Taking your earlier post and this one together, I still would like an answer to your earlier question: why do we have license plates? They don't identify citizens to each other I identify people I know by their faces, I sometimes know what their cars look like. As usual, this is another of those schemes that we pay for and get no benefit from.

If you want the cops to be able to "find the crooks", they have to sift through a group of "non-crooks" - that means that people who are committing no crime have their plates run, some innocents are stopped [borrowed the car from a friend] and a few crooks are stopped. Eccch. If you want to identify your car in a unique way that you don't have to have involvement with the state for, go shopping for an obscure bumper sticker. If you want to know with whom you are doing business, ask them. How will knowing their license plate help?

Actually, some horses have brands that tell who the owner was at one point in time - usually when they are 2 or 3 years old and being broken to ride is when they were branded. Most horses are then sold multiple times. The original brands become distorted and covered with hair as the horse ages and it is difficult to see the brand at all, let alone interpret it. Some horses do not have any brands. It is rarely possible to look at a horse walking by you and say, "Hey, that is the Wachowski brand! She never sells her branded stock - that horse must be stolen."*

Jan
*(I once owned such a horse. He was 22 years old, had been abandoned and was lame in 3 legs. I reconditioned him to be able to walk/trot/canter and even do his show gaits again. Show gaits? Yes, in his youth the decrepit cast-off horse had been an Olympic silver medalist. He came from a stable that had a rep for never selling their horses. Long story...)

A friend of mine who was raised in a small town often makes the same point about privacy not being the default human condition. I counter that health and long life are not the default human condition either, but I would like to have them.

It is true that historically there was little privacy, but the other side of that coin is that in 1914 when you went to rent an apartment or get a job no one asked you for your SSAN or was able to trace your activities on the internet. Our whole society has moved from one of casual personal interaction to one of regulated cya formality. I think that we should value and conserve privacy whenever we can, even in those areas that have not traditionally been private, since it is inevitable that an interfaced society is removing other aspects of privacy from our lives.

When you rode a horse, everyone could see you and know who you were. But you did not have a license plate tied to the horse's tail (and if you rode in a closed carriage you did have privacy).

Jan

That wasn't my point.

The "Tin-Foil Hat" brigade has long been looked down upon as paranoid and this reminds me of a quote from Catch 22 by Joseph Heller.

“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you”

the aclu is correct that people should inundate the police departments for the information collected on them. they can scan 1 million is a short time, but they couldn't give out the requested information that fast. it would keep them so busy they might need to get the picture takers inside to help get the information requested. land of the free?

Honestly it is getting to the point that the "Tin-Foil Hat" brigade doesn't seem so crazy anymore.

whoa. Colorado has it-but it's city by city