NSW, AUSTRALIA: The state government of New South Wales is now using the same facial recognition technology as the Australian Passport Office. Australia has long led the way in terms of security, in their currency as well as passport identification.

Australian passports carry a microchip embedded in the center with a digital map of the holder’s face. Encrypted using PKI technology, the chip holds not only a digital map of the person’s face but also contains the name, gender, date of birth, nationality, passport number, and the passport expiry date. When surrendered to border officials upon entering the country the passport is scanned wirelessly and the citizen is identified.

The Australian government asserts that the citizen has nothing to fear regarding privacy:

Strict guidelines control how the department uses the information you supply with a passport application. The Privacy Act 1988 prohibits government officers from collecting, using or disclosing your information except in the performance of their duties. It obliges the department to take all reasonable steps to protect your information against loss, misuse, unauthorised access, modification or disclosure.

The data on the chip is PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) protected, guaranteeing that it was put there by an authorised issuing authority and has not subsequently been altered. The chip’s digital signature meets standards determined by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a specialised agency of the United Nations.

Australian citizens can take cold comfort in their Privacy Act of 1988. Forbidden from using citizenry data “except in the performance of their duties,” government officials apparently now feel their duty extends to monitoring all citizens, everywhere and all the time.

Evidently NSW state officials, envious of the Passport Office, have gone them one better. They’ve decided to scan in all NSW driver’s licenses in order to build a massive database. Oops! Now the federal government wants in on the action. They want access to all the new state data to help them spy on their citizens nationwide. After all, they need to do their “duty” too: Read more…

BABE HUGGETT: For the malleable young, nothing beats having a role model to look up to and emulate. That’s why sports figures, rock musicians and celebrities need to be so circumspect in their lives. They’re not, of course, because it’s in their commercial interest to keep the current toxic popular culture churning away for their risk adverse, corporate masters. Scandals help to hide the lack of talent amongst the unoriginal, cookie-cutter star set while generating you-can’t-pay-for-this-type-of-publicity headlines sure to push off real news in favor of the mental cotton candy floss so beloved by commercial interests.

However, this type of decadent, inartistic slovenliness gets repetitiously boring after a while and a teen’s radar is exquisitely tuned to winnowing out the bogus from the merely banal. So what’s a poor teen looking for someone to pattern themselves after supposed to do? Our past heroes and heroines are either excoriated for not being politically correct, if they are even mentioned at all, or are considered so out-of-date as to be irrelevant. In fact, what with all this eco-greenie Gaia worship going on in our public schools, humans themselves are not only not held up as something worth while but actively despised for their respective and collective carbon footprints. Even that current socialist secular living saint, President Obama, is proving to have feet of clay for them because BP oil is still gushing into the Gulf of Mexico soiling US beaches, destroying Louisiana tide water ecosystems and killing untold numbers of marine and animal life all while he goes on yet another vacation and/or tees off at the nearest golf course. Read more…