Quote:
Originally posted by VictorKaum
Hey, why all that panic?
Here in Belgium we all (all people > 12 year) have an Identity Card
On the card is a number called 'Rijksregisternummer' or 'Stateregistrynumber' with this numbe they can track you down: age, gender, location, social status, birth date, birth place, parents names, criminal status.
No 1 here does have complains against this... is this a privacy violation... perhaps.
My dad works as a computer analyst at the company that runs the mainframes holding the archive with everyone's info and yes there are some risks about privacy, but there are also many benefits.
About security: they use their own telecommunicationlines to communicate (encrypted) between governement, police, ministry of defense and the mainframes. So no1 can snif on those lines except when they dig a hole in the ground, search for the cable and pretend to be a reciever but this is not an easy task to do.
Well I've mostly worked in this sort of area (IBM mainframe systems) for the last 20 years or so, and yes, there is a lot of truth in what you say. However, nothing is perfect, and there are a lot of loopholes, although normally you would require some sort of assistance from someone on the 'inside' - however this can be as simple as aquiring access to a laptop used by a support person. I'm speaking from personal experience here, as a company I was working for in the past detected some very odd database requests (just commercialy sensitive as it turned out), which we eventually managed to trace.