Three workers were revealed as having read the passport application file of Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama. Two have been fired and one was disciplined administratively. Nothing was apparently divulged to others and the motive seems to have been "imprudent curiousity" according to the US State Department. What does this reveal though about today’s America and the world.
Computers both make it easier for people with access to files to view them and to expose that they have search those files.
Nobody is safe from spying.
Why exactly should people have to get a passport to travel outside their country? When the great Argentine poet, essayist and novelist Jorge Luis Borges was a little boy his father took him to see a military parade in Uruguay so that he would see part of the "militant society" that pioneering sociologist and advocate of freedom Herbert Spencer saw as being swept away in humanity’s progress. Like his father, Borges was an adherent of Herbert Spencer’s individualist philosophy of freedom. Spencer saw passports, border posts and customs offices as part of our barbarous militant past that would be replaced by the "industrial society" of peace, free trade and capitalism. Only backward countries like Czarist Russia had passports internally, which practice the Soviets continued. Ah well, Spencer is gone and passports, border posts and customs offices as well as the "militant society" are all too present.
Privacy versus passports. Freedom of travel versus passports. The choice is ours.
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See Richard Cooper "Herbert Spencer Misrepresented In NY Times Article" http://mythsmasher.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html
(About the author: Richard Cooper is the export/import manager of a Long Island, New York manufacturer. He served as Chair of the Libertarian Party of New York www.ny.lp.org. He is a Life Member of the International Society for Individual Liberty www.isil.org. In the Super Tuesday primary he ran as a Ron Paul delegate www.ronpaul2008.com).
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