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Jack Dunphy*,
an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department
(*Jack Dunphy is the author's nom de cyber. The
opinions expressed are his own and almost certainly do not reflect
those of the LAPD management .)
The question
is essentially an old one: How much freedom are we as a nation willing
to sacrifice for security? If the highway speed limit were 10 mph
there would be few fatal traffic accidents, but few would be willing
to trade an interminable commute for some indeterminate margin of
safety. Consider this: If a national ID card system had been in
place years ago, and if all the new security measures now in place
at America's airports had been in effect on September 11, those
19 men would still have been able to board their flights and carry
out their plan. They jumped through every hoop they needed to in
order to commit their barbarous crime. It is inconceivable that
they wouldn't have somehow obtained national ID cards if such cards
had been required to obtain their airline tickets.
The security
system now in place at our airports is designed to demonstrate to
the public that it is safe to fly. But even if you had a platoon
of Marines strip-searching every passenger boarding every flight,
a group of unarmed terrorists, committed to their cause unto death,
could even today commandeer an airliner if there were no one aboard
willing and able to resist them. The answer lies in hardening the
target, not in tinkering with the Constitution.
Ronald
Bailey, Reason
magazine's science correspondent (email
Mr. Bailey)
Government
IDs are a leading indicator of the erosion of liberty to come. Once
they exist, it will be impossible for the federal authorities and
local police to resist using them to monitor and regulate all kinds
of citizen activities. If you don't believe it, take a look at the
Social
Security Number Chronology page which shows how, over the years,
agency after agency has adopted regulations requiring the use of
Social Security numbers as identification. A national ID card, possibly
with electronic features, will make the situation even worse. Sure,
the federal government is relatively respectful of our liberties
now (however, talk to some property owners about civil-forfeiture
laws before becoming too comfortable about that notion), but that's
no guarantee for the future.
The problem
with trusting a government, any government, to keep its promises
about limits on registration, which issuing national ID cards would
essentially be, was illustrated to me on a trip to Australia a few
years back. Talking with a former member of the parliament of New
South Wales, he told me that the neighboring state of Victoria had
some years previously required that all gun owners register their
firearms while New South Wales had not. After a particularly horrific
massacre by a lone gunman, the Australian National Parliament in
a moral panic banned the private ownership of most firearms. "The
next day police were at the homes of gun owners in Victoria demanding
that they surrender their weapons," said the parliamentarian.
"In New South Wales, we still have our guns."
Dave
Kopel, NRO columnist
Those who want to trade liberty for security are obliged to demonstrate
that their proposals will actually improve more security. Consider
that the United States already has a de facto national ID card:
the driver's license. We also have a second de facto national ID:
the passport, required for any person who wants to leave the country.
Now if the
state-administered driver's license system is too susceptible to
fraud, the obvious solution is to require everyone to obtain a passport,
for which antifraud safeguards are more extensive.
What does a
new "national ID card" provide that passports wouldn't?
Passports are made out of paper, and have digitized photos. It would
not be especially difficult to add a digitized thumbprint. But by
ignoring the passport (which collects very little personal information,
other than foreign-travel history) the national ID card gives the
surveillance state a place to collect centralized information on
an individual's medical records, school records, gun ownership,
and much more.
In contrast,
the passport doesn't have this risk of abuse: It just proves that
you're who you say you are.
State driver's
licenses, the federal passport, and similar identity documents (such
as the Firearms Owners Identification Card issued by Illinois since
the 1960s) sometimes work in preventing unsophisticated people from
obtaining forbidden products. For example, there are some 16-year-olds
who don't know how or where to obtain fake identification to buy
alcohol, nor to they know any people over 21 who would make a "straw-man"
purchase.
But let us
remember that the purpose of the national ID card isn't better enforcement
of vice laws, or preventing people from obtaining library cards
under a pseudonym. The targets are extremely sophisticated terrorists,
backed up by masters of fraudulent document production.
But we do know
one beneficiary of a national ID card program. Oracle's
Larry Ellison has offered to create the software to implement
the program. Then, Oracle can rake in money selling the national
ID card database and verification programs to governments and business
in all over America.
Even if Oracle
gave the whole thing away from free, Ellison's gift will shift the
entire American population into a de facto national standard of
using Oracle.
In some ways,
this is like what Bill Gates did, by giving away Internet Explorer
for free. But the difference is that Gates never lobbied for a law
requiring that every person in the United States be forced to use
Internet Explorer. Microsoft's newly expanded Passport program (to
provide user identification for Internet commerce) is entirely voluntary.
What kind of blow could Ellison strike at his bitter enemy Gates
by converting the U.S. into a mandatory Oracle world?
Mr. Ellison,
it should be remembered, hired
private "detectives" to bribe janitors, steal trash,
and spy on think tanks which spoke out in favor of Microsoft in
the famous antitrust case. (One of the victims was the Independent
Institute in Oakland; this group has no relation to Colorado's Independence
Institute, where I work.)
When Oracle
got caught, Ellison insisted that the dumpster diving and other
dirty tricks were his "civic duty."
The more that
information is centralized, the easier it is to steal a valuable
quantity of it. A national ID "smart card" containing
private information will provide many new business opportunities
for Larry Ellison and other scurrilous characters who consider your
privacy an obstacle to their business plans.
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