Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Social Security Numbers--Close Enough For A Drone Strike?

The title is an entry at Naked Capitalism.

The author is:  "Patrick Durusau, who consults on semantic integration and edits standards. Durusau is convener of JTC 1 SC 34/WG 3, co-editor of 13250-1 and 13250-5 (Topic Maps Introduction and Reference Model, respectively), and editor of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard at OASIS and ISO (ISO/IEC 26300). Originally published at Another Word for It."

In  prior post I wrote about the obvious necessity of having a single number identifier to which is associated all information associated with an individual.  Stupid people think that the universal ID number will never happen as long as they have their guns.  We certainly all have a unique number identifier, we just don't know it because we have no need to know.  Publicly, our SSN comes as close to it as possible, secretly it is probably linked to a better all inclusive number.  India wants to make that kind of better all inclusive unique number a means of identifying all of its citizens.

One unique person having more than one SSN breaks the rule and messes up the system.  The unique one to one relationship is mandatory and cannot be violated any more than there can be two unique physical beings that are me.  Impossible.  So must be the impossibility of two people having the same number.  Like all the unique serialized dollar  bills in the monetary system I propose, there can be no duplicates.  Alarm bells go off if the computer finds any and it is checking every milli-second to assure system integrity.

The rule of Information Engineering is that information structures are built on unique one to one relationships of a unique instance of a collective entity is identified by a unique attribute, the easiest one being a number.  That is the essential idea of my monetary system:  Every single dollar is uniquely serialized.  Every financial entity that relates to a dollar must also be uniquely identified and relate to its own associated information.  That is foundation of the system.  Clear and simple.  Exactly the way we vote.  One person, one vote.  A unique one to one relationship upon which a democracy is built.  Of course, we are a republic therefore our one vote is for a representative to vote on stuff for us.  Not for my good every time but the common good of the republic.

While the examination starts well with analysis of the attributes of SSN and its validity identifying number it ends on a diversionary note consistent with a Keystone Cops characterization of the NSA.

"Yes, the NSA can use a phone call to search all other phone calls, within the phone call database. Ho-hum. Annoying but hardly high tech merging of data from diverse data sources.
It is also true that once you are selected, the NSA could invest the time and effort to reconcile all the information about you, on a one-off basis.
But that has always been the case.
The public motivation for the NSA project was to data mine diverse data sources. Computers replacing labor-intensive human investigation of terrorism.
But as Snowden points out, it takes a human to connect dots in the noisy results of computer processing.
Fewer humans = less effective against terrorism." 

My next blog entry illustrates a more technical reality amusingly placed in an historical perspectives.


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