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National ID debate
Senator John McCain and the 9/11 panel have called for a debate on the idea of issuing National ID cards. There’s a lot of confusion about this issue, so it’s good to see our political leaders engaging in serious discussion about it:
Kean replied that the commission had judged biometric screening -- using techniques like fingerprinting or retinal scanning -- to be "a little less intrusive," but acknowledged "A national ID card would be another way to do it."
Unfortunately, the above quote is total gibberish, but at least they’re talking.
My take is that a National ID Card program, if done properly with a very carefully thought out set of policies and technologies, would be the single best thing we can do to increase security in this country. However, if done poorly, it could easily be every bit the disaster that the ACLU and other privacy groups are predicting. What’s the US government’s track record for doing such big things reasonably well? Not as bad as you think, really.
I have hope that it can be done well. More than hope, actually; CoreStreet is actively involved in trying to shape the architecture for similar programs at home and abroad. I believe that a properly architected National ID program will not erode privacy, but enhance it. It will not constrain our freedom of movement, but expand it.
Of course, there are many opportunities for serious mistakes and ominous turns. Full transparency and public scrutiny of the procedures and technologies will be required. The government must resist the urge to be secretive about National ID plans. This is vital and complex and our country is not well served by knee-jerk reactions from either side. We must wrestle with the substantive issues.
If this were on the Daily Show right now (I have not yet been invited), now is the time when Jon Stewart would rub his eyes and say something like, “I don’t think this audience is gonna wrestle with anything more substantive than stale Cheetos.” Funny… true, etc. We can’t keep our attention on anything important in this country. Let’s try just this once.
You know, just to be different and stuff.
We’ll work on the architecture and the debate. The national conversation must be vigorous and closely monitored by skeptics. It would help if our leaders could get the basic concepts of biometrics, databases, validation and credentials straight. We’ll work on that part as well.
August 19, 2004 | Permalink
Comments
I think my knee is jerking but what the heck.
I think before you specify security you need to specify the risk. To specify my bias, I lived in Spain for five years (as a lad) under the regime of Francisco Franco. Sitting in the US in the early part of the 21st century I worry more about government than I worry about Islamic militants. I believe that the threat of the militants is addressable without trading away my rights and I have experienced living in a country where the rights were surrendered in the name of security. They are hard to retrieve.
Posted by: Casey.Jennings | Aug 19, 2004 2:03:02 PM
Casey,
I share your experience and your concerns (and I’m pleasantly surprised that you read my blog). My own childhood was spent under the Brezhnev regime, which was slightly less murderous of its own citizens than Franco’s only due to an overall lack of motivation. For most people through history, a tyrannical domestic government has been a much larger threat than external terrorists.
Where I disagree with you is the assertion than a national ID card is necessarily a tool for oppressive government. A poorly implemented scheme certainly is, but a properly constructed program does not have to make government stronger, only more efficient. I really believe that a good national ID program can help cement our individual rights and that the current patchwork system of sloppy technologies, procedures and laws will slowly erode more and more of our liberties and lifestyles.
I will not endorse or accept a national ID program that unilaterally strengthens government power at the expense of individual rights. I am optimistic that I will not have to.
Posted by: Phil Libin | Aug 19, 2004 2:37:06 PM
I can't imagine that Sam Adams or Thomas Paine would have posed willingly for a national ID photo, fingerprint, or retinal scan. The common law principle of my being able to say I am whoever the heck I want to say I am, until I commit a crime, is important, and it ceases to have effect as soon as someone says "ID, please." _before_ I'm arrested. But the point of a national ID is to prove to third parties I am specifically a certian person at their request, regardless of whether I've committed any offense. Put another way, a national ID, or any ID for that matter, that is "required" or that becomes "customary" to any commercial or social activity, necessarily restricts my common law excercise of anonymity. Show me a mechanism that certifies my lack of a criminal record, yet is absolutely unique to me, and provably double-blinded after the moment of it's creation, and I'll think you aren't pushing some other agenda.
I resist showing my drivers license or passport to anybody who isn't wearing an appropriate uniform or who has a valid right or duty to ask me to produce it in a transaction I'm voluntarily initiatiing, just to make the point, and I no longer fly commercially, because of all the silly "security" hoopla surrounding commercial airline operations. I did have to show picture ID to the FAA medical examiner when I got my airmen's certificate, but my airmen's certificate doesn't have a picture, or a fingerprint, and that and a credit card are all that is required to rent a plane at nearly any FBO in the U.S.
I could easily obtain valid ID as John Galt or Sonny Bono, and so long as I don't do so for felonious purposes, I have every right to maintain as many aliases as I like. With valid picture ID, I could also be airmen Sonny Bono and John Galt, too. Maybe I already am! And _that_ is the principle which is traded away carelessly by any national ID program. National ID is a terrible idea, not likely to thwart criminals, or improve anyone's life, but a positive and immediate threat to my freedom, unless at a minimum, it meets the basic test above. Even then, it's a bad, bad step, on principle.
But rather than further push you to a reflexive defense of national ID, I'd like to ask you, as a fellow technologist, to rethink this as an ethical issue. Do we, as technologists, have any duty to safeguard rights whose infringement can readily be abridged, only by the employment of technology? I think we do, and national ID is one of those tipping point examples that starts sounding really good primarily to people who want unambiguous primary keys in large database systems, doesn't it?
Posted by: phaTTboi | Aug 21, 2004 10:02:15 AM
phaTTboi,
I am incapable of mounting a reflexive defense of anything as years of sitting in front of a computer have conditioned my muscles to only produce reactions charitably described as “deliberate.”
You ask if we technologists have a duty to, “safeguard rights whose infringement can readily be abridged, only by the employment of technology?”
Absolutely.
Many of those rights are currently being abridged by poorly designed security systems with ominous, if initially unintended, consequences. Certainly, there are many ways to architect a national ID scheme that would place our rights in greater peril. Are you saying that there is absolutely no way to architect one in a way that will make our rights more secure?
The socially meaningful question isn’t, “should we have a national ID program?” We already have several confused and overlapping systems of identification. A half-assed approach is no boon to democratic rights. Sloppy identity systems are not only burdensome to individuals, but they are open to exploitation by terrorists AND by the government (or occasionally overzealous members thereof).
The socially meaningful question is, “how do we make a national ID program that doesn’t suck?”
As a technologist, I believe that there are usually ways to design a good system. Your “double blind” test, for example, is quite feasible using PKI cards with the proper safeguards. I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Instead of fighting against the creation of any national ID program, I think you should list the minimum requirements and safeguards you would demand of such a system. Try to be mindful of collective repercussions, not just of individual ones. Then we should debate those requirements. Then we can see if a set of technologies and policies can be implemented to meet our goals as citizens. My ample gut feeling (intentionally ambiguous phraseology, see paragraph one) is that we can make a system that’s a hell of a lot better than what we have now.
That’s the sort of thing that we geeks are supposed to be doing, anyway.
Posted by: Phil Libin | Aug 21, 2004 2:37:00 PM
My reaction to a national ID relates to what it does for me, and for society. I have better things to do than worry about John Ashcroft tracking my movements because I use 21st century facts of life, such as the internet, email, EZPass, or a rental car with GPS. I use all these things because I get benefits from them greater that my paranoia (to quote Thomas Pynchon, "paranoids those f****** idiots are only paranoids because they are always putting themselves in paranoid situations" - or something like that. I will also consider the second order stuff related to the benefits to society, EZPass for example does help with traffic, and as a result reduces pollution, improves air quality, etc. There are analogs to the internet, email, etc., GPS will likely save some campers butt, emailing photos probably makes a lot a moms happy, blah, blah.
The same logic applies for me with a national ID or frequently flier retina record. If it does a better job of protecting my identity, gets me, as a very frequent flyer, more hours of life not waiting in lines, and the possibility of better national security. I will likely go for it.
Posted by: Adam Smith | Aug 21, 2004 3:13:02 PM
Phil:
I don't accept the assertion that "The socially meaningful question is,'how do we make a national ID program that doesn’t suck?'" I think a national ID program is a really awful idea on principle, period.
But in the spirit of helping writers of a movie script for some Orwellian future, let's take up a few common points here:
First, on the idea of a national ID somehow contributing to the national security. As bus riders in Israel know, the problem with the most dangerous terrorists is that they are only terrorists one time. A person ready to die in his act of terrorism is, in principle, indistinguishable from a law abiding citizen, until a few moments before his act (presuming his equipment isn't particularly noticeable, or is sited in such a way as to allow him access or control near the last moment). A national ID program is clearly not going to be any help in the apprehension of such persons. Indeed, the Israeli experience is that most suicide bombers go out of their way to establish verifiable identification that can be released posthumously, so that attribution of their action makes their political point. Positive identification actually becomes part of the motivation for some terrorists, and for this reason, Israeli authorities do not publicly pursue DNA identification of remains. Also, in Israel, military or national service is compulsory for all citizens, male and female, at the age of 18, so that through it's military, Israel already has a de facto national ID system of very good quality, probably better than any voluntary system here could be in terms of quality of verification. As an anti-terrorist measure, it doesn't appear to be particularly effective.
Turning to domestic terrorists, consider our own most infamous, Mr. Timothy McVeigh. It was legal for Tim McVeigh to rent a truck, although he rented it as Robert Kling, using alias ID. It was legal for Tim McVeigh to buy fertilizer. It was legal for Tim McVeigh to buy kerosene. It was legal for Tim McVeigh to put the fertilizer and the kerosene in the rented truck, and park the thing on a street in Oklahoma City. He crossed a line of intention if he opened the fertilizer bags and mixed in the kerosene to assemble them as an explosive, and chose a parking spot calculated for damage of a Federal Building, and ignited the materials he assembled and sited. But, in principal, until shortly before those couple tons of material went bang, he'd done nothing prosecutable, and he showed his own driver's license ID to an Oklahoma state trooper who stopped him for a no license plate violation in the car he was driving away from Oklahoma City after the bombing. I think it is tough to show how a national ID could have actually stopped Tim McVeigh. Laws making it illegal to possess more than 10 pounds of nitrogen enriched fertilizer in pellet form might have slowed him down, had someone caught him with his stash, at the cost of inconveniencing every gardener and farmer in America. Laws making it illegal to rent trucks under aliases might have inconvenienced him, but not stopped him, as used trucks are pretty cheap, if they don't have to go far. In any case, obtaining and carrying a high quality, verifiable national ID, had one existed, should have been a snap for a decorated Gulf War veteran, and I bet he would have had one if he felt it was useful.
I concede that identification might be useful in eventually stopping serial terrorists, or "criminals" as they are sometimes called, sometime after they've begun their criminal careers. Indeed, the original purpose of most identification measures such as fingerprinting, photos, descriptions, and biometric measurements was to make identification of persons with prior criminal histories easier to convict on subsequent charges, and to recognize them as the predictable predators they are. Identifying criminals has never warranted normal citizens giving up common law rights, and shouldn't now, on principle. But let me come back to this in a minute, after taking on a couple of other points.
Turning to the issue of convenience, I don't see how obtaining and maintaining a national ID furthers convenience of anyone, since to be effective as a "filter for bad guys" you have to accompany the ID requirement with many new "filter points" such as we now see in airport security, which are patently ineffective for stopping the most dangerous persons, for reasons cited above. That's saying nothing about the pile of new laws and regulations that would be needed to enforce use in these areas. I suppose that the existence of a standardized national ID could form a dandy mechanism for building security, auto anti-theft, home security, etc. ad nauseam, and a person could then be asked to show his national ID card at every instance he needs to enter his place of work, his designated workplace restroom facility, his home, his car, his health club, his doctor's office, or any other place he doesn't now need to show it, for its lack of existence. But unless you filter for the possession of the ID at a lot of places it isn't now required, what good is it? And if you do filter for it, someone is going to have to pay for all those filtering mechanisms and transactions, and it won't be the terrorists and criminals. The cost/benefit ratio for even simple checking systems is staggering, which makes this a legitimate concern. Just ask Visa/Mastercard what it costs them to run their transaction verification systems to pickup fraudulent use of credit cards, and realize that they still lose billions annually covering and prosecuting fraud, after nearly 40 years of doing it. Ask the airlines and their passengers if increasing security as we've done it, is a cost effective business move.
On the issue of multiple re-use, as advanced by people thinking that economies of scale could be had by substituting a single, cradle-to-grave ID for various kinds of ID now used, the notion doesn't sail on the simple recognition that the nature and quality of ID must, in many applications, conform to the purposes. At the most secure levels, revocability and repudiation are important features of ID systems, as are privilege management and isolation. The most secure systems need to maintain a trust chain of physical token possession in concert with other measures, and most assuredly do not want to base their system on anything but tokens they alone generate and fully manage. They will not even acknowledge existence of their ID system to others. Even as a business person, I would not base employee credentialing on a national ID system, without substantive legal liability relief from acts arising from misidentification based on a national ID system that is bound to be imperfect or exploitable in some circumstance. Therefore, I doubt the creation of a national ID system will obviate the need for multiple ID systems, physical keys and locks, and other security measures, to a meaningful degree greater than its cost of creation and ongoing maintenance.
But this is all worked ground, plowed deep by better men elsewhere, and this is already a very long comment. But if you've come this far, take another few seconds to let me return to the point left before, as conclusion. If you accept my previous point that ID has historically been of greatest use in stopping career criminals from further crime, a national "vouch" system might make some sense. Our problem is then, really, to give good guys something that says unambiguously, "I'm not a criminal" and make the bad guys carry something that says "I've been a criminal." There's no need for an ongoing identification component to this for the good guys, but a clear value in making criminals carry their bad guy credential, which might well contain ID components. The bad guys won't carry theirs, because, well, they're bad guys. But the good guys might, especially if such a credential could be shown to provably not tromp on their rights. I've just realized an elegant proof of why this will work, but it won't fit in the margins here, either..:-) Good news is I'm available for private elaboration at competitive consulting rates!
Posted by: phaTTboi | Aug 21, 2004 5:28:33 PM
phaTTboi,
Your arguments are detailed, well presented and utterly devastating to my plan to build a national ID system that will solve every problem, at every place, for all points – past, present and future - in the historical time continuum. Oh wait.
Seriously, you’re right on many counts. In particular, your description of a “vouching” system is very close to the direction we’re taking some of CoreStreet’s credentialing efforts. The idea is to focus security technologies not just on catching the bad guys, but on making the everyday life of the good guys better. Security Director News published my thoughts along these lines last month.
Whether or not we agree on the issue of a national ID program (and I think we’re actually not very far apart in our opinions), I think we both agree that it’s an important issue worthy of structured analysis. I’m going to put my general support of the idea aside, and suggest that the following two questions are crucial to the matter:
1. What kinds of problems could a national ID program solve?
2. Which of our social rights (as defined by the constitution – like freedom of speech) and privileges (as established by courts or convention – like privacy) might be negatively impacted by such a program?
Until the country can reach at least a rough consensus on these two questions, all debate is going to be theatrical and ineffective. Once there’s some agreement on the basic goals, we can start weighing the options and formulating policy. Simply refusing to contemplate a national ID program is not an option, as there are already multiple, overloaded, identity programs (drivers’ licenses, passports, social security cards, visas, credit cards, cell phones, etc.) that will coalesce into an amorphous, inefficient and dangerous de facto system. Our only practical choices are (1) do nothing and let it happen by accident, (2) do nothing and let it be shaped solely by business and government forces, or (3) actively engage in the process and try to come up with a system we can live with.
I’ll see what’s behind door number three.
I think your examples of what a national ID card won’t solve are valid. Let’s come up with examples of things that it will solve and then see if it’s worth the risks. I can think of at least two good uses:
1. A practically unforgeable “breeder document” (to us the charming industry term of art) that can be used to establish identity for all sorts of shorter-lived credentials from airline tickets to bank accounts to employee cards and visas.
2. A system to let the good guys instantly “prove” their records and privileges.
Such a system may not have done much to prevent Timothy McVeigh, but it might have thrown some serious wrenches into the 9/11 plot (as evidenced by the new supplemental reports of the 9/11 commission saying that all 19 hijackers had fraudulent immigration and travel papers). The types of complex terror plots that we are trying to disrupt are not typically committed by people who are innocent and untraceable until the second they pull the trigger. This is not all that similar to Israeli bus bombings. Of course, you are also correct to point out that more mundane criminal actions would be hampered as well.
As for the problem of infringing our individual rights, I’d like to see a specific list of which rights are at risk. My suspicion is that we can find appropriate safeguards, but I might be wrong. Let’s get specific and find out.
Lastly, you and I agree that a national ID program should not be a single, physical, card, issued by one agency and carried cradle-to-grave by all individuals. It should instead be a set of common standards and technologies which would allow multiple credentials to be trusted and recognized across diverse government and commercial agencies. Credentials which might eventually constitute a “national ID program” are state drivers’ licenses, passports and government ID cards (such as DoD CAC and DHS TWIC).
The technical and economic issue you raise about filter points, validation, privilege management and liability are all real problems that we’re working on right now. They’re real problems, but they’re not intractable. Customer demand for unified credential systems, both from government and commercial sources, is very strong. Of course this is my main area of business, so you should expect a certain level of personal bias.
Thanks again for the time and efforts you put in to your detailed comments. I hope I have not been too snarky in the first paragraph of this response; your 1400 word post was a bit intimidating to tackle without a cheap-shot opening.
Posted by: Phil Libin | Aug 22, 2004 10:43:58 PM
Phil:
"Snarky" is what keeps the pretty girls interested, isn't it? So it's fine with me, and besides, this is your house, and I've come near hoggin' your whole porch. Well, sorry, but the good news is I'm wrestlin' with a 20 year old ethical problem today, that is also the subject of an academic paper due this evening, and I'm not comin' off any better than I did 20 years ago. So, I haven't a lot of time today to litter up your yard, too. Bad news is, "Ah'll be back."
But you propose a couple of good questions as the foundation for a top level policy discussion, and you want to frame this issue in pros and cons. That's a good discussion basis, and without ignoring other points of your latest reply that I simply haven't time for today, but will address on your dime later, here's a couple of quick thoughts.
A key problem in past debates over "national ID" has been "national," not "ID." The "national" word, for many, is synonymous with "compulsory," and that's probably a fair inference if it's going to be effective for law enforcement purposes. There is huge, if narrow, political resistance to that whole concept, some sources of which would invoke Godwin's Law on this discussion if I got into them. Let's just recognize early on that the "national" word takes us into areas that are polarizing in ways "big effective voluntary convenience ID" doesn't. A lot of what Jeneane Sessum has written about over on her blog this morning is about her fears of being seen as something less than who she is and can become, because of who she once was. I think it's a ways from setting up a big ID system, to computerizing all our histories, and hanging them about our necks indefinitely, but she's right in believing that "national ID" is the thin end of the wedge for doing just that eventually. I share her concern for the potential for dehumanizing people through use of technology, when that technology is not voluntary, although I think the "vouch" system ID she fears even more is actually easier to double-blind against just such abuses, and need not contain a usable ID component to be effective. Anonymity and alias aren't conveniences, they are the foundation of privacy. And the immediate target of "national ID." So let's recognize that, and keep a healthy suspicion of motives, because down here in Atlanta, where ISS is the big security dog in town, it's gotten real "dark" lately, what with ISS hiring every security heavy 'round heah, who are working all hours of the day and night, and can't even admit they work for ISS, much less discuss what they're working on so hard, in what I'm sure is just a timing coincidence with a cozy new attitude there towards the Feds.
Second quick point is that the concept of "ID" itself may be increasingly mutable as the coming age of biological science overtakes us. Suppose a genetic cure for diabetes happens to have the side effect of altering fingerprints. When our very DNA is likely to be intentionally modified for our clear benefit, when is "me" still "me"? What is the immutable Platonic "form" of "me" to which an "ID" applies? Do aliases have to resolve to that form in all cases? Simply put, what is "ID?" I suspect that within the next 20 to 30 years, our "common sense" notions of ID being based on a body with unique characteristics hosting a consciousness which integrates a single life history may be entirely obsolete, due to technological advance. But let's start with today's problems, and just get a working definition up here of what ID is, and what it is we're trying to "ID."
Anyway, gotta run. Time for someone else to jump in.
Posted by: phaTTboi | Aug 23, 2004 10:11:08 AM
I think you and I are starting to converge on at least a partial agreement. Making a “national ID” program voluntary and beneficial is a good way to go. Or at least a good way to start.
I don’t have too much fear of “The Feds”. In my experience they’ve done some of the best thinking on these issues and I’ve never worked with anyone in the government who didn’t show a very real and healthy respect for privacy rights. Of course, there’s no reason to trust in the continuing benevolence of government technology architects; we can make a system that doesn’t rely on blind trust.
Here’s the comment I left on Jeneane’s post about our conversation.:
---
It’s easy to imagine a dystopia where your junior high school permanent record followed you around for the rest of your life, but that’s not how it would work. Your national ID “voucher” would say something like this:
“1. This card was issued by a nationally recognized credentialing authority and has not been tampered with. 2. The person to whom this card is assigned was not, as of 8am this morning, on any government watch lists that would prevent her from getting on this flight. 3. I am the person to whom this card was assigned.”
There are no gold stars, and there are no new databases. It’s just a way to prove that you are who you say you are and that you’re allowed, under current laws, to do whatever it is that you’re trying to do. Under virtually every analysis, whether security or privacy based, this is better than the current systems.
Note that, strictly speaking, you do not even have to disclose *who* you are, only that you are the person allowed to fly. You can have total anonymity and still have great security.
---
Now, I’m not necessarily calling for anonymity to be a guaranteed right in such a system. I’m just saying that a properly architected system can support anonymity much better than the current mess.
You’re not the only one in this conversation with other things to do. Good luck with the paper.
Posted by: Phil Libin | Aug 24, 2004 12:00:48 AM
Phil: Interesting comments related to going down the road to a non-compulsory ID card with "features" to increase its usefulness, aka "voluntary". Let me raise the issue of power and coercion. If the card becomes ubiquitous the private sector model will become "No ID, no entrance" from a risk/reward perspective they'd be silly to do otherwise. If you have the resources to exit the system (our pilot in the earlier post) then you can, but the vast majority will not be able to exit and therefore "voluntary" becomes defacto required.
In some sense it becomes a variation of the "tragedy of the commons" in this case each actor (corporation, individual, security provider), independently pursuing their own interests will end up worse off, and the problem of security from terrorism will not be solved.
Posted by: Casey Jennings | Aug 25, 2004 10:38:02 AM
Casey,
"The tragedy of the commons" is one of my favorite economic metaphors (big fan of private property, I am), but I don’t think it applies here. Simply put, there’s no dwindling resource; the more people that use a strong credential for security, the more secure everyone becomes.
If you meant that the dwindling resource was “choice”, you are correct. I do not expect the system to remain “voluntary” for long. I don’t have a problem with this because I can’t think of a single negative repercussion of using a properly designed ID card. Of course it would be oppressive and unacceptable to have an ID program that’s designed to track every movement and log every action. I do not support ubiquitous tracking and monitoring. A national ID program must be designed with technological and procedural safeguards against just this sort of abuse. In fact, one of the best arguments in support of a national ID program is to curb the rampant rights abuses that are going on right now as a result of ad-hoc and secretive systems. National ID should not be a tool of the surveillance state.
But how do we know that Barnes & Nobles won’t require you to show your national ID to buy a book? Because (1) the government will not issue Barnes & Nobles a credential authorizing them to process the card and (2) Barnes & Noble would not gain anything from reading the card in the first place.
But how do we know that a future government won’t decide to give Barnes & Noble the ability to read the card? We don’t know; we do not abdicate our responsibility for shaping future public policy by accepting or rejecting any technology today.
“National ID” has become a bogeyman for all our anxieties about police states. Accepting a well designed program does not bring us any closer to a police state. Most crucially, rejecting the program out of hand does not get us any further from one. There’s nothing magic here. I just want a standard for ID cards that can’t be trivially forged, that can be used to quickly clear authorized people using existing databases, and that offers mathematical protection against misuse by either the individual or the state.
If we don’t do it correctly, it’ll be done incorrectly for us. It’ll be called the, “Patriotic Freedom of Choice Badge”, and it’ll be every bit as bad as it sounds.
Posted by: Phil Libin | Aug 26, 2004 2:08:47 PM
Phil:
You posed the following questions earlier:
1. What kinds of problems could a national ID program solve?
2. Which of our social rights (as defined by the constitution like freedom of speech) and privileges (as established by courts or convention like privacy) might be negatively impacted by such a program?
Getting back to those, it's clear to me that the answers to those questions are highly implementation dependent, and that the implementation of any specific system is bound to be enabled/regulated/limited by the nest of laws, regulations and policies that will be needed to set up and operate such a system. In my mind, such a system probably goes through a number of iterations as its legal base evolves along side the technical development and implementation. (That kind of methodology itself is objectionable to many, for being fraught with "scope creep" and "slippery slope" problems.) But to put up some first approximation answers for consideration, let's take a couple of imaginary scenarios, as follows.
A. Compulsory national ID "breeder document" created at birth for all children born subsequently (from program inception date) into U.S. citizenship, and current U.S. citizens, legal aliens, and non-citizen military personnel, keyed to bio-metric data of natural persons, including third party usable identification information, administered by U.S. government. Accuracy of data subject to challenge/correction as per current regulations for credit agency information (dispute statements can be attached to record by the identified person, but data can only be changed by administrative agency). ID is not revocable (cradle to grave), identification cannot be repudiated except on basis of case specific fact (faulty equipment, network transmission, clerical error, etc.), aliases not permitted unless resolved to "breeder document", anonymity not guaranteed, expected to be cross-signed base for all other forms of identification for U.S. citizens.
Answers:
1) a) Very useful for law enforcement agencies (FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, state & local)..:-)
b) Probably very useful for financial institutions and credit agencies.
c) Very useful for military application
d) Useful for Census, Social Security, IRS, and other all other federal agencies dealing with taxpayers and program beneficiaries
2) a) Anonymity is sacrificed when all citizens are required to possess government ID
b) Common law alias rights are impinged if all aliases are required to resolve to a legitimate ID for a natural person. Yet if they are not, the value of a national ID is debased.
c) Big 4th amendment constitutional issues, if production of ID on demand is required. If not, what's the point of compulsory ID?
d) Big 5th amendment issues, for same reasons.
e) Clear 1st amendment issues, stemming from "chill effect" for political and religious speech which will not be anonymous.
In the minds of many, including me, the rights sacrificed or impinged outweigh the potential benefits. I judge this to be a political non-starter, likely to promote significant backlash and lots of citizen resistance.
B. Voluntary ID "breeder document" issued by designated U.S. federal agency to those U.S. citizens, aliens, and others desiring uncontestable high quality permanent identification, for use in expediting transactions with federal and state governments, and cross certifiable as ID base for private parties and transactions.
Answers:
1) a) Utility to law enforcement depends on program participation by majority of population.
b) Utility for financial institutions and credit agencies is essentially the same as for A, since the government is "certifying" identity, thereby presumptively relieving the ID burden to the same degree.
c) Useful for dealing with Census, SS, IRS, and other federal agencies, but voluntary nature means they have to retain procedures for dealing effectively with non-program participants. Real problems here!
2) a) Voluntary nature of program preserves anonymity and alias rights.
b) No constitutional issues for a voluntary program, so long as supporting government agencies meet their burdens to ensure the program is actually voluntary.
On philosophic, moral and political grounds, I judge that Option B is likely a more practical base for a large scale ID program, because it avoids the "Big Brother" syndrome of the compulsory "type A" system. More importantly, it puts such a system on a merit basis from the outset, ensuring that "wins" are delivered early and often, since nobody (government, business, nor users) will participate unless the benefits quickly outweigh the costs, incrementally throughout the development and extension of such a program. That's important, because the costs of doing this on a large scale are going to be immense, and are probably going to have to be borne to varying degrees by all participants and users.
It also means that your "trust the friendly Feds" assertions have time to be proven as program participation develops, because the best law is made slowly, in small and specific steps, which can be tuned as experience develops.
Let's recognize that you and I differ fundamentally on that basic point, Phil. You feel the Feds (and by extension, other subsidiary state and local governments) are trustworthy, and I don't. I stand with a larger crowd on that point, I think, and with the philosophy of our founders as expressed in the Constitution, which expressly limits the powers of government to those enumerated, reserving all others to the people, precisely because it is quintessentially American to suspect the government, and not trust it's officers, employees or agents as far as we can throw them. In my life, the federal government would have used it's guns to send me to Vietnam in 1969 if I had met their "prime grade A meat" standards, despite the fact that it was a stupid war, based on lies and misrepresentations by 2 Presidents and the U.S. military (Gulf of Tonkin resolution, etc.). Every year, they're happy to remind me that paying taxes is not voluntary, and they'll send guys with guns to my door if I get uppity about it, but I do it because our system of paying taxes is at least the will of the majority as developed by our political system in Constitutionally valid ways,
Option A scares the willies out of me, and I'll fight it tooth and nail. Option B raises hairs on the back of my neck, but I'm willing to see it developed and proved, and might even become a user in time. I'd hope that you would recognize the real potential for abuse inherent in the compulsory nature of Option A, and join me in being opposed to such a beast. If you believe as you say "If we don't do it correctly, it’ll be done incorrectly for us. It’ll be called the, 'Patriotic Freedom of Choice Badge', and it’ll be every bit as bad as it sounds." we have common ground on Option B.
I expect you and others will want to expand and comment on the basics of the nomenclature I've introduced here. Maybe there will develop Options C, D, and E as well. That's the point of this discussion, and I look forward to seeing it develop further.
Posted by: phaTTboi | Aug 26, 2004 8:44:48 PM
