companies are European and they stand to make the most profit from a national ID card in the United States. These companies include Gemplus and ActivCard of France, Philips of the Netherlands, and Siemens and Giesecke & Devrient of Germany.
from waynemadsen.com
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