BIG BROTHER JUST KEEPS ROLLING ALONG

The immigration issue has given Big Brother Bush another chance to spy on American citizens, with the justification that this Employment Eligibility Verification System (EEVS), as it is being labeled, will identity the employment of illegal immigrants. Agreed, something must be done about the “illegals” situation, but putting the current political version of the “Keystone Kops” in charge is the wrong answer. ZD Net’s account of this new undertaking backed by the Bush administration and many members of Congress, says that anyone who fails the database check would be fired. The data, which includes Social Security numbers, is shared with Homeland Security with no privacy protection to delete the information once authorization is given or denied. One more “floating database” under the control of an incompetent government that has lost millions of individual personal records. But that’s not all. The EEVS will no doubt turn to private business again for some of its data, where companies like ChoicePoint and Acxiom will play an important part. As I have disclosed repeatedly in past posts, the former has a reported error rate in its data of 73 percent, the latter 67 percent. The feds will probably also look at credit bureau reports which boast overall error rates of 79 percent, 25 percent serious enough to deny credit. The answer is not to throw more bad data into the system, but rather to give individuals control over their names and private information with a national system of recognition that can accurately identity each American citizen, while at the same time providing full protection of their privacy.