Israeli Knesset Approves Biometric Database Law 303
Lord Duran writes "The Israeli Knesset approved a bill that will require every Israeli citizen to submit a visual scan of their face and a biometric scan of their fingerprints to a national database. I, for one, fail to see how this is anything but evil. TFA mentions the Israeli census was breached — I'd like to point out, for comparison, that it's still freely available on your peer-to-peer file sharing network of choice."
Good quote (Score:5, Insightful)
FTA: "...that the system would be kept as confidential as any banking website"
Why does that not make me feel better about this?
How do you change your password? (Score:5, Insightful)
Same problem with all biometrics.
What happens when the system is compromised? How do I change my password?
Every ID card? (Score:3, Insightful)
What is a "biometric visual scan of their face"? A photograph?
Every country does that. It's called an ID card. As far as fingerprints, I've had to submit my fingerprints like 10 times for various services, clearances, not to mention immigration documents.
This isn't really news. Even if it's a 3D laser-scan, that's really not different from a photograph nowadays.
As much as it bothers me to have centralized databases of ANYTHING, if there is anything that needs a centralized database, it's identification. I'm a privacy freak and I am not sure that this bothers me, especially in the context of a country that can claim the dubious honor of being the most likely terrorist target in the industrialized world.
Re:Every ID card? (Score:1, Insightful)
You are not a privacy freak, not until you change your behaviour.
Re:It's Israel (Score:4, Insightful)
While their actions and policies towards the Palestinians are pretty heinous, you can't just paint the whole society as evil. They have developed a verymodern society in the midst of their enemies and excel at many fields of science and literature.
You can blame the Jews for persecuting the Palestinians, but you can't say that everything they do is evil.
Re:How do you change your password? (Score:5, Insightful)
Same problem with all biometrics.
What happens when the system is compromised? How do I change my password?
Or worse, what if Osama Bin Laden (or any other terorist) get's to insert his bio information into an Israeli citizen's profile? Now, Bin Laden has a valid Bio-Informatic ID in Israel. If he shaved off his beard, I couldn't tell him apart. It's been years since I've seen a photo of him. He'd get away with being Bernie Horowitz.
Re:It's Israel (Score:1, Insightful)
You can blame the Jews for persecuting the Palestinians
Is that like being an apologist for terrorists, and then blaming the victims when they try to defend themselves? Wait, that's not a bad analogy, it's just what you're doing. You can't blame the Jews for persecuting the Palestinians, because they haven't been. They actually get better treatment is Israel than in any other country in the Middle East. If the Palestinians don't like the defensive measures Israel takes, then they should stop attacking Israel.
Here's an analogy for you- What do you think would happen if the Mexican government started sending rockets and mortars into El Paso because they wanted to take Texas back? What would happen if snipers from Mexico started shooting farmers in Arizona? If they blew up crowds of shoppers in San Diego? And the Mexican government refused to stop? I think the US would start carpet bombing in about 2 seconds. Does that analogy work for you?
Godwin's Law? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Every ID card? (Score:3, Insightful)
What is a "biometric visual scan of their face"? A photograph?
Every country does that.
No, they don't. Yet.
Re:Every ID card? (Score:3, Insightful)
What is a "biometric visual scan of their face"? A photograph?
It is the mathematical function that identifies your facial features as your own to a very high degree of probability.
Every country does that. It's called an ID card. As far as fingerprints, I've had to submit my fingerprints like 10 times for various services, clearances, not to mention immigration documents.
Your fingerprints are not in one big database that can be hacked (as others have been hacked before) along with the rest of your entire country. If you've given your fingerprints 10 times, I hope you're sure you gave them to people who can keep them a secret. You can't really change them later.
As much as it bothers me to have centralized databases of ANYTHING, if there is anything that needs a centralized database, it's identification. I'm a privacy freak and I am not sure that this bothers me, especially in the context of a country that can claim the dubious honor of being the most likely terrorist target in the industrialized world.
Think of someone using this database, along with live CCTV footage from a railway station (say, a public online webcam), singling out the Israelis in the crowd. When they see a large group of Israelis coming by, a suicide bomber comes along and explodes next to them. You don't have to be a privacy freak to shudder at that thought.
Re:Godwin's Law? (Score:3, Insightful)
a little man in Germany fifty years ago did something very similar
You're posting from 1987? And not claiming first post?
Since you have 22 years to think about it, please elaborate on how signing people up for drivers licenses and passports is similar to burning and looting their property, murdering them in the streets, and then rounding up the rest and sending them to concentration camps? I don't think that's what the Israeli government plans. If you don't like biometric databases that's fine, but at least add something intelligent to the discussion.
Re:It's Israel (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:It's Israel (Score:0, Insightful)
They were not offered a place to stay, Palenstinian land and buildings are usurped using the progressive tactic of:
1. Build border settlements 2. Whine about rocket attacks 3. Move border out of range of rockets
Wash, rinse, repeat. This is why the illegal settlements are such a sore point in the issue; they are the mechanism by which Israel is stealing the entire area that was the Palestinian state. Just look at a map from 1948 and a map from today. If you have time, check the map every decade between, you'll see Israel increasing steadily in area.
That's just it; the Palenstinians contend that Israel is not only violating their sovereignty, but displacing it physically by pushing their country into a smaller and smaller area. Gaza and the West Bank are becoming more and more overpopulated as the Palestinian lands shrink, effectively making them concentration camps.
Say what you want about Hamas. They were elected fairly, in elections overseen by Jimmy Carter. Whatever you, the UN or your government may think of them, they are the democratically elected party, and they were elected mainly because the previous group who did not support direct violence fell out of favour because Israel refused to negotiate with them. This fuelled support for Hamas. Now that Hamas are in Israel strangely wants to talk to Fatah again.
Smells like Israel just wants a belligerent neighbor so they can keep pointing at them and playing victim all the while dredging military aid from the US by the billions.
Right. Because it's completely justifiable, logical, and rational to elect fucking terrorists as your leaders. They don't have a country, they never did as far I as I can tell. Their complete inability to defend their sovereignty is the nail in that coffin. The fact that they elected terrorists democratically is irrelevant.
Back in 1948 when Israel was declared independent, no one displaced. No one was kicked out. What did happen though was a bunch of racist "palestinians" who hated the Jews so much that they got up and left voluntarily. Then after it was all said and done it was suddenly a problem that needed a solution. A man made problem by a bunch of obviously barbaric people.
How civilized can you say a people really are when they elect terrorists to lead them? How sovereign is a nation that technically cannot defend itself from foreign threats?
Re:Why "evil"? (Score:3, Insightful)
All citizens must be known to the government at all times.
This leads to all citizens must be forced to carry identification at all times. Biometrics is a short-circuit around forcing people to carry ID papers 24/7. At present, I can walk out of the house without my wallet, and nobody can identify me without my permission. Not so with biometrics.
More to the point, it's a way of monitoring the populace. It assumes that everyone is a latent criminal, and needs to be watched.
And hey--what if they decide that racial group 'x' needs to be wiped out? They've got the data from face scans, they just need to send out the troops.
Re:It's Israel (Score:5, Insightful)
You call them terrorists, they call them freedom fighters. It's a matter of perspective. Get some.
I think you're a bit confused. There is nothing stopping a person from being a freedom fighter and a terrorist at the same time. The first term refers to why they're doing what they're doing. The second refers to how they do it. So while Hamas may (it's rather questionable. but so are many other things) be fighting for freedom, how they do it (purposefully targeting, attacking and executing unarmed civilians) makes them terrorists.
Re:It's Israel (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought about him a while back in my Jewish studies class (online gen-eds, gotta love 'em). There was a part dealing with antisemitism, about how it has evolved to into anti-Israeli sentiment to cover it's ass, so to speak, by taking the guise of a reasonable argument against a nation's policies, not pure racist hatred, because clearly there are two types of anti-Israel sentiment: reasonable and racist. Imagine if black people only made up a small enough percent of the population that 40% could live in one small area. Do you think the KKK and the neo-nazi skinheads would criticize that nation's policies, regardless? You know they would, and publicly, they'd do it under the guise of 'criticizing policy' but really, it would be racism. We all know it would be. Israel is the same way. Take a race that has historically been hated and but them in their own little country, guess what the racists say about it? Only now, they have a mask for their racism, they can claim that they're anti-Israel, not the antisemitic Jew hating racists that they really are.
I don't think criticism of Israel is all without merit. Yes, some of it is insane, like when people say the Israelis are monsters for defending themselves from terrorists who want to kill as many Israeli citizens as possible, but Israeli policy has, at times, not helped things, and that is worth criticizing. Israel has done, and does do, bad things. One of my Arabic professors presented very reasonable criticisms of Israel. Problem is, there's enough blame to go around when Israel's neighbors are supporting a group that launches rockets at Israeli civilians while hiding behind other civilians and using them as shields, so it is hardly unreasonable when Israel takes the precautionary principle, and a degree of overreaction on their part is sadly justified.
But I agree with you all the way, you're wasting your time if you argue with douchebag. I saw a bumper sticker the other day that read 'Hate is the ONLY enemy.' People like him, they hate. They are part of the problem. Israelis are not the enemy, Palestinians are not the enemy, Arabs are not the enemy, Iranians are not the enemy. People who hate [slashdot.org] are the enemy. There is so much antisemitism and islamophobia in that region and around the world trying to make itself look reasonable, it's disgusting. There's plenty about Israel you can debate, but not with an antisemite who thinks the Israeli people are evil and that a country were people are born and die and make their homes and lives shouldn't even have the right to exist.
Not everyone wants peace. They are the problem. They are the evil ones.
Re:It's Israel (Score:3, Insightful)
Israel is a state founded with violence.
That's every country, by the way. Look at how many countries were formed by, at one point in their history, by unjustly killing the natives. Almost all, if not all, of them. Might have been 300 years ago, might have been 100 years ago, might have been 50 years ago, but the only thing that separates Israel and every other country in that respect is time.
Revelations isn't a chapter in the Torah (Score:3, Insightful)
But it's still evil. I always tell rednecks :
Israel is one of the very few countries in the world with significant terrorism problems. If Israel doesn't need some security measure, we sure as hell don't need it.
So Israel agreeing to buy American tech with America's aid money to keep American politicians happy hurts my argument. :(
Re:It's Israel (Score:4, Insightful)
War is just terrorism with a bigger budget. (And better political spin.)
You call them unarmed civilians, we call them "collateral damage."
Re:When I was born (Score:3, Insightful)
The most disturbing thing about all this is how readily people in the "civilized" world continue to simply submit to this sort of nonsense and view it as an acceptable part of living.
Re:It's Israel (Score:3, Insightful)
Hi! I’m going to move into my house, which you for some reason decided to move into after I was hauled off in the dead of night and imprisoned unjustly without trial or basis other than my race. I’ll even let you stay there, if you’ll agree to be a halfway-civil roommate. Sound good to you?
Re:It's Israel (Score:3, Insightful)
they are the mechanism by which Israel is stealing the entire area that was the Palestinian state
Just what Palestinian state do you speak of, sir?
Re:It's Israel (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Every ID card? (Score:1, Insightful)
Hi, I'm an Israeli. ...
We're used to armed guards at every publicly accessible building, which includes malls, theaters, larger apartment complexes, and of course any government-run institutions. A big part of the police's job here is patrolling in search of signs of terrorism, not crime. We've sat in too many shelters, heard too many missile alarms go off, and seen too many scorched remains of explosions to give a damn about a photo and a fingerprint.
Hi.
Your country was founded in part as citizens of a country in Europe were previously used to late night knocks on the door from government soldiers intent on killing anyone of a certain ethnicity, disability, or sexual orientation. The German regime relied extensively on government records, the census, and modern technology [wikipedia.org] to select their victims and make the genocide as "efficient" as possible. ID cards and government records have been used elsewhere [preventgenocide.org] to aid criminals, terrorists, and murderers.
In short, you seem to be very comfortable with the collection and storage of very personal details by governments. Once this data is in one place, it can be sold, hacked, or otherwise abused. Historically speaking, the class most likely to use this data for abuse is your government.
What if the Third Reich had a database which included not only the names of Jews, but their fingerprints. How many Jews, gypsies, and others branded "life unworthy of life" would have been caught if border police checked fingerprints against a database? False papers would have been next to impossible. What if hospital records were digitised and held on a government database which could, if desired, be cross referenced against the identity register? How difficult would it have been to pinpoint those "genetic undesirables" then.
Think what Hitler did with early 1930s IBM technology, then imagine how much easier it would be for the Hitler of tomorrow. Mandatory national ID cards? Simple - the arab terrorist in the cafe simply makes everyone produce their ID at gunpoint and shoots those with a Hebrew date of birth....
Why trust any government to that extent with your life? What other information will be recorded en masse and used to aid persecution? It has happened all over the world at various times - to blacks, gays, Jews, the handicapped....
I think you will understand where I am coming from due to your terrorism issue. People will accept a lot to be made safe from an ever present threat of being blown up by a terrorist, but just imagine these modern databases and tools in the hands of your enemies - think how much more difficult it would be to resist and escape an oppressive regime. Should we really develop and promote this technology to make us feel safer, and then allow it to be used by the governments of Iran, North Korea, and China?
Larry Ellison prominently offered to donate Oracle licences to the US government to be used in anti-terrorist databases. Just think what Hitler or Stalin could have done with that technology....
Re:Every ID card? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hi, I'm also an Israeli.
This law is "risky, superfluous, and expensive" and your apathy (and the apathy of all others with the same "don't care" attitude around you) saddens me deeply.
The argument Israel never regarded my personal information with care, so who cares if I give it some more to play around with carelessly is a really stupid argument. The premise of that argument should lead you to the opposite conclusion. You should worry more when such a careless regime asks for more power from the citizens instead of passing laws that limit such malpractices.
Did I just say that the "regime asks" for more power? I just made myself laugh. The issue of the ID cards and the central biometric database were never openly on the table, were never debated in any elections and the only coverage in the media was in small Sci/Tech sections for geeks and nerds. Most of the paragraphs in the law were voted for "unanimously" by one person (Meir Sheetrit) who managed and supervised the comity as a self pleasing theater.
Your apathy (and the apathy of those like you) is not a reasonable response to the situation in Israel in any way or form. On the contrary. There are many dangers to the state of Israel, and the outside threats are negligible compared to what the 120 idiots in the Knesset are doing to our democracy for the last decade.
We have the "big brother" digital wiretapping laws (police wire tapping without the need for a court order).
We have the laws that allow the police to receive personal information from wireless/cellphone providers/ISPS. These laws allow the police to maintain self regulated databases with that information (again, with no supervision and no need for court orders that limit access to these databases).
We had more than one proposals of internet censorships and government firewalls (which are currently postponed, but my guess is that it will not be for a very long time. They will be back on the table in no time).
We have the IDF that collects and stores information on all recruits (most of the Jewish citizens) - from psychological evaluations and intelligence tests to health status and biometric info.
Now we have the biometric law and a government that is starting to talk about adding a nationalized ISP that will compete with the two major ones in the private sector.
The conflict is not a separate issue at all. Presto above hit the nail right on the head on that one. There are many historical and political causes to the on going conflict, but the conflict is indeed used cynically by politicians and power groups on both sides of the conflict on the expanse of the populace rights and comfort. The Israeli politicians do indeed use the magic word "security" in order to gain more power over the citizens with an alarming rate in the last few years. The biometric law that just got passed is only one link in the long chain of insane "big brother" laws that got passed here recently.
You don't worry about the thief in your backyard, but you really should be. Especially because your house is not really on fire as much as the politicians want you to think. They really really enjoy you being so apathetic like that.
Re:Every ID card? (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a proverb in some european languages which translates roughly as: "you don't worry about a thief in the backyard when your house in on fire".
Very true. But a neighbour may worry about both the thief in his neighbours yard, and the fact that his neighbours house is on fire.
This massive biometric database sets a bad precedent which will no doubt be followed by other countries, who will point to Israel and say "See? No one in Israel is complaining about it."
Sometimes, I think all of our countries are in a race to the bottom.