If we create this national ID card for the US - will it supplant our Driver’s License, Passport and Social Secuiryt card?
Can we require that it be shown to be allowed to vote?
Will it tie into a national database of thugs and loonies (the two groups that are supposedly tracked for a variety of purposes)?
The trouble is that it has become like the skeleton key to access all of your financial assets. Rattle off a good SSN and you can get a credit card in 5 minutes. I like the notion of public key/private key that was mentioned earlier. I don’t understand it, but I like the idea of not having SSN be so all-powerful.
No.
Sunrazor was saying that because his teacher and cop father said they didn’t need ID for the sole purpose of walking down the street, we didn’t need a national ID card. I was pointing out where that analogy fell apart - there are times when ID is demanded - and those times depend on ID security to be effective.
And please note - I am not advocating a national ID card, really, though the Real ID act is seen as a step in that direction by some. What I think is needed is ID that is more secure, which I think most of us can agree with.
Especially in light of the events of August 2001, which I do not mention to win an argument, but because they actually happened, and ought to be dealt with.
I’m assuming you mean the events of September, 2001?
The terrorists didn’t succeed because they had fake ID, they succeeded because, after almost fifty years of having planes hijacked, we were too fucking stupid to lock that goddam cockpit doors! And, of course, being foreigners, such an issue would never have arisen anyway.
If the government were to tattoo the number on your forehead or right hand most of the objections would go away.
What?
Don’t assume. These guys were prowling around the DMV a month earlier. And they were assisted by illegal immigrants, a secretary in an Arlington attorney’s office, and others in a well-documented network that existed to provide ID to illegal immigrants in the Northern Virginia area.
This network was exploited by these guys for their purposes. Also well documented.
And just because we are doing some things to beef up security doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do other things, especially if those things are reasonable on the face of it. Virginia after this incident was forced to police the process of obtaining IDs and restrict certain practices. Given what happened, that was a reasonable response. I’m sure you won’t fault it.
The problem is that these practices are replicated across the country, and the drivers license is the de facto national ID, as I stated. If it is to be used in this manner, it has to be run in a better fashion. Otherwise it shouldn’t be used in this way, so as to allow people to find the weak links in the chain.
What specific objections do you have to anything I have said in this thread?
As I posted earlier, putting all of your eggs into one basket has some critical issues attached to it.
With a multitude of official databases (driver’s license, bank account info, passport, SSN, etc.) you have a systems of checks and balances to help ensure the data retained by each is accurate and honest, despite the multiple opportunities for each database to have information entered incorrectly. Assuming the Reasonable Man Hypothesis for the moment, one would still have to jump through a few hoops if an error was found in one and you had to challenge it to get it corrected. The clerk/guard/security agent stopping you had some level of authority to realize the information was not accurate, provided you with an opportunity to get it corrected as soon as possible, but you were not often denied from proceeding on your way.
A single national ID predisposes a certain level of FUD in the society (effectively perpetrated by the government). That requires everyone to be in the same basket together. With no checks and balances among several trusted databases, what recourse does one person have in correcting the information in a fair and timely manner, when most often, the error is found at a critical moment when access is needed right then and there (at an airport security checkpoint, stopped by a police officer for a traffic violation, etc.)? Sorry but the database says the name is on the terrorist watch list and you cannot board. But, officer, my child is only a month old. You really believe she’s a terrorist?
We already have mindless TSA people refusing to board well-known people, despite their other IDs, well known status and commonsense. Sorry but your name is in our database you you must be a suspect person. WTF?
Besides, what does a national ID protect us from now? Even before computers came along kids were making fake IDs. As IDs became more sophisticated, the tools necessary to create fake IDs came along as well. Now we have the implementation of RFID chips into passports. Yet, it has already been determined the base code for the chips is a UN requirement and details of the requirements are widely known. It has already been demonstrated several times that passports being issued right now can easily be faked and/or cloned using off the shelf hardware, using the already-published UN standards for the RFID chips.
Sure, many kids may not have the resources to make the newer IDs, but we are not talking about a national ID to stop kids from buying beer and tobacco. But is is an unintended consequence of a single national ID. Assuming for the moment that a terrorist group has the time, money and other resources to create fake IDs to meet the RealID Act, they only need to be successful once to accomplish their intended goal. OTOH, the rest of us ordinary innocent folks will have to prove who we are, time and time again, and endure how many stops when the ID information doesn’t add up? Who then is regarded as a potential threat according to the government?
As MEBuckner said above, in our society you need some form of plastic proving your identity. I don’t drive, so I have an ID card. Few people who do drive keep one; they use their driver’s licenses instead. Passports are big and clumsy to carry around and until fairly recently (some time between 1996, when I got my last passport, and 2006, when I got my current one) they weren’t fully acceptable as identification.
Let’s check… Full name, ID number including date of birth, expiry date, card number, signature and a photograph.
Makes me wonder, being Northern Irish I can plump for either type of passport (I’m getting an Irish one, Dad’s thinking of taking us out of the country for once and he got all funny when I suggested a British passport), but will that cause trouble for an ID scheme?
I think that having a national identity card is a good idea.
Having fifty (or more) different kinds of identification in the USA (each state having a different format for the driver’s license) makes it harder for a person to identify fakes - someone using it to confirm your age, for example, would have to know what a Rhode Island driver’s license is supposed to look like.
The advantage it would have over a passport would be its size - it would be the size of a current state ID card or driver’s license, or credit card, so easy to carry in your wallet.
The identification number displayed on it would not have to be a social security number. It could be something new.
This is one of the cases where I disagree with the ACLU’s position even though I am a longtime member of the ACLU.
In Switzerland you have a passport (a booklet), a national ID card (size and shape of a credit card), and a driver’s license (size and shape of a credit card I guess? I haven’t seen one in real life [ the driver’s license I keep back at my dad’s house is still an old blue paper one with my photo on it). The driver’s license purpose should be to show that you are allowed to operate a vehicle, I don’t see the need to conflate its purpose with that of an identification card. The swiss national ID card is handy to have because you can use it to travel in the European Community (EC), the passport is only needed for travel to foreign countries outside the EC. I could see something similar in North America. for example Mexico and Canada and the USA having an agreement where automobile or boat travel between those countries is allowed with an ID card instead of requiring a passport.
Shouldn’t do, and I speak as a fundamental opponent of the ID/NIR scheme.
If you identify yourself as Irish (as is your right) then you would probably be treated as an Irish citizen resident in the UK - and you would need to get a standalone ID cards when the system becomes compulsory.
You could probably hold both passports if you wanted to, but why bother with the hassle?
There’s a problem with the scheme here which hasn’t been confronted properly yet. It’s certainly not as simple as requiring Irish citizens to have a separate card:
There would be many objections from Irish people, especially in Northern Ireland, and I suspect it may also run contrary to the Good Friday Agreement
All EU nationals are entitled to equal treatment. You cannot single out the Irish as needing a card to access services when others can identify themselves by other means - it’s all EU citizens living here, or none.
Assuming one of the purposes of the card is proving one’s identity when voting (or registering to vote), there’s issues with recipricol agreements between the two countries over full voting rights. If Irish people suddenly have to acquire a card just to vote, the Irish government will take issue with it, and possibly will find a way to retaliate.
Quite aside from point (2), I can see the idea of singling out one nationality as being challenged on basic discrimination grounds.
It doesn’t just apply to Northern Ireland. There’s two millions Irish in England, Scotland & Wales. Many British-born people are recognised as citizens by both countries - me for one. I’ve only ever had an Irish passport, for reasons I don’t see I need to explain, but it’s nothing to do with ‘hassle’.
Well, my understanding of the law (as proposed) is that everyone resident in the UK for more than three months will eventually need a card. That applies to EU, non-EU and Irish (who are EU, of course, but treated more leniently than other EU citizens).
So I don’t see why discrimination will be a problem - if a person is an Irish citizen resident in the UK, or a dual-citizen who holds only an Irish passport, they will need a card. The same is true of people from France, Singapore, the USA or wherever.
Irish citizens only vote in UK elections if they are residents of the UK - so they will presumably have cards.
People applying for UK passports will generally get an ID card when they renew their passport (after 2009/2010), but there is a standalone card for resident non-citizens, or dual citizens who don’t hold British passports.
But having said all that, the whole project strikes me as an illiberal, useless and expensive farce.
OK, sorry, I slightly misread your earlier answer.
I still suspect there’s going to be a problem with the principle of reciprocal voting rights.
Trust me if you see a real Rhode Island ID you’d know it.
Same for a Michigan Mass, or Indiana one. They have holograms on them. I suspect all states do, and if they don’t they should.
Actually, that’s a disadvantage. Making it bulky so as to assure that it will be carried only on special occasions where there is a legitimate cause for the government to demand proof of your identity (e.g. voting, border crossing) serves to prevent mission creep, which is one of the fundamental objections to the whole concept.
And the terrorists won’t succeed with the same trick again because everybody now knows that the safest response to a hijacking is no longer “sit tight while the clowns get their free ride to Cuba and face time on teevee”.
If the ID is required as proof of identity when voting (and there’s no good reason it shouldn’t be; that’s one of the few occasions when the government has a legitimate reason to insist on proof that you are who you say you are), charging a fee for it would be unconstitutional.
I am against National ID cards for a more practical purpose: I already have a dreadful memory and I don’t want to be responsible to carry yet another piece of unnecessary information. Because I keep my driver’s license in my car and normally pay in cash, I usually have nothing in my pockets except my keys and cell phone. Frankly, I see being forced to carry additional information on my person as an inconvenience.
I am curious as to what the penalties will be. I’ve been pulled over without a driver’s license and gave the cop my Student ID card and told him that I forgot my license at home. He looked me up on a database, gave me a $65 dollar ticket, and let me go. What exactly do you purpose as a penalty for those who don’t carry a National ID card on their person? Will the cops handcuff the individual on the street and take them to local precinct?
My guess is the punishment you’d get would be you’d be denied access to whatever they wanted an ID for.