National ID System, is it really that bad?
Last night I moderated a seminar on “THE STATE OF CYBER SECURITY & INTERNET SURVEILLANCE” held in NYC. It was an interesting event mostly attended by lawyers. I think I gained a deeper understanding of technology issues from a legal perspective.
When I sat down at the table, I turned to the woman sitting next to me and introduced myself, while I was doing that someone chimed in “he used to be a hacker!” Her response was “oh really? I’m the Federal Prosecutor for computer crimes in New York State.”
After explaining that I was a law abiding professional we got along pretty well and the event turn out great.
Afterwards some of the panel members went out to dinner. One of the members was Christopher Chiu, a technology policy analyst for the ACLU.
I explained to him, playing devils advocate that I didn’t understand what the fear of having a national identification system was. I had participated in something similar being a foreigner in Japan and I was never worried because I was never involved in illegal activates.
We (a bunch of lawyers and me) came conclusion that America just doesn’t have a good track record of respecting human rights. It was only a generation ago that we held Japanese in detainment camps and blacks are still stopped for walking in the wrong neighborhood.
I’ll be writing a piece on this. But what do you feel about this? What’s the big deal anyway?
February 21st, 2003 at 9:10 am
There is an old saying “those that do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” As far as a National ID goes, there is a historical example that sheds some light on the problem.
The going got tough. Real tough. Horribly tough. And people started looking for scapegoats. They used each town’s Citizen Registry to find all the undesirable people in town and send them away. I am, of course, talking about World War II Germany.
Eventually, in a country with 60 million people, 15 million of them died. 3 million were soldiers in the war. The first 6 million of the “undesirables” to be killed were chosen because of their Citizen Registry record of conduct. They were convicts, ex-convicts and homosexuals. The last 6 million to be killed were chosen because of their Citizen Registry record of race. They were Jewish.
Look at those numbers - 1 out 4 people died.
In the aftermath, Germany enacted some of the toughest personal privacy laws on the planet. The thinking was that if the records didn’t exist, they wouldn’t be a temptation to a future government for another round of ’select and destroy’.
Could the United States get into that tough a situation, where we are in so much pain, we want to persecute our own? Sure we could. Germany was the biggest, badest, most technologically advanced country of its time - and still, it fell into economic ruin because the rest of the world got sick and tired of Germany throwing its weight around. The rest of the world decided to make Germany pay for its sins (and, frankly, they deserved it.) But even the most advanced country in the world could not survive the rest of the world imposing economic sanctions.
One last note: as times were getting bad in Germany, more and more minor restrictions (persecutions) were imposed on the public.
Here are two examples:
People who smoke cigarettes in Germany were looked down upon. Eventually, school teachers that smoked were fired from their jobs, as they set bad examples for the children. If you look at the rules regarding smoking near or on a school campus, you will see the same attitude. One can look at most city regulations regarding smoking and see that the spirit of persecuting those that annoy us is alive and well in the USA.
In 1929 mandatory gun registration (to the Citizen Registry) was imposed. Five years later, it was followed with mandatory citizen gun forfeiture. You haven’t heard the call for gun registration in the United States anytime recently, have you?
So my opinion is that a National ID system is a bad idea. It has been done before, it grants a huge power without accountablility, and the results were much more worse than good.
February 23rd, 2003 at 5:26 pm
The Japanese internment is probably a bad example, as the US government had concrete evidence that a large percentage of them were actually spying.
February 24th, 2003 at 7:09 am
When I received my social security card it contained a comment, “not to be used for identification purposes”. In fact, it is still illegal to force anyone to give up their social security number for any reason, but, coercive laws and the missing out on essential services has forced us to give it up. The main legal issue is that we are not federal citizens and a federal ID system is unlawful. Federal citizenship is defined by the 14th amendment and was only added to the US Constitution in the 1860’s, because various states wouldn’t allow the freed slaves to become state citizens. (small case intentional). The founders had very concrete and sound reasons for framing our constitution the way they did. Suggest you read “The Miracle in Philadelphia” and “The Federalist Papers”. Anyway, could go on forever BUT, would like to add that if the social security number had been used as intended identity theft would not be a problem. Those who instituted the system didn’t foresee that a breach of the Constitution causes loss of freedom. I don’t think today’s leaders or most in our society, at any level, are capable of the foresight and deductive or inductive reasoning needed to preserve freedom, especially by instituting yet another mechanism to federalize a country that has a Constitution that limits the feds to only 14 expressed powers. I want to stay a non-14th amendment citizen!
April 24th, 2003 at 9:24 am
I’m sorry? Eli…
There was no evidence that a large amount of those people were spies. Actually, there is little evidence on the matter at all. Those internment camps were a huge mistake where the government made the mistake of being ruled by the majority (Federalist 10, 55, etc)…
Probably a bad comment on your part…
I think that even the United States would dissagree with your comment. I don’t know anyone that doesn’t recognize that part of U.S. history as a giant mistake.
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