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 entle
readers, serious people are giving serious thought to this business
of a national ID card. Some unserious folks are blathering about
it, too: Alan Dershowitz has spoken in favor of a "voluntary"
card, one that would utilize some form of modern technology to foil
counterfeiters. Though given to occasional bouts of seriousness,
most of the time Mr. Dershowitz is a nut, and a rule that has generally
worked for me is that if he's for it, I'm against it.
Though I am
an agent of the government, albeit a lowly one, I share with the
more vocal civil libertarians a certain level of distrust in it.
The Founders themselves, after all, enshrined this distrust into
the Constitution. But my opposition to national ID cards doesn't
spring from some big-government paranoia, but rather from a more
practical standpoint: That dog won't hunt. This beast should be
shot in the head with a silver bullet and have a stake driven through
its heart. The corpse should be burned and the ashes scattered to
the four winds.
I'm amused
by those who claim that a system of national ID cards might have
prevented the barbarism of September 11, as though our heroes
Archibald and Basil, while monitoring passenger activity at
the airport, might simply swipe Mr. Abdul Khalid Death-to-America
Mohamed's 100 percent guaranteed, retinally scanned, chip-imbedded,
counterfeit-proof national ID card through their super-duper government
computer and say, "Look here, sir, our information is that
the United States of America has reason to believe you are a hazard
to navigation and may not therefore be borne aloft on a commercial
airliner as you had wished. Furthermore, those books on bomb making
and anthrax cultivation are overdue at the library and are accruing
fines at the rate of five cents a day for each. And finally, your
mother-in-law's birthday is next Wednesday, so, although you won't
be traveling today, perhaps you should duck into the duty-free shop
for a nice little bottle of eau de toilette. She favors Obsession
by Calvin Klein."
No, if Mr.
Abdul Khalid Death-to-America Mohamed actually had an ID card that
revealed any kind of information valuable to those who would seek
to prevent him from carrying his end of the jihad, he'd be laughed
right out of the terrorist fraternity. An anecdote from my own travels
will illustrate the point: I was once checking in for a flight at
LAX, dutifully presenting my identification and avowing that no
stranger had so much as looked at my luggage since the time I packed
it. Next to me at the counter was a young man checking in for the
same flight. Reluctant as I am to put a racial spin on things, his
ethnicity is fairly essential to the story: He was a Hispanic man,
and everything about him suggested he was an illegal alien (yes,
you can usually tell) from somewhere south of the border. When asked
for his ID, he presented what I could readily see from three feet
away was a counterfeit California driver's license. The agent examined
the card briefly, returned it, then handed the man his boarding
pass. When the man had left I spoke with the agent who had helped
him. "Excuse me, I said," but did you know that fellow's
ID was as fake as they come?" "Yes," he said, "but
we're not supposed to make a big deal about it." I continued
along this line of inquiry. "Do you mean," I asked, "that
I could show you a cocktail napkin with the name Abraham Lincoln
printed on it in crayon and my picture stapled to it, and you would
let me fly?" "Pretty much," he said.
This took place
well before September 11, and I suspect that the airlines have tightened
things up quite a bit since then, but problems remain. Just west
of downtown Los Angeles, in the area of MacArthur Park, a man with
a little cash — $40 or so — can obtain a passably authentic-looking
California driver's license. The license will bear his own picture
and any name he chooses, even Abraham Lincoln. These street-corner
ID cards are good enough to accompany any immigration documents
— also counterfeit — demanded by a prospective employer,
most of whom, for reasons of their own, don't look too closely at
them anyway.
For a higher
investment, the more enterprising individual can obtain a genuine
California driver's license issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles.
These are secured through corrupt DMV employees who supplement their
government paychecks by processing bogus paperwork on behalf of
those who want to change their identity without all the pesky bureaucratic
red tape. I once arrested a man who had more than 20 driver's licenses,
all of them bearing his own picture but each issued under a different
name. There is no reason to believe that a federal ID-card system
wouldn't be subject to the same or even greater flaws. If such a
system had been in place prior to September 11, it merely would
have been one more hoop for the terrorists to jump through. With
the resources at their disposal, it would be naive to think they
wouldn't have done so.
Finally, there
is the issue of what information will be held in the database and
how it will be protected. Proponents of national ID cards can harrumph
till they're blue in the face about how closely guarded the information
will be, but critics are rightly skeptical of such claims. As a
California police officer, I can have the information on my car
registration made confidential, so that anyone checking my license
number cannot discover my home address and put a brick or a bullet
through my window. But, again, the same DMV employee who takes a
hundred bucks under the table to get someone a driver's license
will probably be only too happy to accept a like amount for revealing
the address of the Dunphy estate to anyone who might like to stop
by for an unannounced and unwelcome visit. The point is this: If
the information is stored somewhere, it can be had for a price.
National ID
cards would deter minor scofflaws, but they would be little hindrance
to the committed terrorist and sophisticated criminal. And they
would be a pain in the caboose to everyone else.
(*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
.)
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