Microsoft and NBC want you to know that there is a Real ID card in your future, as this segment that aired on the Today show demonstrates.
Earlier this week, we learned that Microsoft filed a patent “for a system to monitor the health and mental state of computer users,” a system designed to “automatically detect frustration or stress in the user via physiological and environmental sensors, and offer or provide some assistance accordingly,” sort of the way the “instructress” in Orwell’s 1984 offered “6079 Smith W” assistance via the telescreen. NBC, owned by death merchant General Electric, also has a vested interest in Real ID, as they are, as a Pentagon “defense” contrator, in the business of “domestic intelligence gathering,” primarily through the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity unit. Last August, we were assured by Def Sec. and former spook Gates that the Pentagon would shut down its controversial domestic spying database known as TALON. Sure. And I have a bridge for sale on Ganymede.
So unpopular is the Real ID scheme with the plebs, Michael Chertoff has lately taken to vigorously pimping the plan. Chertoff tells us Real ID is a fantastic idea because it will “prevent somebody from evading a watchlist and getting on an airplane and blowing the plane up because they pretend to be somebody else,” never mind how unlikely this is, even with dim-bulb patsies such as Richard Reid, the infamous “shoe bomber,” wandering around, waiting for orders from headquarters.
But if you actually believe al-Qaeda is lurking in the shadows with shoe and liquid bombs, you might take comfort in the fact the Ministry of Homeland Security will phase its scheme in over the next few years, regardless of what most people want. As for those handful of states that have declared their unwillingness to participate, their residents will no longer be allowed to get on airplanes or possibly travel by car to other states. In order to do so, they will need a passport — you know, the new passports with RFID chips embedded.
It would seem the only way to avoid this nightmare would be for those states opposed to secede from the United States.
Now there’s a good idea.
