Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

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Schneier on Security: REAL ID.  

The United States is getting a national ID card.

Just read the Schneier piece.  Just read it. 

When I moved to New York City in the 60’s, one of the expressions I learned was “throw the rascals out.”  This was the practice of every so often, after some level of disgust over the deal-making and gamesmanship of our representatives, the legislature would be up-ended and shaken, dumping out the incumbents of all stripes.  Unfortunately, professional politicians have learned how to make their jobs more secure.  Term-limits legislation is another way of forcing turnover but we may have to do it the old-fashioned way.  Not 18th-century old-fashioned, just early 20th century old-fashioned: with our votes.  The problem is that a lot of incumbents have opponents that are caricatures of polarized party ideologies and that makes it tough. So it means finding rational candidates that one is willing to trust to act from conscience, principal, and, above all, unswerving commitment to their oath of office.  To encourage qualified candidates, we have to start now.

A bunch of guys (it’s usually guys, trust me) are sitting around in a room. They have declared this lofty vision.  You know, something about security and safety of the nation and its citizens. Then they come up with all of these schemes for how they are going to secure that or enroll us in the grandness of that promise.  The pronouncement is passed around enough to the point where the vision has enough knobs and warts on it to please everyone, and enough compromises on pet approaches and unspoken agendas are aligned so they can declare a sham unanimity.  But nowhere is there a reality check on exactly how the approach will achieve the objective, how we’ll tell it is doing that, and how we’ll test and correct as we go.  In fact, by the time the approach fails to achieve the vision, it will have been institutionalized, memorialized, and marbleized.  And the vision will have been redefined and victory declared. In this way, we erect institutions that are the antithesis of the heartfelt urgency that led to their establishment.  At some point, we forget that there is any other way of organizing our civil and private institutions.  And in the echo chambers of these conceptions, no one notices that these clothes have no emperor [;<).

posted by orcmid at 5/9/2005 11:28:55 AM