New York Times National I.D. Cards: One Size Fits All By DANIEL J. WAKIN IMAGINE you
were moving to a new state and the government required you to
register at the local police precinct. Or that before the hospital
let Mom leave with her newborn, Dad had to register the newly
arrived citizen at a central office. Or that the police could stop
you and demand to see your papers while you stepped out for a quart
of milk. Hard to accept? Not for Italians, because like most Europeans
they live with these rules, though in Italy the chasm between theory
and practice can be huge. Whatever the practice, though, scores of
governments have the potential to wield strong monitoring powers
over their citizens. Chief among their tools is the national identity card. In the
post-Sept. 11 world, the idea of universal I.D. cards is being
raised in this country, setting off a debate that touches on what it
means to be American, and how to balance freedom with the need for
security. Polls in the weeks after the attacks show that Americans favor
such identity cards. About 70 percent of those interviewed by the
Pew Research Center from Sept. 13 to 17 said they approved of the
requirement that all citizens carried one, to be produced on request
by police. The following week, in a New York Times/CBS News poll, 56
percent said they would accept mandatory national electronic
identification cards. A CNN/Time poll conducted on Sept. 27 reported
a similar figure. Helping fuel the debate was a widely published suggestion by
Larry Ellison, the chief executive of the software maker Oracle,
that the United States should establish a national I.D. system,
embedding people's fingerprints on cards and creating a database so
airport guards could check identities. Mr. Ellison offered to donate
the software. Similar ideas were floated in editorial and letters pages, with
proponents saying the I.D.'s could protect airline travelers at
check-in and guard against identity theft. With the plethora of
personal information already gathered by private industry, some
argued, any threats to privacy would not matter that much
anyway. But given the nation's strong tradition of privacy protection,
its innate resistance to government intrusion and a growing protest
against the use of personal data by marketers, the I.D. idea still
seems far off. The Bush administration has rejected the idea and the
terrorism legislation now under consideration in Congress does not
call for national I.D.'s. Nevertheless, at least one company that makes scanners has
reportedly said several federal agencies had been in touch about
using the devices in connection with I.D. cards. And some in
Congress say the time could be ripe for a serious debate. Other governments agree. Officials in Britain, Australia, the
Netherlands and the Philippines have also raised the idea. Privacy International, a watchdog group in London, estimates that
about 100 countries — many of them developing nations — have
compulsory national I.D.'s. Some, like Denmark, issue I.D. numbers
at birth around which a lifetime of personal information accretes.
They are generally accepted among the citizenry of European
countries, like France, with a tradition of centralized government
and with extensive social welfare systems. "In reality, the card is just the visible part of a vast
information spectrum," said Simon Davies, the director of Privacy
International. "To some it's a security icon; it represents the
potential for a safer society. To others it represents a more
efficient government. To others, it represents cracking down on
illegal immigrants. But ultimately, the card is worthless without
some sort of integrated computer system behind it." And that, he
says, presents a danger to privacy, particularly in the developed
world. During the Apartheid era, South Africa produced the most
nefarious sort of I.D.'s, pass books that specified what areas
blacks were allowed to circulate in and work. The pass laws allowed
the police to arrest blacks without cards — a common form of
harassment. In the United States, resistance to a national I.D. dwells firmly
in the deep-seated tradition of privacy protection, something that
spans the ideological spectrum. "It is a traditional human rights
notion that we see infusing many different constitutional doctrines
in this country," said Nadine Strossen, president of the American
Civil Liberties Union. "You do have a right to be left alone in the
most literal sense." A national I.D. could also become a powerful tool for ethnic
profiling, Ms. Strossen argued, suggesting that the authorities
would be more likely to stop Arab-Americans for an I.D. check. (The
Time/CNN poll found that half of those surveyed favored requiring
Arab-Americans as a group to carry federal I.D. cards.) OTHER opponents argue that a national I.D. and the information
behind it would only strengthen the power of bureaucracies. And they
say it will offer little protection because forgers will inevitably
catch up to the technology. Right now, the United States has embarked on what could be
considered a national I.D. pilot project — for Mexicans. The
Immigration and Naturalization Service has approved four million
cards under a new program for short-term, short-range border
crossings. The new cards have fingerprint and personal information
on an optically etched strip. Actually, the best hope for proponents of national I.D.'s may be
sitting in our wallets. It is the driver's license. The American
Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators has recommended to
Congress that the nation adopt a standard proof of identity for the
issuing of licenses. Such a program would cost up $35 million to
develop, and up to $20 million a year to operate, the association
says. At the same time, it is looking at national standards for
drivers' licenses, including what sort of biometric data — like
fingerprints and face recognition — to include. Right now, 36 states and Washington, D.C., have or are planning
drivers' licenses with two- dimensional bar codes that can contain
2,000 bytes of information, enough for a driving record, photograph
and fingerprint data, said Nathan Root, who directs the
association's standards program. So now imagine this. A police officer stops you in your car, scans your license,
matches your fingerprint with a central database and has immediate
access to a plethora of information, including whether you are on a
terrorist watch list. What would the Italians think? Copyright © 2001. New York Times Company. All rights reserved. saved from url: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/weekinreview/07WAKI.html
October 7, 2001
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