National ID card won't stop terrorists, but will infringe on Americans' liberty

Great Debates
41

I have been following this thread with great interest. Both points of view have valid, well thought out reasons for their difference of opinion. I agree with the poster who said that he didn’t want to be forced to prove his ID if he wasn’t doing anything wrong. My pet peeve is when people say, “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you shouldn’t mind”. My counter to that is that I shouldn’t have to prove I’m innocent;you should have to prove that I’m guilty. If you want to take this idea a bit further, why not require that on every street corner in a big city, a small shed-like structure shall be built for the express purpose of requiring that ten people every hour, shall be compelled to be strip-searched at random, to make sure they’re not carrying any contraband. After all, if you haven’t done anything wrong you shouldn’t mind. I know, I certainly would mind.

On the other hand, I don’t see why a digitized fingerprint can’t be added to someone’s driver’s license. With the advent of the internet and sophisticated databases, there is practically no privacy left anyways. In any event, I hope that a cooling off period will serve to preserve law-abiding citizen’s civil rights while making sure that nefarious individuals are kept out. Maybe there should be more of an effort to keep tabs on foreigners travelling on temporary visas, such as beefing up INS; requiring foreign visitors to check in with officials at regularly scheduled intervals.

42

I have been following this thread with great interest. Both points of view have valid, well thought out reasons for their difference of opinion. I agree with the poster who said that he didn’t want to be forced to prove his ID if he wasn’t doing anything wrong. My pet peeve is when people say, “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you shouldn’t mind”. My counter to that is that I shouldn’t have to prove I’m innocent;you should have to prove that I’m guilty. If you want to take this idea a bit further, why not require that on every street corner in a big city, a small shed-like structure shall be built for the express purpose of requiring that ten people every hour, shall be compelled to be strip-searched at random, to make sure they’re not carrying any contraband. After all, if you haven’t done anything wrong you shouldn’t mind. I know, I certainly would mind.

On the other hand, I don’t see why a digitized fingerprint can’t be added to someone’s driver’s license. With the advent of the internet and sophisticated databases, there is practically no privacy left anyways. In any event, I hope that a cooling off period will serve to preserve law-abiding citizen’s civil rights while making sure that nefarious individuals are kept out. Maybe there should be more of an effort to keep tabs on foreigners travelling on temporary visas, such as beefing up INS; requiring foreign visitors to check in with officials at regularly scheduled intervals.

43

That, all by itself, is a great reason to oppose National ID cards. 1/2-:wink:

Now if, say…a real civil-libertarian and constitutional scholar like Nat Hentoff (who I disagree with on a number of issues but seems to have a good grounding for his beliefs) said that it was a good idea…I might stop and reconsider. But Dershowitz? Nah. (again, 1/2-:wink: )

Fenris

44

Here’s Privacy International’s take on it, along with reports on how it has evolved in other parts of the world.

45

DPWhite, ID card or no ID card, the gathering of information about individuals that you are proposing would be so invasive it would not be accepted by anybody. It is not done in any country and Europe has privacy laws preventing it. An ID card is just one more piece of ID. The collection of information about individuals in the scale that you propose would be unacceptable to the great majority. It will never happen even if a national ID is implemented.

46

All this information is already collected, it simply isn’t analyzed. The ball team you buy a ticket from knows who you are. They know who you are when you are at the courthouse, they know who you are when you go to the airport.

  1. Why do you find it necessary to treat me with such condescension? Is it because of my lack of formal education?

I was unaware of your lack of formal education, and was making my responses to the audience in general. You questioned whether I was an American. That’s extremely offensive. I accept that you didn’t mean it that way. An informal education can be more impressive than a formal one. Abraham Lincoln had a mostly informal education, yet he was a very impressive intellect and one of the best advocates in history.

  1. A related question: why do you seem to hold me in such contempt? What did I do to upset you? Let me explain that I was not questioning your patriotism when I asked whether you were an American, but was trying to establish your frame of reference.

That isn’t the way it came across. Ask someone else how it came across. I accept that you meant no offense. (Yes, I am an American and active on behalf of civil liberties.)

  1. Why do you say things like, “I know that you want the right to do suspicious things”? What makes you think you “know” this about me?

The you is general as in people want the freedom to cut loose without all the town gossips wagging their tongues about it. It’s a free country. If people want to walk around downtown repeatedly that is up to them, but a police officer may see that as casing the bank branches. I personally don’t buy weed, but I understand that there are a lot of people who do, and provided you (general) aren’t selling it to kids, I don’t care.

  1. Why do you assume that I have not thought any of this through?

Again, the you is general, and nobody seems to be addressing the real arguments except to beg them away. “We don’t want it, how could anyone want it?” Since when does that pass for thought. Look fellas, I took the unpopular side of this argument, I’m hardly convinced, but why can’t people do better than jumping to the argument that it is Orwellian and Naziish. It may be that others simply don’t have the tools to take on the subject. I’d have some difficulty coming up with arguments against this other than that we all find it offensive and it feels creepy. But we all already know that.

  1. And finally, I have a number of problems with your analysis in your long post, and would like to enumerate them. But I don’t want to waste either your time or mine if you simply hate me a priori and we stand no chance of a civil debate. So my question is, can you and I start over, and address one another as civil men who both have decent motives and value our liberties?

Sure, even if I don’t come back to this page (I usually leave a page open all day and then maybe come back later) it will be useful for people to see. I don’t hate Libertarian or anyone else on this board (but I was quite taken aback by the question of my nationality/patriotism. As a liberal Democrat who has learned the hard way, I don’t let people in political debates get away with that sort of thing), nor do I take this stuff or myself too seriously. But I don’t want to have to take both sides of this debate. That isn’t fair to those opposing.

As for Dershowitz, no, I don’t agree with everything he says or does, but he is one of a handful of the best advocates alive. Ordinarily he will take the side of very broad liberties, so if he doesn’t have civil liberty concerns based on the constitution, I stop wondering so intensely why I don’t, they are probably not there, (and certainly not from a strict constructionist view, although neither AD nor I are constructionists).

Part of this debate is whether the ID cards are a good idea. Do the benefits outweigh the risks? Some folks have said that there are no benefits to the public because they wouldn’t have prevented the attack and won’t protect against future attacks, and the risk is that we move closer to a police state.

Now some folks have said we cannot possibly keep a record of when you go to a public place and use the card to identify yourself because the public won’t stand for it. If that is accepted as a premise, then there is no point at all in doing it. My side of the argument is that current methods of identification do all this already, just very badly, very inefficiently and in such a way that the data cannot be used in a powerful manner. When a cop pulls you over, he makes a record, sometimes on paper, of your driver’s license. When you buy a ticket for a ball game, your check or credit card potentially gives them your identify (cash is different, granted). When you go to court, they don’t let you talk until your papers are correctly filed and you have identified yourself. It is just a royal pain to gather this information and analyse it. What the argument boils down to is that people will never put up with this and I tend to agree on the basis of it is just plain way creepy, but I also know that if that is the argument, it isn’t really rational. And the LP (Libertarian Party) press release is pretty much just a way of repeating the assumptions over and over again.

Suppose we were subject to a dozen WTC type attacks per year. Let’s give away the better part of the argument and say that only one of those each year will be thwarted by such a tracking and analysis system. Would it be worth it?

47

Maybe I didn’t spend enough words to make my meaning clear, but you at least need to look at my entire quote to have any chance of understanding:

I was trying to get across the point that you are already relying on privacy protection laws, because if it had the necessary warrants, a law enforcement agency could do a pretty damn good job of tracing your movements and tracking you. If you haven’t broken the law, you are not subject to such an invasion of privacy.

48

Bad idea.
Its the start of not only Big Brother, but the mark of the beast.
My 2 cents

49

Even before Sept. 11th, I felt that a National ID was a pretty good idea. Understand that the very thought of having to ‘show your papers’ while walking down the street is vile and makes me want to vomit. However, a National ID does not automatically mean that authorities have the right to see it without cause, or that it will be a crime to be without the card. I always thought of it as nothing more than a consolidation of the multitude of ID cards that we carry everyday.

A National ID can consolidate the following:
Drivers Licence, SS card, bank accounts, insurance, credit cards, pilot’s licence, tax ID, supermarket club, phone card, gun permits, etc.

All of these cards and numbers and such are merely a way to communicate that you are YOU, and not someone else. I see significant benefit to linking these items together. For instance, if you sign up for car insurance and state your residence is in rural NYS (where your parents live), but you have your offical residence in the South Bronx, the insurance co. will have a few questions for you.

Linkages from things like your immigration status, or criminal status to financial status can be useful as well, for obvious reasons.

I will leave my comments here for now, since work is preventing me from spending much more time crafting this note, I’ve been in ‘Reply’ mode for the last 3 hrs as it is…

50

DPWhite,

I’m glad all that’s behind us! Nothing like a fresh start! :wink: Now, here are the problems I have with some of your arguments.

First, you seem to be arguing that computerizing the ID cards will make them more difficult to forge. I’m not certain that’s necessarily the case. Computers that have any connectivity at all are brutally difficult to secure. In fact, it could reasonably be argued that computerizing will greatly compromise security against forgery and identity theft.

Second, some of your fallacy attributions seem awfully nebulous to me. For example, you say that the failure-to-carry argument is a straw man since no one has suggested it. Frankly, I’m not sure exactly who is suggesting exactly what. There is no formal proposal on the floor of either chamber right now, and Representative Ron Paul effectively killed the idea the last time it came up. The LP is talking about what people like George W. Gekas are saying on talk shows. At any rate, a substantial block of congress critters are against it, as is the White House.

Finally, I wish you would ease up on the whole I’m-the-only-one-thinking-this-through bit. We are thinkers, too. The Libertarian Party, the Cato Institute, and other libertarian entities are not populated by morons who don’t know a straw man from a tu quoque.

That’s it for now.

51

Thank you Medstar, I also cringe when I hear someone say that if youre not doing anything wrong, you shouldnt worry.

Operation Enduring Freedom?

I think the government has been riddled with silliness in attacking problems in the past. In lieu of a real solution in the war on drugs, we just made more prisoners and seized more assets. There has been no change in the consumption of drugs or the crime revolving around it. The death penalty hasnt brought down or affected the crime rate. A speed limit on 'free’ways doesnt make people not speed, but it does help generate money for the agencies that enforce the law.

This isnt a concurrance to the ‘it wont work so lets not do it’ statement. Im just saying National IDs is apropo to other ineffective government practices.

I think we will see a lot of this type of planning in the weeks and months to come. Everyone wants to see something done to feel safer.

Note that the Espionage Act from WWI still exists. It states,“Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty in the military…” Eugene Debs was put in prison under this law along with 900 other people during The Great War. They broke the law. It has yet to be inforced since 1950…it’s still on the books.

My paranoid (and maybe not so) is that as the war continues and there is greater surveiliance and prying who’s the target of the next witch hunt? The moral majority and mass hysteria are not relics of the past. Where does it stop? It’s starts with a majority of Americans willing to put all there info into a computer chip to feel safer.

52

Why should we have seperate pieces w/ info such as gun permit, drivers license status, social security number et?

'cause there are reasons for some individuals to have one piece of info but not others. When I cash a check at the grocery store, s’ok to me to show my DL to prove who I am, NOT ok to add in Social Security card (the other piece of info some one would need in order to establish credit in my name etc.). Ditto the gun permit etc.

and while we’re bandying about the phrase “Drivers liscense” let’s keep in mind there’s whole hosts of folks who don’t need/want them. So, their needs are to prove identity alone, just enough to cash their check, for example.

Yes, I have thought this through.

let me also expound on the concept of “it won’t stop 'em”

National ID card system would be a very expensive set up, and a continuing expense. At present, we’re having economic difficulties, we have a whole lotta folks on Social Security, medicare, need all sorts of defense spending, job training monies, education priorities , disaster relief etc. Those items have a relatively proven track record of cost/benefit. I don’t see why we should short change areas where we’re currently hurting on the 'gee, we hope this will help in the future, especially when it seems clear to me that the had we had National ID in place last year, it may have delayed 9/11 (and probably not). The amount, level of planning, sophistication, money and singlemindedness of purpose should show you that when faced with an enemy where money is no object, and the possability of death is seen as a reward - we’re better off figuring out ways of determining who they are and shutting down their sources of funds than attempting to figure out how many ways some one might attempt to hurt us.