Sorry for the confusion. What I'd meant was I was surprised that UPS would require license scans whereas USPS doesn't.

Since when does the policy of a Corporation override my rights?? I hate that answer... "It's policy", like that means "it's law".

You are already nearly guaranteed to be recorded on CCTV, and now they want to scan your license?? Forget it.

I wonder if the UPS Store/Mailboxes Etc. and the mom & pop pack & send type places are requiring this as well??

Youre right Alan, it was an attempt at humor. I do find it funny that the Dems will jump on any excuse to blame Bush. This is very similar to the conservatives screaming bloody hell every time they thought they had caught Clinton doing something wrong--whitewater, arlington etc. They looked like the boy who cried wolf for 5 years until Monica. Now its the Democrats turn. Both sides make fools of themselves when they jump up and down over any imagined transgression by the party in power.

As far as UPS goes, the counter jockey did'nt know why the ID check was required. It may be that that a company lawyer is requiring this, it could be as you state, an evil BIG company selling your private info, or it could be big brother trying to keep a closer watch over us all.

What recourse will you have if a hacker steals your identity? If you do not have fraud alert on your credit records today you are a fool. And its a free service, from a BIG company.

Not that I am supporting this action in ANY way, because I am NOT, but how is this any more of a threat than a clerk getting our drivers liscence # and/or ss# when writing a check?

LMAO

I don’t believe it too much to ask for. Maybe being in the military has given me other points of views. My brother came back from Iraq back in November. While he was serving I sent him a USB hard drive for storing all his pics. After borrowing the drive to view the pics and seening the true reality of war it kind of confirms my position. Pics haven't changed in 15 years. War is easy to talk about and whine about. But being in the front line either at a UPS shipping desk or in Iraq we all deserve some reassurance.

There are crazy people out there. Ones that will give their life to kill at random. Just a fact of life. If one extra measure to filter out this helps save a life then why not. It is my choice to send this package anyway.
to send this package anyway.

Skip the red states part. "This country" would have been sufficient.

Wrong. Period. Let me repeat. Wrong. Period. Less government is the Republican way. That was some of the bedrock the founding fathers stood on. That means less social programs that makes government the sugar daddy to millions of our citizens. This doesn not mean abandon the poor and needy. However, where money is given away in social programs, dependence increases, strings are always attached, i.e. government control increases.

What about the Democratic governor of Louisiana who left the 1000 buses inactive that could have carried tens of thousands to safety? Or who seemed completely inept at even getting help except on her terms? Did you know Time magazine named her one of the five worst governors in the country?
[Link: en.wikipedia.org]


Come on, you are flinging major. Are you comparing wiretapping of phone calls to KNOWN TERRORISTS to entering MY HOME without a warrant? That is poor rhetoric at the very least. Alan, they flew into buildings in YOUR BACKYARD, HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN??

Now I know you can and probably will come back with, "Well what about when so and so did thus and such, and the Red Staters are known for that, and they don't know how to think, and don't they care", and on and on and et cetera. There is plenty of error and malfeasance on both sides of the aisle. Do you want to keep score and see who is the best and the worst? Is this going to get you anywhere?

Why not just leave the political rhetoric out and get on with it. You have your world view and think you are right and some of us have ours and think we are right. Leave it at that.

I don't see this as even close to the same thing. One is done in case a check bounces and does not go into a searchable database. I'll be curious to run into this first hand. I don't believe I'll be handing over my drivers license though.

The thing is, these kinds of intrusions into privacy aren't going to stop anything. Does anyone think Saudia Arabia or Iraq are free? But they aren't free from terrorism by a long shot.

Does anyone really believe that someone who is going to mail a bomb isn't going to be creative enough to get a fake driver's license with someone else's information so that it looks legite? And if the point of the scan is to be able to figure out who sent the box after the fact, then that's not of much use after the bomb blows up is it? Even if the person was stupid enough to use his or her real license, I'm kind of guessing that unless they are mentally ill they'll be on their own plane shortly after dropping the box off, and way out of the country by the time anyone gets around to going back to the database to check the license that was scanned. You'd have to be a pretty brain dead terrorist for this system to have any effect whatsoever.

Freedom isn't free. And one of the costs is that you are going to be more open to psychos who hate you. Personally, I'd prefer to keep our open society and take my chances. I'd prefer that our country keep the big stick, but remember more often the speak softly part, so that those people who don't hate us for completely ignorant ideological reasons don't end up hating us because they think we are dicks, which is all too often the case right now, and that can't be helping our cause particularly. All you have to do is look at the difference in the situation between Bush Sr's handling of the situation and Bush Jr's. In the former situation we had almost everyone on our side in a war, even though it was a obviously no more than a war to protect our oil, i.e. purely based on financial self interest.

Now, despite having been brutally attacked, those same people are standing on the other side of the room because they think we are off the reservation. Bush Jr and his neocon friends came in full of arrogance and having no understanding or will to understand how to make people want to be on our side, and with an ideological agenda of American domination. He's done an amazing amount of damage to our credibility, because he only understands the big stick and not the speaking softly part.

Hi Tom. The following is not directed at you but at the statement I quote from you above.

One of the things I hate about politics is the incredible amount of hypocrisy and lies that are spewed at us by both parties about what they "believe". I'm not sure how many people we have in politics any more that *really* believe anything in any meaningful way other than to spout it as a so-called philosophy.

Many people are attached to one party or the other and are not objective or honest about facts when they don’t fit their views. So...

Less government is what is claimed to be the Republican way, but if that’s the case than George Bush is not much of a Republican. Nor are many of the Republicans in the Senate or the House who have happily signed on to questionable spending bill after spending bill after spending bill. We didn’t even have anyone in either party that dared to question the unprecedented assistance that was given to victims of 9/11, where anyone that lost a loved one got anywhere between a million and several million dollars. God forbid someone look like a meanie. People die from horrible tragedies every day. Car accidents, shootings, fires, heart attacks. Perhaps our government should just start a fund and give everyone that has a family member die of a tragedy 1 million dollars.

And I have similar criticisms of the Democrats on other issues. There are times that I think that if Democrats had their way it would be a requirement that for every 10 people we hire, 4 should be Caucasian, 2 Mexican, 3 African American and 1 Asian. And of course the breakdown by sex should be 6 female and 4 male.

My point is that I wish people would work more to solve problems instead of breaking down so much along partisan lines. Even the issue of “big government” versus “small government” is a bit if a red herring, INSOFAR as there is SO much waste in government, that if we just focused on waste we could make some huge improvements. But that would mean BOTH parties giving up their gravy programs and that aint going to happen any time soon.

One of the aspects of that hypocrasy is that if you don't agree with something, then if there is any waste involved, then that's a reason to close it down. If you do, then that waste is an unfortunate side effect that shouldn't cast doubt on the overall idea. My favorit example is defense versus social safety net. I have no problem with our having a big stick, but the amount of waste in the defense system is enormous. Now some of it is unavoidable. when you are working on the bleeding edge you are going to have lots of failures for every success. So you write those losses off as a necessary cost of pushing the boundaries. I see the space program in the same light. Yes it is expensive, but the long term payoff is potentially enormous.

But, this system pumps enormous amounts of our tax money into the hands of people who are already quite well off, and they get their nice salaries whether their project pans out or not. I've worked on the edges of that world in the past and our tax money is supporting many an upper middle-class yuppie lifestyle who are hardly straining themselves.

But, when it comes to social safety net, the fact that there is some amount of fraud and that there are some people who are happy to just live on the dole indefinitely is treated like this massive rip off of the people and the whole thing should just be shut down. The whole 'welfare mother in a Caddilac' mentality. The fact that these programs do a massive amount of good and allow people who fall to have a chance to get back up again and get back into the game is irrelevant. As long as there are some people who are getting enough money to live in a crappy apartment and have a bottle of liquor and don't want todo anymore, is just intolerable to some people.

That kind of hypocracy drives me crazy.

Our local UPS will not allow an individual (without a UPS account) to bring in a 'sealed' package for shipment. If you bring it in sealed, they will open it up (in front of you) 'inspect' the contents and tape it back up! When I asked why I was told that UPS is a private company with its own rules/policies and that was one of them. I suppose as long as it's not against the law to copy a drivers license then they can require it. It doesn't mean we have to use them as a delivery company. Funny thing is I could ship and armory from my work and the guy would just toss it on the truck...dmc

It doesn't override your rights, you have no right to ship a package via USP.

If you don't like it, use another carrier.

Ah politics. The only subject where everyone's an expert. LOL!

I recently was stopped at the security checkpoint at DIA and told that they could not let me through to my flight because my drivers license was 3 days expired. I asked the lady if the picture was me and what would it matter, but according to her because it was expired it wasn't valid.. however if I had a social security card that would be considered a valid id.. I argued with her that a state issued id with my picture on it wasn't good enough but a social security card with no picture at all and that I signed with a crayon when I was a kid was good enough to get me on the plane? I had to go back to the checkin counter and the agent basically laughed and put a special security stamp on my boarding pass so that I would have to go through the extra finger probe search line. Go figure.. NSA is trying to protect us all by allowing people to board planes with social security cards..