NCIC records are used every day by law enforcement agencies all over the nation. The accuracy requirement was established under the 1974 Privacy Act, one purpose of which was to ensure that federal records, which could have enormous impact on people's lives if misused, don't contain erroneous information. For more information, as well as an online petition asking for a reversal of this misguided shift, visit the Electronic Privacy Information Center Web site (www.epic.org/actions/ncic/).
The Bush administration's attitude, assisted by a Congress that long since abandoned any commitment to liberty, is that government has the right to know absolutely everything about you and that government can violate your fundamental rights with impunity as long as the cause is deemed worthy.
You, on the other hand, have absolutely no right to know what the government is doing in your name and with your money, unless the information is deemed harmless by people who have every motive to cover up misdeeds.
Dan Gillmor SJ Mercury News Apr. 06, 2003
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{I'm getting a little obsessive about this I'm afraid, but circumstances do seem a little pressing.
the morality of the main actors in this episode of the ongoing drama we're all cast in, that of Bush and them, is 'intentionality' based. it matters 'why' things are done. mostly that matters more than what. this is a subversion of the natural order, in which 'why' means nothing, and 'what' means all. it seems at times as though we've entered a cul-de-sac, a corner, a place under the stairs some sick child crawls into, with its delusions and fantasies and an insistence on the 'truth' of what are so clearly untrue things.
I believe more and more every day that these delusions and the insistence on an 'intentionality'-based moral system, are caused by two things:
I know it seems bizarre on the surface, these things are so common, but think of this:
in the embrace of the family a young child experiments, and sometimes those experiments have unintended consequences, sometimes negative ones. judgement is made by authority, based on more than outcome, based also on motive and consciousness. intention. and 'punishment' is rendered accordingly, as guidance. in that sense the society can be seen as a larger family. intention matters there also. and in the religions we inherit. but in the natural, the 'real' world, all that matters is what works and what doesn't. consideration of intent is part of the nurturing of children. it has nothing to do with biology, except tangentially, because our social living, our society, is a means of survival.
biology is what all this is, no matter how loudly the priests and rabbis and imams scream their accusations and denials. all these men are following the demands of biology, cunningly, selflessly at times, but never anything more or less.
so a child is spanked and grows up to expect, to demand, 'punishment' for other malefactors because in a fundamental way, this is how the world is structured. and over time they create a punishing God in that same image, who cares nothing for the world of living things, and only for the spark of will inside the body, inside the mind, somewhere.
circumcision is so obviously a means of psychologically dominating a helpless child it would seem to need no debate.
and all that is in response to the idea that these men in 'charge' are more and more acting out the 'end justifies the means' trope. to debate them on moral grounds is a mistake, their morality is a mask for their biology. that is the conflict, as it always has been, the rest is camoflage.}
