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Biometric Techniques Establish Yet Another Mechanism of Government Control

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If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear from being watched all the time, right?

Obviously wrong, as Cardinal Richelieu said:

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

Increasingly so-called democratic governments are pushing towards higher and higher levels of surveillance of their citizens, largely in the name of fighting ”terrorism” Britain has very nearly sleepwalked into a surveillance society with one surveillance camera for every fourteen citizens, plans for nationwide DNA databases are being implemented.

All of this has been done in the name of fighting ”terrorism”, an absurd claim–the total number of global deaths from terrorism over the last 30 years has hovered around 8000, while the number of people killed by their government in the 20th century has averaged 2 MILLION per year, with 23,000 per year in supposedly democratic countries.

The reality is that your government is FAR more likely to kill you than a wingnut with a pipe bomb–and far more likely to get away with it.

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The FBI Wants Your Biometric Data

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Biometrics Techniques Promote State Control

In a democratic society the government exists to serve the people at least in theory.

In practice this rarely turns out to be the case as government is always by the few for the few–at the expense of the many; this is just how hierarchical social organization works, by definition.

The current fad favoring surveillance is about protecting the state apparatus, not the citizens that apparatus is supposed to be servince.

Biometric techniques let the state monitor its enemies terrorists pose a greater threat to the state than they do to the citizens remember that peanuts killed more Americans than terrorists over the course of the 20th century.

Terrorism however can destabilize a democratically elected government, the irrational fear spread by such attacks undermines support for incumbent political parties so in order to maintain their own power they promote draconian security theater to fool the public into believing they are safer such as a massive database for monitoring via biometric techniques when in reality the people were never in real danger from terrorism.

When we permit the government to use new tools to track one class of enemies, it is inevitable that it will then turn those tools on its other enemies.

Politicians like to conflate themselves with the government, like Nixon’s infamous claim that if the president does it then it can’t be illegal.

It has been seen time and again that politicians will take tools given to them useful in combating one class of their enemies (as opposed to our enemies), and turn them on others rival politicians and dissident citizens.

Don’t believe that?

Watergate, Bush’s politicization of the Department of Justice–political enemies of Nixon were routinely subjected to IRS audits: even mere television hosts–and these are just the obvious examples.

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Biometrics Techniques Allow an Unprecedented Level of Surveillance

It was bad enough when your phone could be tapped, you could be followed physically all for just disagreeing with a politician in a democratic country Biometric technologies allow you to be tracked automatically and remotely-there’s no need to even target individuals, just monitor everyone.

Every movement in public can be tracked by surveillance cameras with facial recognition software sure, you might find some criminals trying to escape, and while you’re at it why not keep an eye on that troublesome reporter?

Can we afford to trust our government with that data and capability, when the reality is that they are far more deadly to us than terrorists ever could be?

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