[capidamonte]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

They're talking about ways to protect rights-holders. That's all. These Big Brother personal paranoia delusions aren't helping.

Rights-holders, in this case, and in every case that matters to the people making these proposals, are large, influential corporations.

This is where eternal , salable, transferable copyright and immortal corporations meet. The people who fear "government" must recognize that it has been co-opted by the business elite.

Nobody at that level of power gives a hoot about the copyrights of Steve Jordan, except as a fig-leaf to cover the agenda of the big-money boyz.

As Kovid says, it will do nothing to stop copyright infringement -- but it will deny you anonymity in purchases, speech, reading, etc. And it would become "voluntary" in name only if it were allowed to come to pass. Want a library card? What's your ID number? Want to join a gym? What's your ID number? Want to get a job? ID number? Bank account? ID number. Internet service. ID please. Just for security, you understand -- It's just that only criminals wouldn't have one. Or someone with a criminal mindset. This is voluntary, but we won't serve you without it.

Ultimately, you will be that ID, and it's purpose is clear -- to track your behavioral patterns and to track everything you do back to you. It's of a piece with ACTA, DMCA and all the other efforts by movers-and-shakers to put the Internet back in a box.

The fact that one might feel like they would never draw attention to themselves under such regime doesn't in any way justify removing anonymity from someone who would. We have a right to anonymity. Anonymity challenges authority.

Look at something like credit histories. It took decades for individuals to even have the right to see their credit histories. It's still nearly impossible to effectively and easily challenge those reports. The corporations compiling them have no interest in accurate information, simply in selling it -- their clients are other corporations -- and that it affects the lives of actual people barely makes a ripple. They've become gatekeepers.

It's human nature for someone higher up the status system to stand on the neck of someone beneath them, and tell everyone looking that they volunteered. Which they did, because the choice was either ostracism or the possibility of maybe standing on someone else's neck someday. It soothes the (faint) conscience of the elite to say it's a choice.

The fact that we're being tracked already doesn't justify adding further, more invasive and more permanent tracking. It's wrong in the first place.

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

You guys need to put the kool-aid down now. Nobody is loading their guns and making up fresh bunks in their death-camps for you.

It'd be a great tool to identify the Jews, though, wouldn't it? Or the atheists? Or the gays? Or the anarchists? I mean, if you happened to somehow get access to it... say by getting elected? Or hacking it? Or being an influential member of a corporation?

The fact that it hasn't been abused yet, because it doesn't exist, doesn't change the fact that it would be abused-- and it would be abused because unequal balances of power are always used to the benefit of the ones with access to that power. It's human nature. The only answer is to prevent such power-bases in the first place.