<story><title>Feds Walk into a Building and Demand Everyone&apos;s Fingerprints to Open Phones</title><url>http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2016/10/16/doj-demands-mass-fingerprint-seizure-to-open-iphones</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>M_Grey</author><text>Just another reason to forgo the convenience of biometrics in favor of a password&amp;#x2F;phrase that exists only in your mind. At least for now, that&amp;#x27;s something you can&amp;#x27;t be compelled to produce.&lt;p&gt;Really though, this descent into a police state is such a pathetic outcome for this country. Dangerous, scary, and tragic, but also... pathetic. This is what happens when a sizeable majority don&amp;#x27;t even participate in the electoral process, and those who do are overwhelmingly mindless.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>susan_hall</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not sure if &amp;quot;overwhelmingly mindless&amp;quot; is the right characterization. In my opinion, the most interesting story playing out among the Western nations is what is happening in Poland right now. In the USA, people fought for independence from Britain starting in 1775, so obviously those people are not alive in 2016. But in Poland, many of the people alive now are the same people who overthrew tyranny in 1989. That&amp;#x27;s an interesting story. Among the Polish public there are many who were willing to risk their lives to fight for a more open, democratic and liberal political system, in 1989. And now, in 2016, Poland is suffering the same shift towards authoritarianism that we see in other Western countries.&lt;p&gt;Just so I&amp;#x27;m clear, I&amp;#x27;m saying I find this interesting because in many cases we are talking about the same people who were alive in  1989. In the USA you can say &amp;quot;Oh, that generation believed in those things, but those currently alive don&amp;#x27;t believe in these things.&amp;quot; (I don&amp;#x27;t agree with that statement, but you could make that argument.) Whereas in Poland, it&amp;#x27;s in many cases the same people who fought for a more open system who are now tolerating the drift towards a more authoritarian system.&lt;p&gt;To me, the story isn&amp;#x27;t about &amp;quot;overwhelmingly mindless&amp;quot; voters, its about voters who are angry with the failure of the system. That is, they are mindful of how the system has failed. They may not know what the answer is, but they are angry, and they are willing to elect politicians who seem to mirror their anger. It might be a bad strategy to vote for someone simply because they appear to reflect your anger, but I think I can understand the motivation, and it is not quite the same as being mindless.</text></comment>
<story><title>Feds Walk into a Building and Demand Everyone&apos;s Fingerprints to Open Phones</title><url>http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2016/10/16/doj-demands-mass-fingerprint-seizure-to-open-iphones</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>M_Grey</author><text>Just another reason to forgo the convenience of biometrics in favor of a password&amp;#x2F;phrase that exists only in your mind. At least for now, that&amp;#x27;s something you can&amp;#x27;t be compelled to produce.&lt;p&gt;Really though, this descent into a police state is such a pathetic outcome for this country. Dangerous, scary, and tragic, but also... pathetic. This is what happens when a sizeable majority don&amp;#x27;t even participate in the electoral process, and those who do are overwhelmingly mindless.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lisper</author><text>No, it&amp;#x27;s what happens when large numbers of people decide they care about safety and security more than they care about freedom.  That doesn&amp;#x27;t necessarily make it any better, but to attribute this outcome to mindlessness is to badly miss the point.  The first step to solving a problem is to understand what the problem actually &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt;.</text></comment>