E-Verify with it's biometric features will be used to track your every move

From massive NSA spying, to IRS targeting of the administration's political opponents, to collection and sharing of our health care information as part of Obamacare, it seems every day we learn of another assault on our privacy. Sadly, this week the Senate took another significant, if little-noticed, step toward creating an authoritarian surveillance state. Buried in the immigration bill is a national identification system called mandatory E-Verify.

The Senate did not spend much time discussing E-Verify, and what little discussion took place was mostly bipartisan praise for its effectiveness as a tool for preventing illegal immigrants from obtaining employment. It is a tragedy that mandatory E-Verify is not receiving more attention, as it will impact nearly every American’s privacy and liberty.

The mandatory E-Verify system requires Americans to carry a “tamper-proof” social security card. Before they can legally begin a job, American citizens will have to show the card to their prospective employer, who will then have to verify their identity and eligibility to hold a job in the US by running the information through the newly-created federal E-Verify database. The database will contain photographs taken from passport files and state driver's licenses. The law gives federal bureaucrats broad discretion in adding other “biometric” identifiers to the database. It also gives the bureaucracy broad authority to determine what features the “tamper proof” card should contain.

Regardless of one’s views on immigration, the idea that we should have to ask permission from the federal government before taking a job ought to be offensive to all Americans. Under this system, many Americans will be denied the opportunity for work. The E-Verify database will falsely identify thousands as "ineligible," forcing many to lose job opportunities while challenging government computer inaccuracies. E-Verify will also impose additional compliance costs on American businesses, at a time when they are struggling with Obamacare implementation and other regulations.

According to David Bier of Competitive Enterprise Institute, there is nothing stopping the use of E-Verify for purposes unrelated to work verification, and these expanded uses could be authorized by agency rule-making or executive order. So it is not inconceivable that, should this bill pass, the day may come when you are not be able to board an airplane or exercise your second amendment rights without being run through the E-Verify database. It is not outside the realm of possibility that the personal health care information that will soon be collected by the IRS and shared with other federal agencies as part of Obamacare will also be linked to the E-Verify system.

Those who dismiss these concerns as paranoid should consider that the same charges were leveled at those who warned that the PATRIOT Act could lead to the government collecting our phone records and spying on our Internet usage. Just as the PATRIOT Act was only supposed to be used against terrorists but is now used to bypass constitutional protections in matters having noting to do with terrorism or national security, the national ID/mandatory E-Verify database will not only be used to prevent illegal immigrants from gaining employment. Instead, it will eventually be used as another tool to monitor and control the American people.

Creation of a federal database with photos and possibly other “biometric” information about American citizens is a great leap forward for the surveillance state. All Americans who still care about limited government and individual liberty should strongly oppose E-Verify.  
http://lewrockwell.com/paul/paul867.html

License-plate readers are part of the domestic surveillance of Americans:

The Center for Independent Reporting discusses the shock a computer security consultant felt when he discovered that the single camera-equipped car in San Leandro, California, "had logged his car once a week on average, photographing his license plate and documenting the time and location." 

Even worse, police departments in northern California are sharing the data they collect. building a record of people's movements. But the problem isn't a local or regional one — cameras capable of capturing and processing license plate numbers are proliferating nationally, and we're well on the way to a unified system, partially planned and largely ad hoc, that monitors the comings and goings of motorists around the country. 

From the Center for Independent Reporting:

When the city of San Leandro, Calif., purchased a license-plate reader for its police department in 2008, computer security consultant Michael Katz-Lacabe asked the city for a record of every time the scanners had photographed his car.

The results shocked him.

The paperback-size device, installed on the outside of police cars, can log thousands of license plates in an eight-hour patrol shift. Katz-Lacabe said it had photographed his two cars on 112 occasions, including one image from 2009 that shows him and his daughters stepping out of his Toyota Prius in their driveway. ...

A year ago, the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center – one of dozens of law enforcement intelligence-sharing centers set up after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 – signed a $340,000 agreement with the Silicon Valley firm Palantir to construct a database of license-plate records flowing in from police using the devices across 14 counties, documents and interviews show.

The extent of the center’s data collection has never been revealed. Neither has the involvement of Palantir, a Silicon Valley firm with extensive ties to the Pentagon and intelligence agencies. The CIA’s venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, has invested $2 million in the firm.

In Tiburon, California, photographs the license plate of every car that transits the two roads into town. Police there know when you're coming and going.

And forget San Leandro's single license plate camera, or even Tiburon's monitored chokepoints; the Washington Postreported in 2011 that Washington, D.C. had 250 such cameras deployed.

The DEA has been working by itself and with law-enforcement agencies throughout the southwestern United States to install fixed-location license plate scanners along interstate highways with the stated goal of picking up patterns of movement that may lead to drug smugglers. Of course, to detect pattens, you need to store data, which means building a database recording the passage of vehicles along those highways.

But law-enforcement agencies don't need to create such databases from scratch to record and share information on our movements if they don't want to. They can just plug into the system already established by Vigilant Solutions, which boasts that its National Vehicle Location Service "aggregates between 35-50 million LPR records every month, and is the largest LPR data sharing initiative in the United States."

The quiet but rapid growth in use of license-plate readers is due to the enthusiasm that law enforcement has for the technology. The International Association of Chiefs of Police even adopted a resolution that "strongly encourages the U.S. Congress to fully fund license plate reader and related digital photographing systems, including interrelated information sharing networks, for the northern and southern borders of the United States" and urges other countries to adopt compatible technology to ease data sharing.

That the CIA is investing in Palantir shows that interest in tracking our movements extends beyond law enforcement agencies and into the intelligence community. The surveillance state is better established than most people realize, and reaches far beyond our communications and Internet activities. 
http://reason.com/blog/2013/06/27/license-plate-cameras-are-part-of-the-do