CDC Wants to Track Travelers 299
gearspring writes "According to Government Health IT the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wants your email address, your mobile phone number, names of your traveling companions, your name, your address, and your emergency contacts name, address, and phone number. This information would be gathered by airlines, travel agents, and online reservation systems for all travelers. Their goal is to protect us in the event of a pandemic. The SARS crisis showed them the difficulty of notifying people that they may have been exposed to a disease. It is a noble goal, but couldn't they do this anonymously?"
Homeless? (Score:5, Interesting)
No address, no contacts, no email, no phone. Are you going to deny someone travel because they can't afford these things? Or choose not to have them?
The Brilliant Way to start... (Score:3, Interesting)
But my health, my child's health! Definitely worth while to store all this information, in the case of an outbreak and all!
Re:Homeless? (Score:5, Interesting)
For more details, see:
http://cryptome.org/freetotravel.htm [cryptome.org]
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
LOL. I'm all ears, then. You wake up tomorrow to find that there's a major outbreak of a new strain of bird flu in some Asian city. This strain is now transmissible from person to person and it's airborne. How do you find Americans who were in that city three days ago, but aren't there any more? How do you prevent each potential Typhoid Mary from walking around your town and coughing on everyone she meets?
land of free aint wat it used to be
My guess is that whatever you're imagining, it never really was in the first place.
Unfortunately.... (Score:5, Interesting)
He has publicly stated if a pandemic strikes there will be martial law, and
the national guard, state police, local police, and "other" authorities will
block "all" travel .
My quetion to this is , who is gonna stop the birds from flying around ???
Want to take that to a WHOLE new level ???
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/8788 [scienceblog.com]
Remember the civet cat and Sars ???? Oh my, guess what .
This virus is changing, and it is not done changing .
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8372 [newscientist.com]
If this thing becomes transmitible to the common house cat, killing and eating birds in
every city that has alley cats . We got ourselves a recipe for a bad situation .
Another point of this strain that is being missed is the mortality rate so far .
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?n
If this thing kicks off at anywhere near this supposed 75%, it will be worse than the plague .
Some current numbers put it under 50% and lets hope it becomes less deadly as it mutates .
Keep in mind the 1918 pandemic was 2 - 5%, and not with modern medicine .
This has the potential for a major catastrophe .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu [wikipedia.org]
20 - 50 million world wide died in a time before widespread food shipment and travel .
A pandemic has reoccured with regularity every few decades, but this is shaping up to be
the deadliest in modern times if the mortality rates are anywhere near what they are now .
I hope all countries around the world take this VERY seriously .
Ex-MislTech
Re:I don't buy this (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm sorry, but anonymousness isn't a one-size-fits-all excuse for you to bash ANY legislation that compromises your privacy ideals. We can all agree that there's such a thing as "too far". What the issue here is where you draw the line. I think that if their intention is to control an extremely deadly (and potentially very infectious) viral strain from entering the public, it's more than acceptable.
Think about this scenario:
You get on a plane on a round-trip to Hong Kong, and provide false information. When you get back, the CDC says "oh shit! Someone on the plane that [insert false name] was on a week ago had H5N1!" Since you provided false information, the CDC couldn't contact you. You go babysit one of your neighbours kids and infect them with H5N1. Are you willing to accept responsibility for that, if you didn't know that you were infected? What are your neighbour's options? If his kids die, it was DIRECTLY your fault for providing false information and preventing the CDC from contacting you. Could you live with that thought? What if one of your loved ones got infected and died from it?
Again, if YOU want to die from bird flu, go right ahead. We don't care about protecting YOU so much as protecting the people AROUND you. Please think more selflessly the next time you scream "omfgz0r oh noes my privacies!!!"
As always, either extreme for any situation can be harmful. If the CDC wants to know when you last clipped your toenails, I'd be screaming right along with you. However, your side of the extreme irresponsibly neglects the health and well-being of others around you.
Controlling the Masses Danger (Score:2, Interesting)
Problems such as 911 and avian flue have been used as excuse for giving up much of our privacy. Are we heading towards a future much like the book "1984"? What would someone like Hitler have done with RFID technology? No one would have been able to blend into the background and hide from him.
There is a "loss of privacy" pattern in recent years. An example is the plans to use RFID tags in most consumer products. Wallmart and various other companies as well as the U.S. military and federal government agencies have been pushing for increased use of RFID tags. There are plans to use inexpensive RFID tags in every item that we buy. The RFID tags would have a unique serial number for each and every single item sold. The passive type of RFID tag does not use a battery and would continue working for many years afterwards. It is mainly intended for inventory control. In a few years we will quite likely be wearing shoes and clothing which have hidden RFID tags which can be read from several feet away by anyone. We will also quite likely have RFID tags in items in our wallet such as our drivers license, charge cards, shoppers discount cards, and passports. There are also proposals for RFID tags in our tires, license plates and possible requirements to be embeded elsewhere in our cars. There has even been a proposal to embed RFID tags in postage stamps in the U.S. I don't know the details but, perhaps tracking all our mail would would be intended as a way to protect us from terrorists who send us packages with explosives or letters with Anthrax.
Many cars in the Houston area have toll passes hanging from their mirrors which have active RFID tags. Houston has over two hundred miles of freeways with "Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVI) stations every five miles along the road. Big brother is watching.
I won't go into all the various privacy issues associated with RFID tags. But, if anyone is interested, the entire first chapter of a "Spychip" book is avialable online from the publisher at http://www.lfb.com/index.php?stocknumber=PV9017 [lfb.com]. There is also a RFID spychips organization at http://www.spychips.com [spychips.com].
People are already tring to figure out how to deactivate RFID tags by microwaving them, slicing them or zapping them with static electricity. If RFID tags ever become common I will search out the few stores that still sell RFID tag free items. Should I be less paranoid and be more trusting and less suspicious of my government?
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
In the Netherlands we have a provision in the criminal code that requires people that know about a public health risk to inform the government. This rule overrules doctor-patient privilege and other forms of privacy. The phone company knows that your phone went to country X and then came back. Even if it is a prepaid phone, they can triangulate your position (with a large margin of error) and inform the government. I assume the UK government has similar provisions for emergency situations.
Re:anti-govt attitude (Score:1, Interesting)
- oppose drivers licensing (the freedom for anyone to drive anytime impeded by government regulation in the name of public safety?)
- oppose medical licensing (why can't i practice medicine on willing patients without any kind of training? public safety?)
- oppose social SECURITY, medicare, and government wealth-redistribution of any kind (why should the government take what is mine under penalty of imprisonment and give it to others just for the increased well-being or safety of others?)
I applaud your ethics if the above is true. Otherwise you admit that there is no absolute individual freedom in a civilized society and the line must be drawn somewhere, which is the goal of the evolving civilized society. You criticize others for drawing their line while drawing your own.
A Lot of The Tracking Efforts... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you happen to not have a mobile phone, you'll be a shadow, moving from place to place and leaving no trace of your presence. At least until you pay for something with a credit card.
What's more important? (Score:2, Interesting)
In case anyone does not understand this, pandemics happen a lot more often than we realize [wikipedia.org]. And with the world having shrunk significantly due to air travel, an unknown infectious disease can be everywhere in the world in 24-48 hours. This is especially frightening when you think there are actually drug-resistant strains [wikipedia.org] of some diseases already out there.
So what's it going to be? I'm as paranoid as the next person, and I don't even give out information to cashiers at department stores, but I for one would welcome this kind of information being given to the CDC, especially if it could help me avoid getting into the middle of a pandemic, but more importantly giving my family a contact point if I'm actually in one. Given the virulence of some diseases nowadays, you could be dead within 72 hours and how would anyone know where you were or more importanly, how to get in touch with your relatives?
At some point we have to bite the bullet. Assuming it is organized and run by the CDC, the data kept securely, and the federal government can keep their hands off it, this will become an invaluable tool in preventing a world-wide health crisis. Let's just hope we don't get caught before anything can be implemented.
Re:Big brother is your friend (Score:4, Interesting)
For example, do you support one of the following?
1. Gun Control
2. "Hate Speech" Censorship Laws
3. IRS Auditing (forcing people to PROVE they are innocent of tax violations, instead of the other way around)
4. Forced Public Education
5. Eminent Domain
6. "War on Drugs" and Drug control
7. "Campaign Finance Reform" (political censorship laws)
8. Copyrights
9. Banning "Dangerous" animals
10. Public "Decentcy" Laws (anti-pornography cencorship)
11. Manditory Enviornmental Inspections (forcing people to PROVE they are innocent of enviornmental violations, instead of the other way around)
12. Sobriety Checkpoints
13. Laws against polyigamy.
14. Restricting people from promoting religion in public. (street corner preachers and such)
15. Restricting protests around abortion clinics.
That is just a few. Nearly everyone I know who rails against "The Patriot Act" or some other policy that is fashionable to hate, supports nearly all the restrictive, unconstitutional policies mentioned above. Even if you don't support most of them, it is almost garanteed that you support at least some of them.
The first part of realizing what happened in America (and what is happening elsewhere), is to realize you are part of the problem. You may not support the "Patriot Act", but that doesn't mean you are for freedom. Hardcore totalitarian Marxists are against the Patriot Act... people are against the Patriot Act because it is politicly unfashionable, or because it is promoted by a party that is considered "right wing". But lets focus on the restrictions of freedom, of exceptions to the constitution that you support.
If you are a leftist, and you speak out against citizen disarmament (gun control), or you speak out against feminists wanting to ban the Miss Universe pagent, or speak out against throwing people in jail for expressing controversial political beliefs on campus, you are going to be much more effective in promoting freedom that you would protesting the Patriot Act, or emergency powers to prevent bird flu, or whatever.
You need to eliminate the hatred of freedom from your own political ideology before you can work on someone elses hatred of freedom.