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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?"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday February 01 2016, @12:59PM
I have a different suggestion. Let's require Erik go everywhere completely naked and sit in a fishbowl office all day long, with his emails displayed on screens outside and his phone conversations broadcast over loudspeakers. Then, when he returns home he'll sit in a stress position and be occasionally hit with cattle prods.
It's all to make sure he doesn't do anything wrong, you see. If he were wearing clothes, he could be concealing child porn in them. If his office and dwellings were not transparent, there could be child porn hidden in them. After all if he has done nothing wrong he surely has nothing to hide, right?
Think of the children.
(on a separate note, we should start a Kickstarter project to have a performance artist do exactly that in front of the Capitol Building.)
Washington DC delenda est.