[I.M. Boggled]

"As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression.
In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged.
And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air however slight, least we become unwitting victims of the darkness."
Justice William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court (1939-75)

Goverment set to order six dollar Radio Frequencie ID chips installed into three dollar chickens...
Welcome to the twilight zone. IMB :(

NAIS Threatens Small Farmers, Homesteaders & Pet Owners

The USDA is attempting to implement the
National Animal Identification System (NAIS)
regulations both at a national level and by funding state efforts to dove-tail with NAIS.
It is presented as a means of preventing disease and terrorism but the reality is that NAIS was developed to give the large meat exporters more markets to countries like Japan who are demanding trace-back on meat they import, specifically cattle.
The problem with NAIS is it is being mandated on all livestock at all farms, homesteads and even for livestock kept as pets.
NAIS involves premise ID for all homes or farms with livestock which will include an annual fee.
While the big factory farms can use one ID for a flock or herd of thousands of animals the small farmers and homesteaders will be burdened with tagging and tracking all movements of all animals.
If you own a single chicken for eggs for your own consumption, raise a summer pig or even just have a horse for pleasure you will be required under NAIS to register, tag and track that animal.

Are you familiar with NAIS?
Let me give you a little background.
The USDA wants to register the GPS coordinates, name, address, phone and other data on every farm, home and other location that has even has a single animal with a government Premise ID.
For this privilege of mandatory registration you will pay a fee of $10 or more per year.
Next they intend to tag every single one of your animals with a RFID or other tag.
This will be mandatory.
In addition to paying an annual fee and paying for tags for all of your animals, you would also be required to log, track and report all 'events' such as the birth of an animal, death of an animal, animals leaving or entering your property.
All reports must be made within 24 hours or you could face stiff fines.
Do not expect them to keep your private information secure.
In a little "Oops" the USDA just released the social security numbers of 350,000 farmers.

Six dollar chips in a three dollar chicken.

Big producers like factory farms get to use a single batch ID for tens of thousands of animals to keep their costs down. For them NAIS is a minor bookkeeping entry that gives them big profits in the export markets to Japan and other countries. Small farmers and homesteaders with their mixed aged flocks and herds would be required to tag and track every single individual animal. NAIS is great for big corporate producers and hellish for small farmers and homesteaders. The cost of NAIS in fees, tags, equipment costs and time will bankrupt small farmers and overwhelm people who raise their own food animals. In the end, the consumer will pay - NAIS could add almost a thousand dollars a year to the annual food budget for the typical family of four. By destroying small producers NAIS will kill the Slow Food and the Buy Local movements as local farmers are driven out of business.

NAIS is already mandatory in some states starting this year including Texas and Wisconsin. In other states, like Vermont, the agricultural commissioner and state vet have said they will tag and track every animal right down to the back yard level. This means everyone, even granny with her one laying hen is going to have to get a $10 per year premise ID, a RFID tag for her chicken and make government reports on its movements. Texas has implemented a $1,000 per incident per day fine for non-compliance. What small farmer or homesteader can stand up to that kind of fire power?!?

NAIS also requires tagging and tracking of pets and guardian animals including alpaca and horses. It may later likely be extended to cats and dogs although that has not yet been announced it is allowed for in the draft proposal through extensions of the program. In New York state they already have a bill in the legislature requiring that all dogs be internally tagged with RFID chips for tracking purposes.

USDA agents can come to your home and kill all of your livestock without a warrant or any legal appeal under NAIS. Once you are registered into the mandatory NAIS system you effectively lose your rights to your own livestock. You become a serf for the state worse than in Communist Russia. If you do not believe me then please go to the USDA web site and read the draft proposal for NAIS which is already being implemented in stages without public feedback or scrutiny.
Check out the timeline - we all must start fighting it now before it is too late. Together we can stop this fascist move to take away our property and livelihoods. We can still protect our traditional rights to farm if we act now

Is NAIS legal?
No, not under our Constitution but that does not stop the government from implementing bad laws and regulations and then enforcing them.
NAIS specifically violates the 1st, 4th, 5th and 14th Amendments and Bill of Rights.
The USDA has been very hush-hush about NAIS because they know that if people really understood how far reaching it is, what an outrageous violation of our constitutional rights NAIS is, then people would stop NAIS dead.
The USDA has being asking for feedback but only from the large "stakeholders" as they call them.
Small farmers don't count.
Homesteaders don't matter.
Pet owners were completely ignored because none of these groups profit from NAIS.
https://pubwvj.redstate.com/story/2006/2/26/142313/238


Some of the concerns with NAIS include financial, civil rights, and religious aspects of the program.

Financially, a system as vast as NAIS will undoubtedly be extremely costly, and there is some doubt that it will be any more effective at controlling disease outbreaks than the less expensive systems currently in place, like the Scrapies or Brucellosis programs.
Additionally, there is concern that the costs of complying with the program will drive small farmers out of business.

There are also civil rights concerns, because NAIS establishes extensive government control over livestock, which are considered to be private property.

There are also concerns that the big agribusiness companies will use this system to blame their mistakes in processing which introduces contamination to the food supply on small farmers putting them out of business.

Finally, the plans to make NAIS mandatory threaten the religious freedom of those who believe that making a “mark” is sinful, such as the Amish.
The Amish also object to the use of electronic devices such as microchips.
If microchip implants were required, as has been proposed in a ...report by the United States Animal Health Association’s Committee on Livestock Identification, it would also violate the rights of those who believe that this practice is morally wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationa...ication_System

[I.M. Boggled]

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an automatic identification method, relying on storing and remotely retrieving data using devices called RFID tags or transponders.
An RFID tag is a small object that can be attached to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person.
RFID tags contain silicon chips and antennas to enable them to receive and respond to radio-frequency queries from an RFID transceiver.
Passive tags require no internal power source, whereas active tags require a power source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Source:Mother Jones Magazine, December 6, 2005

New consumer-tracking technology threatens to make personal privacy a thing of the past.

Imagine a future in which your every belonging is marked with a unique number identifiable with the swipe of a scanner; where your refrigerator keeps track of its contents; where the location of your car is always pinpoint-able; and where signal-emitting microchips storing personal information are implanted beneath your skin or embedded in your inner organs.

This is the future of radio frequency identification (RFID), a technology whose application has so far been limited largely to supply-chain management (enabling companies, for example, to keep track of the quantity of a given product they have in stock).
RFID is set to be applied in a whole range of consumer settings.
Already being tested in products as innocuous as shampoo, lip balm, razor blades, and cream cheese, RFID-enabled items are promoted by retailers and marketers as the next revolution in customer convenience.
Consumer advocates say this is paving the way for a nightmarish future where personal privacy is a quaint throwback.

Katherine Albrecht has been at the forefront of efforts to sound the alarm about the (already) $10 billion-a-year customer surveillance industry. As the founder and director of the consumer advocacy group Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN, a nod to C.S. Lewis’ valiant prince), she has uncovered everything from hidden cameras to tracking devices in shopping carts to fake shoppers who follow you around stores.

In her new book, Spychips (co-written with colleague Liz McIntyre and published by Nelson Current), Albrecht, whose work is motivated in part by deeply held Christian beliefs, details how global corporations—and governments—are working to turn RFID into a way of tracking the day-to-day activities of ordinary citizens.

“Regardless of whether your beliefs are progressive or conservative, socially or politically, everybody’s got a reason to not want somebody spying on them,” she says. “Whether you’re afraid that Big Brother is going to take the form of an evil corporation or Big Brother is going to take the form of an evil government or take whatever form, everybody’s got a reason to be concerned.”

Mother Jones recently talked with Albrecht about her consumer activism, the techniques of customer manipulation, and a future where RFID is ubiquitous and personal privacy in short supply.

Mother Jones: What are the greatest threats posed by radio frequency identification technology in particular in the surveillance operations of stores?

Katherine Albrecht: The problem with RFID has to do with the fact that the RFID tags can be so easily hidden into products—things people buy and carry—and the reader devices can be so easily hidden into aspects of the environment. This makes it extremely easy for someone who wants to observe and watch people in these surreptitious ways to do so. We’ve identified three different arenas that the RFID threat could come from: marketers, the government, and criminals.

MJ: What examples have you seen in those three areas?

KA: The Metro, the RFID industry’s showcase retail outlet in Germany, is a good example of a retailer abusing RFID in a surreptitious way. About a year and a half ago, we toured the store for over three hours. The next day I was giving a talk to a group of Germans on privacy and RFID. We had set up a $200 reader device we had bought off the Internet to read the RFID tags off the Pantene shampoo and the Gillette razor products and just on a lark, one of my colleagues held his frequent shopper card up to the reader device and a number appeared on the screen. We found out that they had actually tagged us—and apparently 10,000 other shoppers—at the store, by giving out these cards without being told that they contained RFID tracking devices.

That’s the retailer’s dream: Instead of having to rely on all of this extremely expensive technology to follow you and watch you walk around the store, they can issue you something that you put in your wallet willingly. That way they could figure out how long you stood in front of the bread aisle or they could figure out how long your shopping trip took. They could identify you from the moment you walked in the door. They could identify your value to the store and then treat you differently depending on how profitable you are.

MJ: Companies are actually thinking like that?

KA: Oh, absolutely. I have thousands of pages to back that up. Actually, the whole current retail environment is set up to maximize profit. There are things that have been going on long before RFID became available to retailers that are quite revolting. They’ve got shelf cameras that can zoom in and capture your customer expression as you look at a shelf. They’ve got fake shoppers who can literally follow you around and record what you say to the people you’re shopping with. It’s a $10 billion per year industry. And it’s almost entirely invisible to the average consumer.

MJ: And what can the average consumer do to fight back against this?

KA: The first thing is to become informed about it, because I think very few people have any clue at all that it’s even happening. We detail a lot of this at our NoCards.org website. We’ve protested shopper cards, which are essentially a tool to get you to reveal your purchasing patterns [with the aid of] very sophisticated data mining filters. We recommend a multi-tier approach: educate yourself, educate other people, boycott stores that engage in it, punish them financially by withholding your shopping dollars from them. If the punishment becomes more painful than the desired reward, just like with anything else, companies will pull back from these practices.

MJ: What motivates your advocacy against RFID technology?

KA: What motivates me is an absolute resistance against the idea that we would all just be reduced to being numbers and tagged and tracked like cattle. When I see RFID and I think about a world in which the powers that be—be they corporate or government—can essentially watch, surveil, track, manipulate, and control the people, that’s what motivates me: a desire to see that not happen, to my generation, to my children, to my grandchildren. History is going to judge us based on how we respond to this threat now.

MJ: So, you walk into a store and you purchase something using the store card, or get a product with one of those RFID tag devices. Can you walk through some of the things that are going on from the surveillance perspective?

KA: Let’s say I buy a pair of size 7 women’s Nike running shoes with a credit card. Currently, most major national chains are recording information about what people are buying. In the future, however, my pair of size 7 Nike running shoes will have a unique ID number in an RFID tag embedded in the sole—unless we stop it—so anytime that I step on carpeting or a floor tile that’s been equipped with an RFID reader, it can scan that number and know: “Hey, I’m at the Atlanta courthouse, and I just saw shoe number 308247 step by. Let me cross-reference that in the database. That’s the shoe that was purchased by Katherine Albrecht.”

And shoes are a particularly interesting example to think of in that regard because we don’t trade shoes with other people, for a variety of hygiene and fitness reasons, and most of us tend to wear only a few pairs of shoes regularly. So if you can identify a pair of shoes as belonging to an individual and strategically locate reader devices—put them in the entrance to the airport, the entrance to the courthouse, the entrance to the Wal-Mart store—you can pinpoint the time and place at which a person was seen entering that location. That opens up a whole new horizon of tracking capability to watch people, for marketers and homeland security folks.

MJ: How might the government use this technology for homeland security?

KA: Depending on your politics, you may attend a peace rally or a gun show or a talk by a Muslim cleric or a union meeting or a particular political rally, all of which are protected by the First Amendment. But in the RFID world, federal agents could attend that meeting with a hand-held reader hidden in a backpack, mill around long enough to capture a couple thousand RFID numbers associated with the people at the meeting, upload all of that to a central database, cross-reference it, and figure out everybody who was there.

Also, once you’ve got the private sector wielding all of this technology, they are at liberty to sell that information to the federal government. At that point, the government does not run a foul of Constitution restrictions for essentially spying on its own citizens. There are a lot of private sector-government partnerships in sharing of this information once it’s been gathered, and we anticipate that there will be more and more of that in coming years.

MJ: That seems to require an enormous about of infrastructure and cooperation between these businesses and the database registration.

KA: Pieces of this are already happening. When you make a purchase, records, including your identity and all of the things you bought are collected and recorded. And there are companies that specialize in purchase-record consolidation, such as Information Resources Inc.

MJ: How far away is that future?

KA: That future is going to happen as soon as we allow them to put RFID tags on the things we wear and carry. If you ask the industry, that future is by 2010. When the industry gets RFID tags down to five cents, or preferably a fraction of a penny, at that point, I think we’ll begin to see them appearing on everything, and we’re really looking at a future in which every physical object on earth will be uniquely numbered and trackable in real-time all the time.

MJ: How can RFID tags be used in a consumer responsible way?

KA: This is a great technology if you want to track things from point A to point B. If you run a warehouse and want to keep track of the inventory in the warehouse, RFID is a super way to do it. Conceivably, RFID could have some consumer benefits, but they absolutely pale in comparison to the risks that this technology poses. Industry will tell you, “Won’t it be great when you can waltz through a check out line without having to stop and stand in line?” If the price I have to pay for that is having all of my belongings remotely identifiable and being under the thumb of Big Brother, I would rather stand in line. The trade off just seems so ludicrously lop-sided.

MJ: What alternatives do you suggest for responsible marketers?

KA: I would say let people make their own decisions without trying to manipulate them. The advice I give to professional marketers is “If you can’t tell people you’re doing it, you shouldn’t do it.” I don’t think that the marketers’ challenge is so great right now that they have to resort to these kinds of underhanded tactics to meet their objectives. I want to buy something on the merits of the product.

MJ: What’s your take on the VeriChip Company and Tommy Thompson— former Secretary of Health and Human Services under the Bush administration and now VeriChip Board member—advocating more RFID technology for medical information?

KA: It absolutely scares the heck out of me.
In the last six months to a year, this company has really stepped up its efforts to get some powerful players behind it.
The fact that people listen to this with a straight face is even more extraordinary to me. You’ve got Tommy Thompson talking about linking medical records with a chip implanted in your arm. You’ve got Senator Joe Biden in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings talking about implant chips to track people with a straight face. It’s unbelievable how quickly we’ve gone from saying “Oh, that’s pet chipping technology, we’ll never put that in people” to people with a straight face suddenly talking about implanting chips into American citizens. Terrifying.

https://www.motherjones.com/interview.../albrecht.html

[I.M. Boggled]

Source: Position statement from the President of
"The Society for the Preservation of Poultry Antiquities"

NAIS:
This is the reason.
Now is the time.

For the last couple of years, when I've tried to talk to people about National Animal Identification Systems, the response was disbelief.
"That will never happen!"
"The government wouldn't do that."

Now that it is clear, with the USDA's National Animal Identification System, they are trying to do it.
I all too often hear..."You can't fight city hall."
"We will have to try to get the best deal we can."
"There is nothing we can do about it."
"There aren't enough of us."
"We don't have the clout we once did."
"It's happening worldwide."
What can we do?"

Give me a break!
We are American.
This country is founded on the idea of fighting "City Hall."
The actions of the British monarchy that spawned us pale beside those of this arrogant, incompetent, over-reaching bureaucracy that would oppress us now.

In early April, Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns issued an implementation plan responding to the outrage and resistance of small livestock keepers.
The emphasis remained on food animals, with much less required of non-food animal keepers.
This encouraging shift indicates that by organizing and creating alliances with other small stock keepers, we can influence the policies that govern us.

This is the time to act like Americans.
Not to go hat in hand pleading for special favors or trying to cut the best deal we can for our special interest crap.
Now is the time to organize and fight, not compromise.
We need to reach out to others affected by this nonsense and help roll it back.
Now is the time to stand for freedom.
When will we be stronger?
Small-scale livestock keepers of all kinds and rural folks in general will suffer from this mindless bureaucracy.
The fanciers and show people, backyarders and preservationists must come together and make common cause with all small scale keepers of livestock.

Right now, the bureaucracies of the world are mindlessly following one another into a growing spiral of regulation that is often devoid of any rational thought.

The citizens need to holler STOP!

Animal identification has its merits.
A reasonable system would not only facilitate quick responses to disease outbreaks but might also reduce thefts, or at least improve the chances of recovery of stolen stock.
The original voluntary premise identification plan sounded reasonable and could have been beneficial.
The costs in time and money of the present mandatory plan are an unwarranted burden on small-scale livestock keepers of all kinds.
Arguments that this excessively cumbersome, expensive and perhaps unworkable program will improve our security are spurious at best.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the USDA has attempted to engineer this unwarranted and unprecedented expansion of their powers both by keeping it below the public's radar and by exaggerating and misrepresenting the risks of avian influenza, anthrax and mad cow disease.

This is about empire building and helping their friends, not about national security or the safety of our food.

If the USDA was seriously concerned about national security and food safety, they would be promoting diversified production and trying to maximize local consumption.
Policies that support those goals have been completely foreign to the department for at least 40 years.

NAIS is not only a sham that will not accomplish its stated goals.
It will also play havoc with our constitutional rights.
Some people of faith, including many Amish and Mennonite sects as well as some other Christians and people of other religions, would be forced to choose between the tenets of their faith and the law of the land.
Well, there goes the First Amendment.

NAIS also proposes surveillance of any property where even a single animal of a livestock species is kept.
This surveillance of innocent citizens who have done nothing more than own an animal takes care of the Fourth Amendment.

The system's forced registration in a permanent government database of citizens' homes, farms and animals does it for the Fifth and probably the Fourteenth.
Talk about over-reaching: 30 percent of the Bill of Rights and one more amendment for good measure.
It is time to say NO!

My grandfather used to like to say that those who can, do; those who can't, teach, and those who can't get a job teaching go to work for the government.
It always amused me, but I didn't know how close to the truth he was.
There are some very good people in the bureaucracy.
But in many cases, we are not dealing with the sharpest knives in the drawer, which may go along way to explaining NAIS.

Our present system for tracking disease outbreaks works pretty well.
If these folks were using common sense and actually trying to improve our safety, they would be concentrating on increased testing after livestock enters the food chain, not creating a cumbersome, intrusive and punitive system that will discourage small-scale livestock keeping.
Additional pressures that accelerate the decline in small-scale keepers are likely to lead to reduced genetic diversity and a marginal increase in the kind of industrial food production that is so vulnerable to the health problems NAIS is claimed to prevent.

The end result is not the only problem.
The manner in which NAIS was developed is suspect.
In fact, a reasonable person has to fear that the way this agency does business is either flawed or corrupted generally.
When the USDA was originally formulating the policy, its representatives met not with a cross-section of the people to be regulated, but with groups representing industrial agriculture and computer manufacturing animal identification systems.
The latter group, to everyone's surprise, suggested a massive animal identification system.
But we can all be sure this had nothing to do with their desire to sell systems.

Finally, the USDA did set up working groups for each species or groups of species to work out the details on how the policy would be implemented. While they have shown some willingness to make it less onerous to the working groups, this late outreach appeared more effective in giving the USDA political cover and tying groups like the SPPA to their agenda.
They either need a better agenda or a lot more rope.

Not only has USDA not yet make a serious attempt to alert the regulated community, let alone the general public, to NAIS, they did not publicize the comment period until it was essentially over.

NAIS isn't the only questionable action that can be laid at the USDA's feet. Their handling of Avian Influenza is a classic case of stupidity or corruption.

The USDA and their flunkies at the state agencies have become so committed to industrial production of poultry that they are incapable or unwilling to make realistic judgments of that industry and the threats it both faces and produces.

The dramatic increases in AI outbreaks over the last 20 years have not been associated with increases in backyard poultry keeping.
They follow directly the enormous growth of large, industrial poultry operations worldwide. Small flocks have rarely been involved. Usually such outbreaks have been traced to nearby commercial operations, not the other way around.

Yet the USDA has aided the industry in giving the impression that this is a backyard, small flock and migratory bird problem. The Virginia Department of Agriculture recently showed a training film making that claim, despite the fact that the last major U.S. outbreak, centered in Virginia, did not involve any small flocks.

Yet a gullible media typically broadcasts images of men in white biosecurity suits chasing chickens in rural villages or flocks of wild bird in reports about the spread of AI. The USDA and other regulators seem to help the industry promote this false image of what is happening. Unless you have followed this story very closely, you may not be aware that most of the people who have died of Avian Influenza were not small flock keepers, but worked in industrial poultry houses or were engaged in other high-risk practices.

AI is nothing new, but the Highly Pathogenic strains that have decimated industrial poultry houses and killed people over the last eight years are unprecedented. They are also a product of industrial poultry operations.

There is a myth that confinement provides biosecurity.
Viruses can enter such operations by a variety of routes, including dust and moisture particles.
Once a few birds are infected, the spread is rapid and the enormous quantity of aerosol virus produced can overcome the immune systems of people and other species not normally affected by AI.

It seems outrageous, but the big poultry companies are actually trying to use AI to do away with the competition. Margaret Say, Southeast Asian director of the US Poultry and Egg Export Council said,
"We cannot control migratory birds but we can surely work hard to close down as many backyard farms as possible."

That kind of statement makes NAIS understandable.
Over time, bureaucracies often come to serve the regulated.

If voluntary premise ID seemed reasonable, the USDA has not handled it in such a fashion.
People responding to surveys were dumped into the database without knowing they had "volunteered."
Other "volunteers" came from breed registries without their permission. ...
https://www.feathersite.com/Poultry/SPPA/NAIS.html.

This is clearly "another" goverment entity out of control.

N.A.I.S. is a good ice breaker topic when discussing big goverment over stepping its authority if one finds oneself chatting with some livestock/critter keepin' folk's...

"Medical Cannabis" and "Tax and Regulate" activists may wish to become conversational in this latest (successful?) outrageous attempt at goverment encroachment of traditional personal freedoms.

IMB

wow

[I Used To Grow]

man, that sucks!

what the hell are they trying to do?...oh yeah, one world government..damn bastages!

[genkisan]

Hitler and Himmler would have creamed their jodhpurs to have that technology.......and it looks like the Nazis of this time are doing the same.


I find it staggering that the American people cannot see the vigorous ass-raping they are getting in the name of "freedom and security"....makes me ill to think about, to be honest.

[I.M. Boggled]

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.

-Edmund Burke-

[2buds]

I.M., man you are one informed member. Glad to know ya bro. Thanks for pulling out the important stufff that most stoners never read till it's too late.
Peace

[Verite]

Yeah, I would like a bucket of extra-krispy. Hold the rfid chips please.

[genkisan]

Well, there are already RFID chips in the new American 20$ bills, so why not yer chickens?

If you have ever studied dictatorships, mass mind control techniques and domination plans, the current events in the US should scare the living fuck outen ya....Herr Mustache would be proud.