It's nothing of the sort. The purpose of a driver's license is not track your whereabouts, it's a license to drive. When you pull out of your driveway and go to work, is there somebody waiting there to check your ID and ask where you are going?

Quite right. But I'm not trying to argue against drivers licences; I'm trying to argue that travelling anonymously is not an inalienable right.

It may, indeed, be good policy to require that travel be anonymous; but I assert that it is no violation of some basic human need to require identification at an airport.

Calling something a basic human right is an oft-used method of deflecting opposition to it (see also "well-poisoning", an ad hominem version of the same). Now if I say that people ought to present identification at airports, they will tell me that it's a violation of basic human rights to do so; but this has certainly not been established.

I love this type of argument -- I call it the "Hey, let's draw a completely stupid and unjustified analogy and hope the other guy just doesn't notice" method.

I love it too: it's called reductio ad absurdum, and it's a handy way to make a point. Except that my object is exactly to get the other guy to notice.

Clearly it didn't work this time; you've cleverly ignored completely what I was driving at (no pun intended). You are rebutting something I never asserted. But hey, at least you got a +4 mod. Glad I could be of service.

Perhaps you could find a bit of time to explain to me why travelling anonymously is a basic human right. Not only would you be actually answering my assertion, you might even get modded up again. Or is it bad form around here to answer people directly?

We tend to be suprised because we are more used to thinking that businesses raise prices either to cover increased costs or to take advantage of increased demand.

In this case, if there are increased costs or demand for "nano-insurance" it is not obvious. More likely, companies who make profit by mitigating risk are *creating* new market space by spinning up the popular uncertainty/unfamiliarity of the new technology as "risk."