Guarding… from within

Well… It looks like “boat gone a watah” on the Electronic Data ID Cards (E-ID) promised a couple of years ago as one of the innovations to signal our progress into first world status!! It’s interesting we did it with the assistance of Abu Dhabi – which started out like us in the 60s, dirt poor, but zoomed to the top by investing their oil funds strategically!! So, imagine that… Abu Dhabi is now providing cutting-edge electronic thingamajigs!! There’s hope for us, no??
And what will this card do, you ask, dear reader?? According to VP Jagdeo, who’d made the original announcement, a chip embedded in the card will “store a lot of the biometric data. Blood type, data for driver’s licence, GRA, your TIN number, etc.” Duncan – the bell crier from the PNC – just said they feel the system ought to be under the purview of Parliament!! Now, the moment your Eyewitness read the “etc.” bit, his paranoia antenna had snapped to attention. With his experience of the Burnhamite dictatorship – which had spread its tentacles into every facet of Guyanese life to control us – he immediately assumed this E-ID could give Big Brother – predicted in Orwell’s “1984” – a free pass into all his affairs!!
And nothing that’s happened with these smart computers and phones has diminished your Eyewitness’ paranoia. Imagine just the other day, he and the Missus were talking casually about buying a shirt for one of the young’uns, then presto!! Ads for shirts started popping up like Jumbie Umbrellas on his smartphone!! Ever since then they’ve had to adopt the strategy they used when the kids were small – don’t say anything sensitive around them unless you want to have it blurted out to any visitor to the home!! In the case of the E-ID card – which would have to be accessible to the smart devices – all his life details would literally be available to “Big Brother”!!
He just saw that over in Old Blighty – which is also trying to get with it in this Brave New World by introducing E-IDs – a former head of their spy agency MI-6 has expressed an additional concern to your Eyewitness’. Said the spook, “When you aggregate data into one massive base, of course it immediately becomes a target for the country’s enemies. You therefore must be sure that the citadel is impregnable. However secure you believe the system to be, quantum computing, when it arrives, could render redundant your defences.”
Now your Eyewitness knows these innovations like E-IDs are inevitable in the new seamless world opening up to us moving from a sh*thole country to having the highest growth rate in the world!! But we gotta take precautions!!
Hope our IT boffins are brushing up on their anti-quantum computing hacking skills!!

…against new exploitation
The altercation between Guyanese workers and Chinese bosses at the Aurora Gold Mine was as inevitable as the sun rising in the east. Over the last decades, we’ve read of the horrible Chinese record in mining in so many African countries. Take, for instance, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). According to one investigative team out of the Netherlands, “For two decades, China’s state-owned mining companies have held a near-monopoly over mining in the DRC. That dominance has allowed Chinese companies to operate with near impunity as they drive corruption, displace communities, and promote illicit mining.” Why’d we think it would be any different here??
While we may need FDI to exploit our resources, we gotta have monitoring systems in place to ensure all forms of exploitation are controlled. Our default position must be that there’s gonna be exploitation – especially by the Chinese. Just look at how they treat their employees in their supermarkets!!
What about mines in the bush?!!

…our borders
With some sorta US military operation to take out Mad Maduro imminent… Shouldn’t we be posting our GDF troops along our NW border to ensure we aren’t overrun by his minions fleeing retribution from those they’d trampled on for years??