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posted by cmn32480 on Monday February 01 2016, @05:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the can't-they-find-a-new-excuse-to-steal-my-rights dept.

You have too many rights, so it's time for a little rebalancing:

Internet anonymity should be banned and everyone required to carry the equivalent of a license plate when driving around online. That's according to Erik Barnett, the US Department of Homeland Security's attaché to the European Union.

Writing in French policy magazine FIC Observatoire, Barnett somewhat predictably relies on the existence of child abuse images to explain why everyone in the world should be easily monitored. He tells a story about how a Romanian man offered to share sexually explicit images of his daughter with an American man over email. The unnamed email provider uncovered this exchange and forwarded the IP address of the Romanian to the European authorities and a few days later the man was arrested. Job well done.

Before we have an opportunity to celebrate, however, Barnett jumps straight to terrorism. "How much of the potential jihadists' data should intelligence agencies or law enforcement be able to examine to protect citizenry from terrorist attack?", he poses. The answer, of course, is everything. Then the pitch: "As the use of technology by human beings grows and we look at ethical and philosophical questions surrounding ownership of data and privacy interests, we must start to ask how much of the user's data is fair game for law enforcement to protect children from sexual abuse?"


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by gman003 on Monday February 01 2016, @05:33AM

    by gman003 (4155) on Monday February 01 2016, @05:33AM (#297636)

    Okay, so if hiding things is causing problems for society, let's get rid of all privacy. So step one, let's open up all government computer networks. I want a read-only account on every single server, desktop, laptop and phone, with read access to literally everything. After all, those top-secret weapon schematics could contain child porn - if the pedos were at all smart about it, they'd try to hide it somewhere where only a few people could look, and where it would be embarrassing for the government to prosecute over it. Think of the children!

    Oh, what's that? Secrets are important when *you* keep them? Then I'll be keeping mine, as best as I'm able, thank you very much.

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