White House Frowns on National ID Card

sonic writes "'One security measure that [Homeland Defense Chief] Clarke didn't put much store in, however, was a proposal by some industry leaders, including Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, to create a national ID card. Clarke said he could not name one official who supports the idea as proposed, though he said the administration does not yet have a formal position on the concept. "Everyone I've talked to doesn't think it's a good idea," Clarke said. "

Comments

I *like* national ID cards

[sam_handelman]

And I'm a crazy civil libertarian.

All of these points have been raised the last four or five times this discussion has come up, but:
1. We allready have them.
2. You need to be able to postively identify people.
3. Questionable identification is more of a problem for our privacy than positive information.
4. It's the stockpiling of information on the part of big whatever that needs to be curtailed - not their ability to verify the information that they are allowed to stockpile by having a centralised system for handling IDs.

Who you are, where you live and where you work are all perfectly reasonable things for the government to know! You give this info to the government and the government gives you a card. Very reasonable. The government *has* to be able to know these things in order to carry out the minimal functions of the state, and the only rational reason for someone not to want the government to know these things about them is that they're a criminal. End of story.

That said, Oracle and Sun are big democratic contributors - in spite of Sun's CEO's (what's his name, the thin guy in the hat) claims to be some kind of jesse venturite or something. Unless the Republicans can find someone on their end of the ideological "spectrum" (with rightists and centrists as it's two "extremes") to spearhead the thing, it's going to go nowhere. So, I wouldn't be surprised if some little known tech firm in Austin (probably owned by Enron) comes up with a proposal that everyone on team W thinks is great.