Against ID Cards
The worse way to fight terrorism.

By John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru
October 3, 2001 10:00 a.m.

nly a bare majority of Americans — 51 percent — support the creation of a national identity card, according to a new poll by Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates. This is a substantial loss of support since the Pew Research Center found 70 percent endorsing the concept in a survey it conducted immediately after the September 11 attacks.

Yet plenty of warning signs remain. Westerners are only demographic group with a majority opposing ID cards (53 percent) and senior citizens are the only segment with a plurality against it (47 percent). Republicans and men are evenly split on the issue, with Democrats and women likely to favor it. Most troubling, however, may be that the poll shows overall support jumping to 61 percent when the ID card is described as "a measure to combat terrorism and make the use of false identities more difficult."

If ever the American public was primed to accept an ID card, the time is now. A recent Washington Post survey reports that 64 percent of Americans say they trust the federal government to do the right thing "nearly always" or "most of the time" — the highest level of trust recorded since 1966 and twice the level measured just a year ago. "This is the most collective mood we've seen in America for a long time," Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told the New York Times. "And it's coming off one of the most individualistic eras in American history."

The Bush administration already has signaled through a spokesman that it does not support the idea, though several members of Congress have embraced it and House immigration subcommittee chairman George Gekas, a Pennsylvania Republican, says ID cards will definitely receive consideration. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has said his company, a leader in databases, would donate the software to make it happen.

Conservatives must oppose these internal passports with vigor. They may be promoted now as tools for combating terrorism, but their potential for abuse is enormous. How long before the federal government also starts tracking gun sales through them? Or auditing income-tax returns? And don't forget the little prop President Clinton held up during his health-care speech to Congress in 1993: a "health-security card" that would have enabled the government's takeover of a whole industry.

Terrorism is obviously worth fighting, but ID cards aren't the only way to do it or even the best way.

(Yesterday, NRO published a symposium on ID cards. And one of your correspondents, in a previous life, co-authored an assessment of ID cards for the Cato Institute.)