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By Michael Snyder, on November 1st, 2015
“By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration”
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is moving forward with its plans to use biometric technology to identify and track refugees, and has selected a vendor for the project. Accenture, an international technology services provider, has won out in the competitive tendering process and will oversee the implementation of the technology in a three-year contract.
The UNHCR will use Accenture’s Biometric Identity Management System (BIMS) for the endeavor. BIMS can be used to collect facial, iris, and fingerprint biometric data, and will also be used to provide many refugees with their only form of official
documentation. The system will work in conjunction with Accenture’s Unique Identity Service Platform (UISP) to send this information back to a central database in Geneva, allowing UNHCR offices all over the world to effectively coordinate with the central UNHCR authority in tracking refugees.
Law enforcement agencies around the country are training their officers to recognize signs of anti-government extremism and to exercise caution during routine traffic stops, criminal investigations and other interactions with potential extremists. “The threat is real,” says the handout from one training program sponsored by the Department of Justice. Since 2000, the handout notes, 25 law enforcement officers have been killed by right-wing extremists, who share a “fear that government will confiscate firearms” and a “belief in the approaching collapse of government and the economy.”
Washington,
DC – In complete reversal of course from the stated position of her
predecessor, Attorney General Loretta Lynch says the federal government
shouldn’t mandate police departments to report lethal shootings of
civilians.“I’ve heard from a number of people who have called on policymakers to ensure better record-keeping on injuries and deaths that occur at the hands of police. I’ve also spoken with law enforcement leaders – including the leadership of the Fraternal Order of Police – who have urged elected officials to consider strategies for collecting better data on officer fatalities. Today, my response to these legitimate concerns is simple: We need to do both.”The about-face by Lynch reveals an utter contempt for the civil rights of American citizens while pandering to the Fraternal Order of Police’s default position.
“One of the things we are focusing on at the Department of Justice is not trying to reach down from Washington and dictate to every local department how they should handle the minutia of record keeping, but we are stressing to them that these records must be kept,” she said at the Washington Ideas Forum, hosted by AtlanticLIVE and the Aspen Institute.Lynch’s implication that she is attempting to uphold state’s rights is a completely ridiculous notion that has absolutely no validity in reality. Furthermore, “stressing how records must be kept” is akin to asking really nicely, as the records are given to the Department of Justice, by police agencies, on a completely voluntary basis currently.
On Thursday, the organization’s Broadband Commission for Digital Development released a damning “world-wide wake-up call” on what it calls “cyber VAWG,” or violence against women and girls. The report concludes that online harassment is “a problem of pandemic proportion” — which, nbd, we’ve all heard before.
But the United Nations then goes on to propose radical, proactive policy changes for both governments and social networks, effectively projecting a whole new vision for how the Internet could work.
Under U.S. law — the law that, not coincidentally, governs most of the world’s largest online platforms — intermediaries such as Twitter and Facebook generally can’t be held responsible for what people do on them. But the United Nations proposes both that social networks proactively police every profile and post, and that government agencies only “license” those who agree to do so.
By Michael Snyder, on September 24th, 2015
