h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Xyroth, even with your examples you've still got a straw man. Firstly, as you would have it, the justification you maintain was used in your examples isn't even about ID cards, and secondly you've only attributed the position to the US and UK governments, you haven't quoted anyone as actually using those words.

The truth is that everybody has something to hide - that's why we put envelopes round our letters and curtains over our windows - and even minimally cogent advocates of ID cards are well aware of this. To pretend that "people with nothing to hide wouldn't be so opposed" is the keystone in the authoritarians' rationale is so transparent an over-simplification that it can only serve to demean your own position.

Hi xyroth,

I know you are not a big fan of spell checkers (I read somewhere that you have yet to find a good one). But if you drop your entry into, say MS Word, you'll see a lot of red (spelling mistakes) and green ("Long Sentence (no suggestions)").

And I had to read some parts several times to work out who or what was the subject of a sentence. May be you could use more concrete examples, or not refer back to a "this" that appeared in an earlier paragraph.

For example...

The only people you hear present this are those who generally speaking don't trust people

Does "this" refer all they way back to the original "people with nothing to hide..." statement?

Some things the spell checker will never find. For example...

"and generally makes you life less simple".

Sometimes it helps to read an article aloud, to yourself.

Otherwise, I concur with a lot of what HELL and others have said above.

Hey - you asked for feedback!

I am a fan of good spelling checkers, unfortunately, you are right, I have yet to find a good one.

I do not agree with microsoft or others that when you select british english that the word "color" is a valid spelling of anything.

if they can't even get that right, then what is the point in trying to use the same checker for any other words?

regarding the article, I need to do more work on it, but have been ill the last week or so, and I will try and update it soon.

thank you for your suggestions and your patience.

Hi Xyroth,

I know that you're planning on working on this entry a bit more...

I think you have to consider that the guidelines say something about balance. While I agree with your opinions, what you've got right now is a polemic, not a balanced guide entry.

An entry exploring both sides of the debate would make for good reading, in my opinion. The people most likely to be interested in an entry on government data collection on citizens are likely to be able to judge the validity, or lack of same, of the arguments in favor of such measures for themselves.

"This is just an example of the sort of problems that crop up if you allow this creeping encroachment upon your civil liberties."

See what I mean about this being a polemic?

If you present each of the arguments being presented in favor of these encroachments, and then the arguments against you'll have the objectivity. That the arguments against make more sense will, IMHO, be self-evident. You won't have to come out and say it.

Good luck.

NBY

I agree with NBY.

I also think the whole structure of the entry needs to be re-examined. I would suggest an introduction, followed by specific examples with arguments for and against under headings, so that the reader is clear at any one time what you are talking about. At present, it is rather nebulous.

You use 'they' a lot. Who, specifically are 'they'? Having read the entry 'they' applies to different authorities, but you tend not to name them (except DVLA).

Spelling - 'usefull' should be 'useful' - it comes up more than once. 'Generaly' should be 'generally' and ' comming' has only one 'm'. There may still be more, but these were the ones that hit me on the nose.

I do intend to make it more balanced. I will probably take the current entry and convert it to html for my website, and then extend this (probably rewrite it from scratch) to cover both sides of the arguament.

Thanks for the feedback.

ps would I be right in thinking that polemic means one sided?

ectually, it comes from the greek 'polemikos', which means 'warlike, hostile'. Truly, an attack. A dispute.

Which, oddly, is just right below 'poleless' in my dictionary.
You're not going to believe what this word from 1647 means.
C'mon, guess. I betcha don't get it.
'having no pole'.....uh, uh, uh,
NOW THERE'S a word that was begging to be dragged into existence if I ever heard of one. Imagine just how different our history would have been without that word.
Just had to have it.
Couldn't live without it.
Unt-uh!

Well, good luck, whatever you decide to do.

The first definition of "polemic" in my dictionary (I confess, it's an American Heritage - Not gonna drag out the OED if I don't have to) is "A controversy or agrument, especially one that is a refutation of or an attack upon a specified opinion, doctorine, or the like."

So, if you're saying that a given position is wrong, wrong-headed, ignorant, full of s**t or something like that, and saying why that position is wrong, wrong-headed, ingorant and full of s**t, you're engaging in polemics.

NBY

OED,OED,OED!
We must have the BEST!
(remember, this is the BBC!)
((can't have any of that Ammurrriccaann rubbish dirtying the Queen's
English))
and you have to use the one with the little magnifying glass.





mumble mumble mumble american mumble mumble heritage mumble mumble
dictonary mumble mumble hah mumble mumble

maybe this has already been mentioned before(i read the backlog, honest, it's just hard to keep track of everything...) but what about misuse of the info? like, the "Red Scare".... there's an entry around here somewhere on McCarthyism, http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A637841 ... the basic attitude seemed to me to be "according to "evidence" we've gathered about you, you sympathise with Communists, therefore you are working to destroy the Freedom and Democracy of Our Nation, and if you do not cooperate and provide conclusive evidence disputing this, you will be jailed You Traitor, and by the way we've already released this information as factual and blacklisted you, so just forget about trying to rebuild your reputation. Suspician Is Evidence." i may have got some of the details wrong, but i still think that it would be a good entry to link to.

perhaps the "boss" example could be left in but formatted differently, as part of a list of examples, and worded differently, as in:

"some examples of violation of privacy for the "common good":
your company issuing a policy that your boss will have access to all your personal information, such as phone and credit card bills, or who you go to lunch with, for the purpose of checking that you do not communicate with competitors."

maybe this would read better with subheaders for the different arguments? like, "inconvenience", "cost", "innacuracy", "misuse", and so on.

if you want to present a more balanced view, but still have it be an argument for your side, you might try something like giving the other sides' arguments in a paragraph at the top, then refuting it with the reasons given.

Look, it's Tonto's horse, Scout! Neiiigggghhh!
Horse want a cookie?

It needs work. I do like Crescent's purposed title.

I think there's some potential here. I don't know what it will look like in the end. It seems to be unevenly written and revised. I had a hard time figuring out what you meant with this statement:

'For a start, it is almost always used to justify gathering of personal information about individuals that "might be usefull" at a later date. the problem with this one has to be the ignoring of the false positive rate that you get when they try and use this information for identification purposes.'

What do you mean by false positives? What information are you using? That's actually an advantage to a national ID card (which I oppose. I think a driver's license is sufficient.)

There are going to be false identifications using almost any kind of information you get from time to time. The big thing that TV shows try to imply is that line ups are unreliable. This isn’t the case at all. If you've seen someone react to a properly conducted line-up, there's no doubt if they can identify the person. I digress.

You do have to carry some information some time, especially when driving or exercising other privileges. Drive without your license, registration or proof of insurance, and you may be cited. If you don't have them at all, you may be jailed. Providing examples of incidents like these would not be difficult.

I think the comment about polygraphs isn't necessary. I don't see how it's relevant. It could be, but it hasn't really been tied into the article. Their reliability and usefulness is debatable. I don't particularly trust them in all circumstances, but they're very useful tools. I think that if you're trying to support a position, you probably don't want to base it on something else that is debatable.

I think the thing about people who have nothing to hide would apply more to interviews and searches than identification and registration. That's where I come across it more often.

false positives (and true negatives) are statistical terms refering to reliability.

false positives are cases judged true, where they are actually false.

A good example of this in practice is automatic face recognition of offenders on cctv. They compare the faces on the screen to the database of people with outstanding warants, and when they get a positive they arrest the person. They currently have a failure rate of 1 in 5 identifications being wrong.

That is an awfull lot of false arrests (with compensation to match).

That error rate doesn't include the true negatives, who are offenders missed by the system. this "trawling" approach is a good example of the problems with collecting data "that may be usefull in future", and it's problems.

...and then there are false statistics.

I haven't done any biometric stuff for a while, but it strikes me as highly improbable that the state of the art has degraded a couple of orders of magnitude in the intervening period. I find it similarly implausible that some unindentified law enforcement authority is so over-funded that they can know this reputed margin of error, and yet still manage to arrest every single person wrongly identified without even asking for ID.

Would you mind putting some flesh on the bones of this factoid?

I think identity cards are a red herring in this context - I for one wouldn't care about carrying an identity card if the government were to give me a freedom of information act as quid pro quo.

More scary is the proposed legislation allowing detention without trial for terrorist suspects. This is so close to the infamous detention laws employed in South Africa during the apartheid era that it's hard to believe it's happening in the UK.

And don't forget internment in Northern Ireland. See what a mistake that was.

Ste

I propose that a better title would be 'What are you afraid of?'
And the answer would be mindless bureaucrats taking even the most useful of technologies and putting it in the hands of the bored civil servant.
As I said above about the Bertillion system, false positives are a historical proof that data cannot be confused with experience.
Even fingerprinting has proven to be an unstable foundation for an information database. At least one half of the population has never been fingerprinted.

I think part of the problem is that the government in general and beaurocrats in particular say "trust us", at the same time as doing massive cover-ups of examples of themselves not being trustworthy.

libertarians don't generally have a fundamental problem with the data being collected, just with the complete ignorance of most of the people who would like to use it as to the sources of error.

most of the people trying to gather extensive amounts of data don't actually have any background in the necessary statistical techniques needed to use it.

most of the people trying to write legislation allowing it don't want to put in reasonable measures to ensure accuracy and availability of data about a person, or on who can use it and who can't.

And then there are our little friends in the intelligence community who have access to so much information that they don't know what is important or necessary.

When you get into the realm of 'law enforcement intelligence', well, that's when you run into the wannabes and the usedtabes getting in the way of the people who are trying to do their jobs.

More suits.