It’s a good thing the Heart Association decided to stop recommending mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and just to urge people to do chest pushes on someone suffering a heart attack. I think I’m a member of the ACLU (I sent them money a few times anyway), and I’m opposed to unreasonable searches of my seizures.
Already they’re covertly collecting my longitude and latitude.
I have an E-Z Pass box on my windshield, and an On-Star system came with the car; so I guess the government snoops would take the position that I have voluntarily put my whereabouts up for public auction. Actually, I was just trying to get into the fast lane at the toll booths where the On-Star system often sends me by mistake.
It’s an important issue, probably headed for the Supreme Court because if any of the Justices who have On-Star and EZ-Pass have been frequenting brothels, now there are public records of their travels, and I wouldn’t put it past them.
In San Diego, detectives shadowing a murder suspect picked up a cigarette butt he discarded, had it tested for DNA, and linked him to a murder fifteen years earlier where the same DNA was found in the blood stain on a towel. The defense attorneys are trying to get the cigarette butt suppressed on the grounds (sic) that its retrieval constitutes a search without a warrant.
It’s called surreptitious sampling.
Detectives contrive to get DNA specimens from coffee cups, water bottles, soft drink cans, tissues, straws, or silverware used by suspects. In one case in Massachusetts, the perp spat in the street, and the police…..oh yes they did.
The defense tried to suppress the evidence as an invasion of privacy. The judge thought otherwise. “The expectorating defendant had no reasonable expectation of privacy,” he ruled. I wish he had said the defendant had no reasonable expectoration of privacy, but in law school they discourage wordplay.
It’s a delicate issue. You definitely own your own saliva, and they have no right to come looking for it where it characteristically reposes. But once you spit it out on the sidewalk, even in righteous indignation, you’ve relinquished custody.
What if a suspect sneezes on a surreptitious detective?
Who owns the mucous droplet on the policeman’s lapel? Should the detectives be required to go to court for a snot warrant?
For that matter, who owns my fingerprints? And footprints?
I’ve left them everywhere, and it’s doubtful I could claim in court that I fully intended to go back and retrieve them at the Lost & Found. As for my personal aroma, I have to assume that’s theirs because they’ve used bloodhounds for decades without a challenge. But I don’t think they can sneak a filter into my bathroom sink because that would be entrapment.
Watch for future developments on the constitutional frontier of illegal search and seizure, but you know what? Surreptitious sounds like spit anyway.
Guest columnist Gib from Chicago has given us a brief, non-paranoid backgrounder on some of the electronic bugs infesting modern life. Gib is a scientist, electronics engineer, and former designer of electronic circuitry and instrumentation.
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I just got my new passport. It has an embedded RFID chip, and is therefore classified as an “electronic device.” For anyone wondering about the great swarms of bugs colonizing this Orwellian age, here’s some basic information.
Definitions:
RFID. Radio Frequency IDentification An automatic data capture technology. Can be a passive chip powered by transmitted radio energy from the interrogating reader (short range), or a transponder (long range). IPASS and EZ-PASS use RFID technology, as does IFF (Identification - Friend or Foe) for military IDs.
Transponder. A data storage device containing both a receiver and a transmitter. When it receives a properly coded query signal it responds by transmitting back information stored inside it. For highway toll use it sends back the identity of the vehicle and it’s owner. It also sends back the amount of money remaining in the user’s toll account as stored in the transponder. The querying signal then deducts the amount of the toll from this balance. When the balance gets low, the Highway Authority is authorized to charge the user’s credit card to replenish the toll account. If you go through the toll booth with no active transponder, a photo is automatically taken of your license plate and the report sent to a processing center for action. You can go on line and download a complete record of your toll usage.
This technology is the wave (no pun intended) of the future. I don’t think I like it — shades of Big Brother watching you. Our toll roads in Illinois have now enforced its use by making tolls paid by coins twice as much as those paid via a transponder. In the military, such a system has been in use since WWII to make the echo of friendly planes show up on the radar display with an identifying mark. Any plane not showing such ID then is considered suspicious, and a potential target for anti-aircraft fire. That could include you if your IFF (Identification, Friend or Foe) system was not working properly, or you forgot to turn it on.
Systems with transponders are called “Active” systems.
The usage now building up at a great rate is of “Passive” systems. Here, an electronic chip is embedded in a store’s product, or now in your new passport. Since there is no battery in the device to supply the transmitter, the power to do so is derived from the querying radio signal. Consequently, passive systems are short range. These systems will speed up store check-out, replacing bar code scanning in many instances, and should also speed-up passport lines in entering another country. They will, of course, also improve border security.
There is, however, concern that people could build a device called a “skimmer” that would beam a brief, powerful Radio Frequency (RF) signal at RFID chips containing private information, and use extra-sensitive receivers to pick it up at a distance. The new passport information claims that they have technology (probably sophisticated coding) to prevent skimming.
Once the chips show up in your driver’s license, and maybe your credit cards, you will be open to having your identity and other information stolen my yet another mechanism. I do not have my IPass (Illinois Toll transponder) mounted up on the windshield as instructed; I keep it down inside the car in a metal box, and only hold it up when passing a toll booth. There is absolutely no reason that they cannot eventually set up speed traps that query your transponder for your identity, and then automatically take a photo of your license and mail out traffic tickets. Great for city income, and no cop’s salary to pay.
Welcome to the future!
Aside from being an impeachable offense, warrantless wire tapping didn’t seem too alarming to me because by the time they actually listen to all those calls and transcribe them, the Whigs or the Roundheads will be in power instead of the Know-Nothings.
Nor did data-mining seem to pose much of a threat, nor subpoenas for medical and library records. To be sure, it’s all very sinister and unconstitutional and certain to be condemned by posterity. And if the Evangelicals are right about divine justice, they’ll all fry in hell; but, beyond that, why worry about a bunch of blithering incompetents?
Well, more fool I. It turns out they know more about me than I do. For example, they know when I’ll die.
A stockbroker handling one of my IRAs sent me the IRS marching orders on how much I have to withdraw (and pay taxes on) each year; and there, in black and white, is a table showing that I have 26.5 years left. I’ll live to be 97-1/2, although to get there I have to give them money every year.
I’m supposed to add up my IRAs and divide the total by 26.5 to find out how much to withdraw and declare as income. If I beat all the odds and reach the age of 115, then the IRS says I’ll have 1.9 years left. And if by some miracle I reach that age in possession of a million dollars, I’m to divide that by 1.9, so then I have to withdraw — and declare as taxable income — $526,315.79.
They must look at that number and drool like a 115-year-old.
My only consolation is that their table stops at 115. The 1.9 applies at age 115 “and thereafter.” From then on, if you’re still in the Thereafter rather than the Hereafter, you just keep dividing by 1.9 every year.
Let’s call it 2, which for a doddering old fool is close enough to 1.9. No matter how many times you divide your dwindling net worth by 2, it never reaches zero. You can always try to get along on half of what’s left.
Unfortunately, the same principle applies to halfwits. No matter how much their brains shrink, what’s left is still running the asylum.
