Uh huh. What other things might they try, and which of these might require use of a drivers license?
The worst terrorist incident before 9/11 was the Oklahoma City bombing, and the clowns that planned that used fake IDs to buy the ammonium nitrate.
So we should just leave this loophole wide open, just because the terrorists won’t use the same trick again? And again, I’m not advocating a national ID, just better use of the ID we already use.
Again, do you have a specific objection to the points I have raised, or are you just being contentious for the hell of it?
A possibility, to be sure. For the moment, the Irish government seems to be saying that they do not have plans to issue ID cards, and the British government is saying (correctly, IMO) that it’s a matter for the Irish to decide.
I suppose the real issue could be Brits voting in Ireland - they couldn’t really demand ID from Brits and not Irish citizens. Well, they could try, but I’m not sure the ECHR would look favourably on this, and any such action by either government could (possibly) be seen as a violation of the various treaties between the two countries.
I totally disagree. Should driver’s licenses be chained to cinder blocks to prevent a policeman on the beat from asking you for identification now? I’ve been asked for identification in the street (once walking home in the early hours of the morning) before. I asked people I know living in Switzerland if they thought that a national ID card was infringing on their civil liberties and it was even hard for me to get them to understand what I was driving at.
Preventing abuse of a national ID card should be a concern. But a national ID card, the way I envision it, would have many benefits.
If you have no need to prove your identity in your daily life, then you wouldn’t need to carry your national ID card with you anywhere. But in cases when you do, don’t you have to carry a card with you now? I think it would make more sense to show an ID card rather than a driver’s license. In your case you would just leave the driver’s license in the car all the time.
In my case, I have a California driver’s licens AND a California ID card. I can leave the driver’s license in the car when I’m going out (e.g. concert, bar) and take the ID card with me. I like having two cards for two different purposes. If I’m in a bar and pass out after my third Shirley Temple, the person rifling my pockets won’t have my driver’s license so I can still drive home afterwards.
Driver’s licenses legitimately need to be with you whenever you’re driving. A centralized ID would be legitimately needed on special occasions (e.g. voting, border crossings), and thus should be bulkier (an added benefit is that this allows it to be more secure).
You’re going to drive right after waking up from an alcohol binge?? :eek:
But you were punished for driving without a license, which is a criminal offense.
My grandmother doesn’t have a driver’s license, but she does have a state ID. No one has ever demanded to see her ID (or punished her in any way for not carrying it) because she doesn’t do anything that requires ID. And even if she did, as someone else, the worst that would happen is that she would be barred entrance to whatever she was trying to do.
agreed in principle, though I’m not so sure I’m on board with the needing to show ID for voting part
I don’t see the how the word “thus” comes into play here. Are you saying that something that is rarely shown should, by logical conclusion, be bulky? When the social security administration sent me my social security card many years ago (something I have put in a safety box and almost never touched since), I would have seen no benefit to it being printed on the cover of a book.
Shirley Temple (from wikipedia): “A Shirley Temple is a non-alcoholic cocktail (or mocktail) made with ginger ale, grenadine syrup, and orange juice garnished with the maraschino cherry and slice of lemon.”
The thing is, should policemen be able to “ask you for identification” simply for walking about in a public place? If the answer is “yes”, then this contradicts the notion that the national ID card would be something you could just leave at home (or in your safe deposit box) if you didn’t anticipate the need to provide ID (i.e., you weren’t planning on opening any new bank accounts or popping down to Mexico that day). If a police officer can demand “identification” because, e.g., he finds it odd that you are walking down the sidewalk in the wee hours of the morning, perhaps on pain of jail if you can’t produce “identification”, then in effect the national ID card becomes a government-mandated “walking around in public license”, or at least a quasi-curfew for adults–if you’re out and about after some (maybe vaguely specified) hour, the government has the right to ask you what you’re doing and who you’re doing it with and when you’ll be home, just like when you were 16.
(Interestingly enough, according to Wikipedia Swiss ID cards are among those which are voluntary, not compulsory. This imples to me that Swiss cops can’t really take you to jail merely for failing to produce “identification”. Or perhaps Wikipedia is mistaken.)
Discussions about ID cards tend to fragment and become frustrating because there are multiple issues, which can lead to people talking past each other. The question of what level of government should issue ID cards, or what sort of security features they should have, is separate from the issue of when any level of government should be able to demand that a citizen produce identification. I’m less concerned about whether ID cards are issued by states or the federal government (or issued by states, with the federal government setting standards which all such ID’s must meet) than I am about the second issue.
That doesn’t strike me as particularly strange. Swedish cops can’t take me to jail solely for failing to produce identification; in fact they don’t have the right to ask just for the hell of it, they have to have a good reason.
I would love to see a national ID card. The system we have now sucks. How is someone working at a bar in Maine supposed to know what a Wyoming license looks like? Hell, Wyoming only has 500,000 people, a policeman in Maine may only see one in their lifetime.
Showing that you are legal to work is a real pain. The last time I tried to find my birth certificate it took me hours to track down. We have a bunch of employees at our store and they all had to show me their birth certificates. How am I supposed to know if it’s valid, or if it is valid if it is really theirs.
My proposal: one ID card with a chip on it that allows it to be authenticated electronically. Have a system in which inexpensive readers can validate the card and display a picture of the person that can be compared against the one on the card. The card could be used instead of a driver’s license, birth certificate, library card, or any other ID except passport (though some countries might accept it). Limit what information the readers can display based on who is using them. For example: bars could just check your age, employers could just check your employment eligibility, police officers could see if you are licensed to drive or have outstanding warrants, a library could validate your identity but get no other info, etc.
The trick is to limit how and when the ID is required so that it is no more onerous than how driver’s licenses, passports, birth certificates, and other IDs are used now.
Well, Sweden is also listed as one of the countries having non-compulsory identity documents. Basically, the U.S. has non-compulsory ID’s as well, since most (all?) states issue “non-driver ID cards” for people who don’t want or can’t have driver’s licenses (and most of us use our driver’s license for ID). We just haven’t nationalized or centralized our non-compulsory ID card.
However some countries do have compulsory ID cards–a police officer can demand to see your ID card, and you can be detained if you refuse.
Yes, like Switzerland, the country you mentioned. You seemed to think this was strange enough to theorize that Wikipedia was mistaken, so I added my perspective, which is that it would be very strange to have cops that were able to drag you to jail for not carrying ID.
It’s just a Wikipedia thing. I don’t feel like wading through the official government websites of assorted countries around the world, so I put in a disclaimer, in case some Swiss Doper were to come back and say “Actually, according to the 1998 Law on Identification Documents, the penalty for failing to produce your identity card upon request of any police officer is a 50 franc fine / 10 years hard labor / summary execution”.
There are (again, if Wikipedia is to be believed) democratic countries (e.g., Spain) where citizens are required to produce their ID cards if asked by a police officer, and may be detained if they fail to do so. (Again, the Wikipedia disclaimer is just so some Spanish doper doesn’t come along and so “Oh, that hasn’t been the law since Franco died.”)
I agree with this 100%, they are two separate issues.
I think a national ID card is a good idea for the reasons I listed above (a person in charge of verifying identification in the USA only needs to be familiar with one type of ID, it could serve as a replacement of the passport for local travel, and it is easier to carry around than a passport.) I’m sure it would be possible for a government to abuse this system, but in this case I think the advantages outweigh the inconvenients. Especially since in this case there is already something existing at the state level. Having these state level IDs consolidated and maintained at the federal level would be appropriate.
I don’t have any strong feelings either way about a policeman being able to ask me for identification in a public place. (In my case, the policeman justified it by saying “we have had reports of robbery in the neighbourhood” or some such.) Personally I don’t think it’s a big deal, but I’m willing to be shown otherwise.
Quick question: how do car rental companies deal with this situation?
When I’ve rented cars across the US and Canada, my driver’s licence has been accepted without question. The rental clerk doesn’t have to look it up in a book or verify it in any other way on the spot. I’ve never been denied a car because the clerk says, “Well, I’ve never seen one of these Alberta licenses before, so I don’t know what a real one looks like, so no car for you.”
One thing to consider with a national ID card is that you have to be careful that you do not inadvertently use it to separate visitors to the country from goods and services they are legally entitled to purchase. If you make such a card the only ID allowable to, say, purchase alcohol in a bar or a store, and that state has adopted a “card everybody” policy, then by accepting only the National ID, you have effectively prevented foreign visitors from buying alcohol. You won’t accept their passports, driver’s licenses, etc. and being neither Americans nor residents, they cannot get the National ID. What effect will this have on your tourism industry? On business visitors?
A national ID might be a good idea for accessing government services only available to citizens: unemployment insurance, Social Security claims, and the like. But in terms of the private sector (bars, liquor stores, casinos, hotels, etc.) a national citizens’ ID should be one of many acceptable IDs, so as not to exclude foreigners from things to which they are legally entitled to purchase or do.
But that goes to show what a crappy ID a driver’s license is. Basically you are inconveniencing the law abiders and having little impact on the determined criminal.
As for foreign tourists, I’m not sure how things are handled now. I know that a friend of mine was not allowed to buy alchohol in Massachusetts with a valid US Passport; you had to show a driver’s license.
Maybe tourists would get a temporary card when they arrive in the US. It would also serve as their visa.
In various ways. I’ve seen a rental company, at the DFW airport, who had a book of foreign licences - “This is what a British licence looks like”, that sort of thing. My bank has an “acceptable ID book”, that includes pictures of typical licences from all states, but not the UK. Luckily, I had a passport.
A good point. I keep seeing signs that read something like “Valid Pennsylvania ID required” in bars and such, and wonder if they really apply these rules. There are a lot of tourists in Philadelphia. One bartender insisted that there was a law stating I must have PA ID to drink in a bar there. Does that mean people from Texas can’t legally drink in PA?
That’s brilliant! I suspect when faced with a foreign passport rather than a US one, they might realise that the rule doesn’t quite work. (I always carry mine when drinking in America, even though it’s a hassle and I always have my driving licence in my wallet.)
