Conference taveng::bagels

1122.0. "Orwell is alive and lives in Israel..." by ASSON::KLEIN (You're never alone with schizophrenia) Fri Oct 25 1991 16:18

RISKS-LIST: RISKS-FORUM Digest  Monday 21 October 1991  Volume 12 : Issue 52

        FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS 
   ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator

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Date: Thu, 17 Oct 91 17:45:36 +0200
From: amos shapir <[email protected]>
Subject: The Future is Here

The Israeli Broadcasting Authority (IBA) is an independently budgeted
government agency, financed by a special tax (sometimes called, for historical
reasons, "TV license fee").  Since it does its own collection, it's sometimes
even more zealous than the IRS.  The following is a true incident that happened
to a friend of mine:

She received a notice from the IBA to pay back due taxes.  The strange thing
about it was that it was sent to an address she moved into just ten days
before, and was sure nobody but the landlord knew about.  While she was in the
IBA's office to settle the matter, she'd found out that due to recent
unification of government databases, the following information about her was
retrieved at a touch of a clerk's terminal key:

- Her new address (probably from the city's municipality);
- The type of each TV she'd owned since 1984 (dealers and importers
 are required to report that to the IBA);
- The dates in which she'd left and entered the country during that time
 (probably from the border police  passport control records).

All this was just information necessary for the specific case at hand; that Big
Computer probably knows a lot more about us.  In short, the future is here, and
it looks more Orwellian than Orwell could have ever imagined.

Amos Shapir, The Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem, Dept. of Comp.Science. +972 2 585706 

    Maybe it's just the SLB in disguise.