Today I got a letter in the post from my credit card company demanding that under some Terrorist and Money Laundering Act that I provide them with ID and proof of address by return of post. A complete stranger to me will open the letter and enter my details into a computer. Bingo - I am not a terrorist or a money launderer! Yesterday I had to fill out forms to be Garda vetted (yet again) so that I can sing in the church choir.
I was intrigued a few months ago at a presentation about Bitcoin when the presenter told us that the whole idea of Bitcoin and digital currencies is that you trust no one from the beginning. Trust is defined by Dictionary.com as:
"reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence"
Guilty until proven innocent
Many people are opposed to the idea of being vetted like this: "I never committed a crime in my life" is true of the overwhelming majority of people. It saddens me that elderly people going to church and who volunteer for activities like taking up the collection at Mass now have to be Garda vetted. It saddens me even more that a few perverts have made this necessary. According to the Central Statistics Office, recorded crime incidents classified as "Sexual Offences" were 2,348 offences in 2016, an increase of 8.6% on the previous year. The population of Ireland in 2016 was recorded as 4,757,976. Using the data above, sex offenders make up 0.049% of the population in 2016. It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack using Garda vetting. Yet it has to be done, and is especially important where children are concerned.
The Shoe Bomber
An idiot called Richard Reid, the world's dumbest ever terrorist, tried to blow up a plane with a bomb in his shoe in December 2001. Now we all have to remove our shoes going through security at airports because we cannot be trusted not to do the same. According to the Worldbank, there were 3.696 billion air passengers in 2016, the vast majority of these have to take off their shoes (that over 7.3 billion shoes!). Has anyone been caught with a bomb in their shoe since 2001? Despite this ritual humiliation we all go through at airports, would you get on a plane that passengers were not checked though security?
Exams
People have been cheating in exams since forever. But it is just a tiny minority who take the chance to do this. Hence all colleges have strict rules about exams - no phones, (new) no smart watches, no notes, and no water bottles. Every time a student sits down to an exam, he/she has to undergo the ritual instructions from Invigilators. Many of us also make students submit assignments like essays and projects through plagiarism detection systems such as Turnitin. While we can argue that it is part of the learning process to do this, in the end it is about preventing cheating. Why should an honest trustworthy student have to do this?
Trust no one!
No comments:
Post a Comment