Do National I.D. Cards Pose a Threat?
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Big Brother?
By Brad Wall
THe's waiting to take your freedom. Not unlike the all knowing and seeing "sibling" from George Orwell's "1984". Perhaps not quite as dramatically, but that makes it all the more insidious. What I'm talking about is an effort to create a national ID card.
Larry Ellison, head of the California based software company Oracle, has offered to donate the technology in order to facilitate the ID program. Proponents of the card say that a nationalized system would deter illegal immigration by preventing aliens from getting jobs. At best this is a highly impractical and expensive undertaking. The Social Security Administration has estimated that it would cost taxpayers at least $2.5 billion just to issue the cards, and be no more reliable than the documents required to acquire them. Another obvious rational for the cards, is 9/11. Plain and simple; this will not stop terrorism. It wouldn't have stopped the September 11th terrorists, who had reportedly obtained identity documents and were in the country legally. Do we really want to give law enforcement officials the power to watch and stop anyone, anytime, and demand identification? If you're walking around at night in a strange neighborhood, or you're the wrong color at the wrong time you be-come a target. If you lose your card you're not just a target you're a suspect. We have the technology to track everyone. A network-enabled card, encrypted with biometric data (fingerprints, retinal scan, etc.) could, in essence, be used as a sort of beacon. You can be tracked in infinite detail, but the possession of a technology does not in turn require it to be used. Some say we live in a new world, that we have to sacrifice the rights of a few Americans to make the rest safe; that these new rules are the price of freedom. I say we live in the same world we lived in before 9/11. We simply exist in a state where we are more aware of our mortality. I hope we don't become ignorant of liberty and justice. National ID cards are wrong. They're wrong and they're un-American. |
Chicken Little?
By Clare Huston
The sky is falling! Big Brother is watching! Big Brother will get you! Some of us have read 1984 one too many times!
When I first started hearing objections to the proposed National I.D. program, two ideas sprung to mind. First, I couldn't help remembering a lecture on logical fallacies in a Critical Thinking class. Specifically, I was reminded of the slippery slope fallacy; one should be mindful when predicting a series of events without being able to prove the causality between one event and another. In this case, the argument that the approval of a standardized and difficult to falsify card will open the flood gates to Gestapo, Nazi, or Stalinist ideas (or even to the ideas of Orwell and Spielberg for that matter), is simply logically dishonest. For the same reasons, the argument that having a card necessitates a situation where you are forced to show your card on-demand for authorities is fallacious. -"Your papers please!" Second (and related to the first), this is not a privacy issue, nor is it a freedom from self-incrimination issue. It is simply an accessibility issue. Not only do standards differ from state to state, but from institution to institution. Although it is justifiably harder to obtain a residency card than a drivers liscence, there are still examples of failure: Only here could the dead hijackers receive acceptance letters for Visas months after their names have become household words since 9/11! Ironically, it was very difficult for me to obtain my residency card (yup, I'm an Alien myself!); the fact that my name, picture, INS Alien # and fingerprint are all printed on it, has not taken away one iota of my privacy. I am often awed by the way the U.S. government leniently allows people to come and go as they please, even with their unpopular status amongst non-Americans. This is not, however, the time to be lenient nor disorganized. Nobody said National I.D. cards would stop terrorism. Opponents of the proposed National I.D. program need a collective slap on the face in order to break their hysteria. The sky will not fall nor will a Big Brother take our freedoms away. |