Search Results: how long before it''s over

Friend sent me this from NY Long Island paper:

While NYS DMV says the Mobile IDs are safe, some critics argue the digital driver's license poses personal privacy and security concerns.

Digital IDs are not yet widely accepted as proof of identity. More than 25 states have adopted or are moving toward adopting the virtual IDs.

The digital IDs can be accessed by cellphones to quickly identify the holder while traveling, at bars, stores that sell liquor and tobacco products, doctor's offices & more - as long as the business decides to accept them. More than 20 airports accept the ID including NYs Kennedy & LaGuardia.

Since then, social media has lit up with concerns that the virtual IDs will serve an authoritarian government at the cost of personal privacy, including calling digital IDs "deep state psyops."

The conservative Rebel News website is pushing a petition claiming digital IDs "call for invasive collection of biometric markers, location data, banking information and vaccination records... digitization will surely have dire consequences for our lives as governments assert more power over us."

But the concern is broader. The NY Civil Liberties Union alerted the DMV about "urgent concerns" five months before the state announced the program. The group called for investigation, public debate and a full balancing of benefits and costs of the program before it was made public. "Without public debate or discernible legal and technical.

The company contracted to provide Mobile ID is Idemia Identity and Security USA, part of a French-based global company. Idemia has several contracts with the state for facial recognition, fingerprinting and other security programs.

The NYCLU's concern isn't just what Mobile ID can do now, but what in can do in the near future, said Daniel Schwarz, senior privacy and technology strategist. "The technology needs to be open sourced, revealing its full capabilities, and that state legislation is needed to provide safeguards."

To say there is no problem with heavy drugs in America and most of Europe would be a denial of reality. You have fentanyl killing a record high number of Americans and in decriminalized areas like The Netherlands you see the degragading effects on society with homelessness and needles laying around the parks and on the streets. You also see this on the west coast and other places in America.

Then you have places like Singapore where the drug problem seems relatively controlled if you're willing to stomach it when it's your loved one who gets the long sentence or hanged if they happen to be caught drug smuggling. Seems like many of the ones who end up being executed are people from the west and from the perspective of the native of these countries the harsh penalties are not so difficult to bare, especially when the lawbreakers come to your country and add to the problem for residents to bare when the punishments are well known to those willing to risk it. No amount of money could possibly be worth dying over. A person might find these penalties to be distasteful or even amoral, admittedly while I do not fall into this camp I at least have sympathy towards that way of thinking.

Well these people might say that penalties and the payoff are rarely considered by the people who end up being caught, at least not before the crime is committed. They'd argue other reasons find them in this nightmarish situation of being caught and finding yourself facing a death sentence for doing something that in the west might not result in more jail time than a year with a good attorney. Or possibly none at all.

It almost seems too fantastical to imagine a livable place where people are allowed the freedom to decide whether to do or not do the drugs in a society where people practice a true form of freedom. Consequences for using such things would be the effects of the drugs themselves which can far outweigh any other considerations.