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[ChinaMovieMagic]

from the December 09, 2004 edition

US Passports go electronic with new microchip
Next year, new US passports will have a chip slipped under the cover, containing biometric and personal data. But privacy advocates worry about surveillance.

By Susan Llewelyn Leach | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

The US passport is about to go electronic, with a tiny microchip embedded in its cover. Along with digitized pictures, holograms, security ink, and "ghost" photos - all security features added since 2002 - the chip is the latest outpost in the battle to outwit tamperers. But it's also one that worries privacy advocates.

The RFID (radio frequency identification) chip in each passport will contain the same personal data as now appear on the inside pages - name, date of birth, place of birth, issuing office - and a digitized version of the photo. But the 64K chip will be read remotely. And there's the rub.

The scenario, privacy advocates say, could be as simple as you standing in line with your passport as someone walks by innocuously carrying a briefcase. Inside that case, a microchip reader could be skimming data from your passport to be used for identity theft. Or maybe authorities or terrorists want to see who's gathered in a crowd and surreptitiously survey your ID and track you. Suddenly, "The Matrix" looks less futuristic.The State Department maintains that such scenarios are outright fiction.

"A person can't be tracked," says Kelly Shannon, spokeswoman for the Bureau of Consular Affairs at the State Department. "It's not as if the information is going to broadcast and anyone with a receiver can be picking up that signal. There isn't a signal."

The passport, issued to officials and diplomats in early 2005 and to the public by the end of the year, is accessed using a reader that "pings" the microchip in order to release the data, much like proximity cards used for workplace ID badges. What prevents surveillance is that "the passport can only be read at a distance of 10 centimeters or less," explains Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance, an industry association that represents the four companies that produced prototype chips for the State Department.

Concerns of privacy advocates have "no validity," he says. "The purpose of the passport is to create a more secure travel document. The introduction of contactless chip technology has accomplished that."

The response of technology experts and privacy advocates is simply: "Rubbish."

"It's perfectly reasonable that the government wants a machine-readable photograph," says Bruce Schneier, a security guru and author of "Beyond Fear." "I just worry that they are building a technology that the bad guys can surreptitiously access."

The idea that the chips cannot be read beyond 10 centimeters (four inches) doesn't fly with him. "There is no impossible," Mr. Schneier says. "So they [the manufacturers] guarantee that there will be no technological advances in the next 10 years that will change that? It's absurd."

In fact, data skimming is already common in other arenas, says Richard Doherty, research director for the Envisioneering Group, a technology-assessment company out of Seaford, N.Y. "Bluejacking," where someone with the right equipment can hijack your phone, grab your directory, history of calls, and electronic serial number just by walking past you while you're on the phone, and "war-driving," where an individual drives down the street with a computer that maps all the networks that are free along with their IDs - these are already significant security issues, he says.

"This whole world of wireless is one that, yes, it has tremendous convenience, but it's increasingly threatened by a cloud of easy-to-exploit criminal means," Mr. Doherty says.

But why not choose a contact chip, where there would be no possibility of skimming, asks Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Project.

(c) 2004 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.

[ChinaMovieMagic]

Watching "The Terror of Nightmares" is like taking the Red Pill in the movie The Matrix.

A transcript is available on-line. Useful for English learning.

Published on Tuesday, December 7, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Hyping Terror For Fun, Profit - And Power
by Thom Hartmann

What if there really was no need for much - or even most - of the Cold War? What if, in fact, the Cold War had been kept alive for two decades based on phony WMD threats?
What if, similarly, the War On Terror was largely a scam, and the administration was hyping it to seem larger-than-life? What if our "enemy" represented a real but relatively small threat posed by rogue and criminal groups well outside the mainstream of Islam? What if that hype was done largely to enhance the power, electability, and stature of George W. Bush and Tony Blair?

And what if the world was to discover the most shocking dimensions of these twin deceits - that the same men promulgated them in the 1970s and today?

It happened.

The myth-shattering event took place in England the first three weeks of October, when the BBC aired a three-hour documentary written and produced by Adam Curtis, titled "The Power of Nightmares." If the emails and phone calls many of us in the US received from friends in the UK - and debate in the pages of publications like The Guardian are any indicator, this was a seismic event, one that may have even provoked a hasty meeting between Blair and Bush a few weeks later.

According to this carefully researched and well-vetted BBC documentary, Richard Nixon, following in the steps of his mentor and former boss Dwight D. Eisenhower, believed it was possible to end the Cold War and eliminate fear from the national psyche. The nation need no longer be afraid of communism or the Soviet Union. Nixon worked out a truce with the Soviets, meeting their demands for safety as well as the US needs for security, and then announced to Americans that they need no longer be afraid.

In 1972, President Richard Nixon returned from the Soviet Union with a treaty worked out by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the beginning of a process Kissinger called "d�tente." On June 1, 1972, Nixon gave a speech in which he said, "Last Friday, in Moscow, we witnessed the beginning of the end of that era which began in 1945. With this step, we have enhanced the security of both nations. We have begun to reduce the level of fear, by reducing the causes of fear�for our two peoples, and for all peoples in the world."

But Nixon left amid scandal and Ford came in, and Ford's Secretary of Defense (Donald Rumsfeld) and Chief of Staff (Dick Cheney) believed it was intolerable that Americans might no longer be bound by fear. Without fear, how could Americans be manipulated?

Rumsfeld and Cheney began a concerted effort - first secretly and then openly - to undermine Nixon's treaty for peace and to rebuild the state of fear and, thus, reinstate the Cold War.

And these two men - 1974 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Ford Chief of Staff Dick Cheney - did this by claiming that the Soviets had secret weapons of mass destruction that the president didn't know about, that the CIA didn't know about, that nobody but them knew about. And, they said, because of those weapons, the US must redirect billions of dollars away from domestic programs and instead give the money to defense contractors for whom these two men would one day work. ...

...But the neocons said it was true, and organized a group - The Committee on the Present Danger - to promote their worldview. The Committee produced documentaries, publications, and provided guests for national talk shows and news reports. They worked hard to whip up fear and encourage increases in defense spending, particularly for sophisticated weapons systems offered by the defense contractors for whom neocons would later become lobbyists.


The Cold War was good for business, and good for the political power of its advocates, from Rumsfeld to Reagan.

Similarly, according to this documentary, the War On Terror is the same sort of scam, run for many of the same reasons, by the same people. And by hyping it - and then invading Iraq - we may well be bringing into reality terrors and forces that previously existed only on the margins and with very little power to harm us.

Curtis' documentary suggests that the War On Terror is just as much a fiction as were the super-WMDs this same group of neocons said the Soviets had in the 70s. He suggests we've done more to create terror than to fight it. That the risk was really quite minimal (at least until we invaded Iraq), and the terrorists are - like most terrorist groups - simply people on the fringes, rather easily dispatched by their own people. He even points out that Al Qaeda itself was a brand we invented, later adopted by bin Laden because we'd put so many millions into creating worldwide name recognition for it.

Watching "The Terror of Nightmares" is like taking the Red Pill in the movie The Matrix.

It's the story of idealism gone wrong, of ideologies promoted in the US by Leo Strauss and his followers (principally Wolfowitz, Feith, and Pearle), and in the Muslim world by bin Laden's mentor, Ayman Zawahiri. Both sought to create a utopian world through world domination; both believe that the ends justify the means; both are convinced that "the people" must be frightened into embracing religion and nationalism for the greater good of morality and a stable state. Each needs the other in order to hold power.
Whatever your plans are for tonight or tomorrow, clip three hours out of them and take the Red Pill. Get a pair of headphones (the audio is faint), plug them into your computer, and visit an unofficial archive of the Curtis' BBC documentary at the Information Clearing House website. (The third hour of the program, in a more viewable format, is also available here.)

For those who prefer to read things online, an unofficial but complete transcript is on this Belgian site.
But be forewarned: You'll never see political reality - and certainly never hear the words of the Bush or Blair administrations - the same again.

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," The Edison Gene, and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."

[dyak]

Anyone can already be located anywhere, we've already 'bugged' ourselves with cell phones.

Microchipping has been slowly inserted into the sheep-like acceptance of the people for a while now. Read all you can on David Icke's site... he's been saying all this, and more, for years now.

[ChinaMovieMagic]

Yes...I met w/David when he gave a talk in LA area. I was in communication w/his people regarding him giving speeches in China...but I don't think there's a "Market" yet...

As an Archimedean Lever for organizing, the BBC TV series has great potential...especially within an English-learning context. Documentary with folks speaking authentic oral language...great input!!

I notice the London location-listed...can you give some INPUT regarding how this BBC series was received in Britain? BBC states that it has no plans to release the shows to the Video market.

[ImanH]

Not based in the UK but from what I understand it was very well received in some circles but not in others.
Check this site.
http://www.medialens.org/

[ChinaMovieMagic]

Yes...thanks for the MediaLens link...just read the article/critique and the response...In terms of promoting English Learning/Critical Thinking...as well as income-generation...a project/product can be developed...having folks do various DVD "special feature" audio tracks, discussing this show, with simultaneous commentary.
BBC stated they have no plans to make Videos of the show available. Given the "laissez faire" Digital market distribution dynamics in China, this BBC show could be distributed throughout China if someone had a copy> Anyone???