Ridiculous
Today, trains got delayed and rerouted around Amsterdam because some silly person spotted someone with wires hanging about and around their backpack.... As if, in this iPod era, wires are a surefire sign of a bomb.
I mean... I don't want to go all Schneier, haven't got the credentials, but it's almost like this story, that has been blogged about enough.
Look, there are plenty of ways, I'm sure, although I deny any active or direct knowledge and wouldn't be able to make a bomb to save the world from certain doom, but it's just hacking, anyway -- if I were to make a bomb, it wouldn't involve wires. Wires are so -- fifties James Bond, you know.
By the way, in the discussions in Parliament about the national ID, we were told that it was a great success: many tens of thousands of fines have been collected for the serious offense of not carrying your ID -- something that became only an offense January 1st, 2005.
However, nowhere have I been able to find an answer to the really important question: how many terrorists have been arrested because of the national ID -- nor answers to the secondary question, how many ordinary criminals have been arrested because of same. The first was ostentatiously the goal of the national ID, the second was advertised as a nice side-effect.
But everyone who is asked for his ID who isn't a terrorist or a criminal is a false positive, like an email that's flagged as spam when it isn't, and everyone who's fined is like an email that gets the "respond to this challenge then I'll know you're real" response, sort of like. So, what's the success rate? How many terrorists got caught? More importantly, would SpamAssassin have caught on with the success rate of this measure?
By the sidewalk, how many people think the data traffic retention law that's being pushed because we need that data to catch terrorists, is actually motivated and intended to catch music and movie swappers?
/thoughts | permanent link | |