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NEWS AND VIEWS THAT IMPACT LIMITED CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with
power to endanger the public liberty." - - - - John Adams

Thursday, July 17, 2014

State Police Now Fingerprinting Every Texan



Notes From The Police State
  • The Police State is alive and well in Conservative "Small Government" Republican run Texas.
  • Texans are being systematically fingerprinted, their faces recorded and the data stored by Big Brother Government for later use.


(Dallas News)  -  The Texas Department of Public Safety began requiring full sets of fingerprints from everyone who obtains a new driver’s license or photo identification card. This applies to those who come in as required for periodic renewals, but it doesn’t apply to mail-in renewals.

The Watchdog won’t let this change go unnoticed. Previously, DPS took only a thumbprint.

Until now, if a person never got arrested, most likely his or her fingerprints would never get recorded and placed in a government database.

Some occupations, such as those in law enforcement, the military and medical care, require fingerprints. But under the new system, everybody who has a driver’s license — as they cycle through their 12-year in-person renewal requirement — will be fingerprinted. Your grandmother will be fingerprinted, along with your 16-year-old new driver.

Outside the driver’s license office, I called my associate at The Dallas Morning News Watchdog desk, Marina Trahan Martinez, and asked her to search for previous publicity regarding the new fingerprint program. She found none.

When a License Was Just a License
In the olden days you could get a driver's license without a
government anal probe.  Somehow the world managed to go on
without a 1984 Big Brother data base recording your every movement.
 
Marina did find other state reports in various government databases that explain that the new fingerprinting program is only one aspect of the state’s 21st-century security system.

Since 2010, Texas has used facial recognition software to match driver’s license photos with government databases looking for persons wanted by law enforcement for various reasons.

The state’s Image Verification System also matches known faces from driver’s licenses and photo ID cards with sketches of criminal suspects, a Texas Department of Public Safety spokesman explained in answer to The Watchdog’s questions.

Big Brother is Recording You

Every day, it seems, we hear new revelations about government surveillance. Surveillance is not only conducted on potential terrorists abroad. Surveillance is now part of everyday life at home, too.

For me, the most troubling revelation is one I learned this month when reading about Edward Snowden’s TV interview with NBC news anchor Brian Williams.

The exiled former security contractor explained that U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies have the ability to use any cellphone as a listening device to hear what is happening or to take photos using the phone’s camera. The owner of the “roving bug” doesn’t know this is happening.

“As soon as you turn it on, it can be theirs,” Snowden says, according to a transcript. “They can turn it into a microphone. They can take pictures from it. They can take data off of it.”

Even turning a phone off doesn’t stop it, he said. “They can absolutely turn them on with the power turned off to the device,” he said.

This type of surveillance is “typically done on a targeted basis,” he said.

In the Texas Homeland Security Strategic Plan, which Marina found, authorities cite identity theft and terrorism as two motivators for using fingerprints and facial recognition software.

Judge Napolitano
NSA Spies On All Members Of Congress




Al Capone
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In The Olden Days
Back in the old days when Americans believed in freedom, the government would only photograph and fingerprint criminals.  Today both "Liberals" and "Conservatives" have locked arms to create and fully fund a 1984 Surveillance Police State to record your every movement, conversation, written word and purchase.
 

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