🚀 go-pugleaf

BAR-CODED MONEY...

     Imagine you are your average Fascist-minded politician.  What
is it that you are striving to accomplish?  Well, for one thing you
want to control every aspect of each citizen's life.  For another
you want to crush the possibility of any future resistance.  So how
will you go about it?  What exactly will you be "for"?  One thing
for sure is you will be "for" gun control, meaning that all guns
will be under the express "control" of you and your cronies.
Another will be economic controls.
     Consider the lowly credit card.  What a great tool for
dictatorship it is.  It reports every item purchased with it as
well as the location of the person when he bought it.  Even greater
detail can be obtained by a computer combination of credit card and
Universal Product Code (UPC) bar-coding.  This generates the
possibility of providing instant computer access not only to a
citizens shopping, but also can give an exact inventory of items,
brand names, package sizes and other details as well.  What a
political intelligence bonanza.  Your average politician at his
average government computer terminal can get either an average
profile of the personal habits of his constituents in general or
alternatively, an exact profile of you.  If only credit cards and
bar-codes were compulsory for every purchase!
     Unfortunately for our political friend, money is still legal.
Of course this does not mean that the same information cannot be
obtained, because it can ... it's just harder to do.  You see each
bill has a serial number and that number allows it to be traced.
If you draw out a stack of fifties from the bank and they note the
numbers and then later those same numbers show up in a deposit at
another bank credited to the account of say Vance's Gun Shop, there
can be a pretty good guess made as to what you did with that money
even if they can't "forward trace" the yellow sheets.
     The problem here is that serial number noting and tracing is
manual and so labor intensive it can't be done on a routine basis.
Now that seems to have changed.  World in Review May 1992
newsletter reports that the Federal Reserve Board seems to have
begun to issue $50 notes with magnetic bar-codes.  Older bills have
a continuous design under the picture of Grant printed with
magnetic ink.  This can be used by reading machines to detect
counterfeit bills.  The new bills, however, called 1990 series
differ in that the design is suspected to be a bar-code where some
of the stripes are not printed with magnetic ink.  These new bills
also contain the anti-counterfeiting plastic strip that reads "USA
50" when the bill is held to the light as well as the words "United
States of America" micro-printed in what appears to the naked eye
as a line around the portrait of Grant.
     With routine bar-code reading of $50 dollar bills a wonderful
computerized tracing system can be implemented for larger purchases
like firearms, gold coins, or whatever.  You just never know when
these things might need to be confiscated for the "public good".
Of course, there is a plus side here too.  The system is dynamite
for tracing the laundering of drug money, but I got a bar-coded $50
bill that says few in the higher reaches of government have any
interest in using the system for that. (Many already seemed
informed of BCCI's activities and did nothing)  So far, the
bar-code system has not been reported on $20 dollar bills.


This is from:
    dennis@bluemoon.rn.com
---- The Soviet Union Died, But the Communists Live On ----