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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. "
The Homeland Security Chief is not Richard Clarke. It is Tom Ridge. Do people even read the articles they submit? It plainly says " President Bush's special adviser on cyberspace security said". I love to bitch about the editorial control of this site, but this is obvious.
Robert Heinlein said it best:
"When ID's are mandatory, it is time to leave the planet."
Does the word "vulture" come to mind ?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
They certainly don't have to pay for it.
When a company like MS eventually gets Hailstorm rolled out, they will have a database of a large sector of the country.
Which they will then "share" with the government for free.
Or at least to get out of anti-trust difficulties.
Paranoid?
Maybe. for now.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
Does
Anyhow, my point: this would be a good time to write to your representative. Tell him/her/it that the White House's reasons may not be the same as yours or your rep's, but that the Congress should stand behind this "frowning."
After all, "frowning" is hardly a policy decision. A few campaign contributions from major software companies and Bush will change his mind. Now is the time to say NO and make it stick.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Your social security number is already a national id card. Link it with a driver's license and you're set.
Regardless, this is a good sign. I also think one of the reasons that politicians are backing down on earlier proposals is because the public isn't as furious anymore. Wait about 3-6 months and few will care; wait a year and it'll be thrown in the back of society's minds. (Note: I don't mean to downplay the attacks by any means; all I'm saying is that it's human nature to get over things in about 3-6 months, of course, not including the people who were directly affected by it.)
Anyways, now that society's not as angry anymore, people are becoming relatively sane again. And in another year, we'll be back where we started.
..we have lot's of national ID cards all over Europe and no big brother in sight.
Just our crime rates are lower, our economic wealth is greater and people may drink alcohol on the streets.
The US is in fact criminals paradise without any decent resident laws (you must register where you live at the local public authority). Swift moving around, never be caught. There might be reasons for this but they belong to the 18th century not to the 21th.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
We already have a nice system to identify people that does not intrude upon the citizenry.
what we need to do is moniter who is in this country better.
1) do extensive background checks on visa applications before they are allowed in.
2)when they get here, they must register with some agency (INS?) giving their name address and phone number of the place they will be staying at.
3)have interviews every 2-3 months to make sure information is updated.
4)have the states issue diffrent drivers licences/ state ID cards to aliens
5)make the states issue a uniform and permanent number to all state ID cards (in my state you get a new number every time you buy a new card)
this may make it a pain for people to come a d do business here but tough....give the aliens a harder time than the citizens.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Uhh, it's national. Driver's licenses are by state, and regulated by the states. Driver's licenses are also optional - nobody ever forced you to get one.
Reports in The Observer reported on 30 September that an ID card will be introduced, which will be mandatory "to use public services, including schools and hospitals, under plans being drawn up by the Home Office" however Home Secretary David Blunkett and Lord Rooker said on 1 October that there are no plans to introduce legislation on ID cards this year or early next year. Surely this is going to create more questions that it raises? Good article about it over at Privacy International too
Join the Free Software Foundation
Like we've said before each time this comes up.
WHATS the point of ID's? We have drivers licences and passports and state ID's and All this other stuff. We also must remember that we are at war with terrorists. They kill themselves while they kill others. They don't care if you know who they are/were. Matter of fact, they probably prefer that you DO know.
Don't Tread on Me
...unless you, the people, fight like grim death against it.
Here in Australia we had a proposal for the `Australia Card' -- basically the same as this proposal, only not as technologically sophisticated. It was put to the people's vote (referendum or an election issue? I don't remember) and the people's response was to tell the proposers how to fold it into sharp corners, and where to stick it afterwards. That's Ok, though, because then they introduced the Tax File Number, which is a wannabe SSN -- you need it to earn an income (failure to provide a TFN is not illegal, but automatically results in you being taxed at 49.5%), to open a bank account, or just about anywhere else where you are using money in a non-trivial way.
The TFN was possible because we (the Australian population) had just fought furiously and won against a more draconian scheme, and were tired. Also, this almost slipped under the radar without comment, as the parliament rushed it through with very little debate, in the house or in public.
This may turn out to be another High Aim Tactic. Ask for something which is absolutely ridiculous, and let yourself be beaten back to what you wanted in the first place. Even if Ellison is serious (surely not...?) his overtures can -- and probably will -- be used by others with the same barrow to push.
The question is where to draw the line. How much freedom from surveillance do you want? Once you have figured that out, don't settle for one jot less! As soon as you rationalise that `I don't really need to be able to X' and bargain away the right to be able to do so, then you have just lost something precious which you will never get back.
Of course, things are rarely that simple, and some things are obviously stupid. (Such as, eg, `I demand the right to stockpile Anthrax spores'.) But the apparatchiks will use these examples to persuade you that the right to freely assemble, for example, is just too dangerous for you to have. It will not be put to you like that. It will be that some travel may have to be restricted, or that restrictions based on profiling [Hmm, you have travelled in the middle east, your family name is arabic, and you talk funny...] will be instituted `for the time being'.
If history teaches us anything, it is that `for the time being' can be translated `for the foreseeable future', and that just means `until it is no longer profitable to do so'.
Wasn't it a Founding Father who said `the Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance'?
Any nation ID card will fail, and probabally make it easier for "terrorists" to enter the country due to a false sense of security. Once the card is reverse engineered, some millionaire with a grudge will buy/have made equipment to produce them or modify them. The ONLY way a national ID card could ever work is if the card were tied to a national database and that database had unique information on the individual with the card, such as genetic, retinal, or finger prints. You think there was a stink when people had to register their guns, just imagine trying to get the entire population to do this.
Now with that said, I wouldn't totally discount the idea. Why not require all foreigners over on visas submit thumb prints that are tied to cards? It would make it harder to "legally" enter the country on a stolen or counterfeit visa, though of course not impossible, but considering the paranoia in the US now it would make a "sleeper agents" job a bit more difficult.
Burn Hollywood Burn
1) Driver's licence is optional.
2) Driver's licence is state-controlled.
3) Driving is a state-granted ability; citizenship is a birthright.
4) Lose your driver's license, you can't drive until you get a new one; lose your national ID card, ???
etc, etc.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
Clarke then followed up with some remarks about Larry Ellison:
"As far as anyone can tell, the only real supporter of the scheme is that Larry Ellison guy. He is so obsessed with being richer than Bill Gates that he will use any occasion to pimp out Oracle. I think it has something to do with him being a caveman; anyone with that much testosterone is obviously going to have a hard time coping in an industry where nobody really gives a damn about penis size."
ID's are, in a sense, already mandatory. Think about this. How do you open up a bank account? How do you get a job? How do you prove your age? I could ask hundreds of questions... but the answer is always the same:
A Government Issued ID Card
State Driver's License
State Identification Card
Military ID
Military Dependant ID
Passport
I'm sure there are other official forms of ID, but these are the 'mainstream' ones.
At least one of these is necessary 99% of the time as proof of identity or age. You don't need one, but how much can you really do without one?
Maybe Larry needs to spend more on bribes^H^H^H^H^H^H campaign contributions if he wants his ideas to get a warmer reception in DC.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
First of all, Selective Service (AKA the draft) does not include women. So its only manditory for half the population.
And secondly, it isn't an ID. People don't ask for selective service ID numbers when you board planes or whatever.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Asked about Clarke's disklike of the national ID card plan, Ellison was quoted as saying, "Ok, so no ID cards. How about every citizen is required to purchase an Oracle Database Enterprise license? C'mon, folks, I get to make money off of this somehow, right?"
"Understand you're having a little Jimmy Page trouble."
When a company like MS eventually gets Hailstorm rolled out, they will have a database of a large sector of the country.
.NET My Services previously known as hailstorm, would be a system for centrally storing all the user info from Hotmail/Windows XP users that decided they want Microsoft to be the central arbiter of their information.
At best,
Oracle and Sun on the other hand decided to use the an incident that involved the most deaths by violent means on American soil in over a century as a chance to hawk their fucking software. People on Slashdot like the bash Microsoft because their software is buggy and they put a couple of greedy startups out of business yet when people sink so low as to use the deaths of their fellow citizens as a cheap and guady way to make more money WHERE THE FUCK IS THE OUTRAGE?.
Here's my take on it...Prototype of US National ID Card Unveiled
PS: What's interesting is that besides being one big ad for Oracle and Sun products not one person has shown how a national ID card would have prevented the acts of September 11th. Heck, it isn't like teh airlines weren't already asking for ID before people boarded the plane or are Ellison and McNeally suggesting racial profiling where all foreigners fly on seperate flights from God Fearing Americans?
In Canada, Income Tax was introduced sometime in the last century as a method of dealing with war debts if I don't miss my recollection. This "Temporary Measure" has proved to have remarkable staying power. Decades and decades later, and still going strong.
Hmmm. Kinda like the Liberals getting elected with a plan to repeal the GST (VAT-like tax). They never did. Hmmmm.
Temporary measures tend to not be. Governments tend not to repeal measures giving them more money or power.
The old RPG Traveller (by Marc Miller) captured this by pointing out (in the rules for generating worlds) the relationship between high population and oppressive government and between oppressive government and high levels of law and law enforcement.
It was only a game. But strangely reality seems to be following pretty much the pattern they mapped out....
Tomb
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
In 1992 the state of California brought out the new digitized driver's license. The DMV had this big pr campaign saying that it was impossible to counterfeit. That lasted for about two months until perfect fraudulent licenses were being found. How did it happen?
Because DMV employees were being bribed--as much as $5000 per license.
See, the thing is, if such a card is so powerful, then there will be a justification in getting a fraudulent one. Before photos were added to licenses (not all states require the photo incidentally) no one faked a license...because it couldn't do crap. No one bribed a DMV official for a license--they just drove the car. After the photo was added, then the license became a powerful document--now I can cash out someone's bank account, or write bad checks...et cetera.
And in the instance in California above--the criminals didn't even mess about trying to fake the card--they just bribed a DMV official. A biometric card wouldn't prevent this...because clearly the card would be made correctly--it's just representing the wrong identity. And if this were a national card, then there would be millions of cards made per year by thousands of government officials--all you have to do is find one to bribe (and it's easy...they don't make that much money ya know.)
In computers, they say that your security is as good as your biggest weakness. Consider the California driver's license--it's got microprinting and holograms and all that silly stuff. That's not the weakness of the card--the weakness is that it's issued to 30 million people by thousands of DMV employees and is verified at tens of thousands of different places. I don't care if you required DNA to issue such a card, the numbers just don't make it that secure.
As much as my inner civil libertarian likes the White House backing away from a national ID card, I really have to wonder at that last comment. Specifically, if you have some way to correlate data between multiple cards (DMV databases, social security, etc), isn't it the same thing as having a national ID? Mine just happens to say "California Driver's Liscence" on the front while yours says "M.I.T. Student ID." It just takes one giant database record merge to put the whole mess together.
It seems the civil liberty issue is not the use of a single card (as symbolic as that might be) but the sharing of the information already out there. The "record merge" can already be done under limited circumstances (e.g. manually by a detective with warrants to search records at all the instituions). The real problem here would be the wholesale sharing of that information, especially electronically for any bureaucrat with too much free time to peruse.
Viewed from that point, I don't know whether to relax about a national ID card (since the thing essentially already exists) or freak out in panic (for the same reasons).
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
I am sorry but I don't get it ?!
What would you show to proof your identity to someone? Your birth certificate ?!
Now, as much as I personally would like to see this particular individual holed up in a bunker, far away from yours truely, I have an inkling that the whole tattoo thing might be a bad idea to implement (and that's without the Nazi, THX-1138(?), cattle, etc. baggage taken into account).
Still, I really do like the DNA crosscheck idea.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Your social security number is already a national id card. Link it with a driver's license and you're set.
They allowed that, then mandated it, several years ago.
If you didn't have to provide your SS number the last time you renewed, expect to have to produce it next time.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
> brother in sight.
You don't? Are you sure?
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
Why would the White House frown on a national US ID card, when it was all in favor of the strongly authoritarian "PATRIOT" act?
There's a weird undercurrent in USA Right Wing politics against things like national ID cards. The more crazed Republicans ("Black Helicopter Republicans", sort of like "Log Cabin Republicans", only the average BHR gets less respect) usually believe that national ID cards equate to the "Mark of the Beast". I can't really believe that consideration of weird, fringe beliefs keeps the current White House from doing the national ID card thing.
It isn't actually very surprising to be hearing this from the Whitehouse. Republicans have traditionally been against national ID cards, in fact I remember republicans railing against the Clinton Health Care Plan because it could have implicitly created a national ID card.
There are still some ethics in Washington, surprisingly.
and it's not like anyone didn't just see this as a ploy to sell more copies of Oracle anyway.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
If they ever DO mandate a national ID card/number I want it to be mandatory to provide it for registration in federal elections and to be collected federally and checked for uniqueness. That would go a long way toward eliminating election fraud.
"Everyone I've talked to doesn't think it's a good idea," Clarke said.
Which is why I almost didn't post this, for fear of turning more Republicans on to the idea of national ID cards than it turns Democrats off from it.
In case you haven't been following the issues, it's primarily Democratic legislators who have been in favor of a national ID card and other tightening of citizen tracking.
But the Democrats are the main beneficiaries of the votes of illegal/undocumented non-citizen voters. So they have also been strong opponents of voter verification and proponents of unexamined registration and voting schemes such as "motor-voter" and always-absentee-without-reason voting.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
There are circumstances where a Citizen qualifies to vote but does not have or need an SS number.
There are a few duplications - both multiple people under one number and people with more than one number.
Non-citizens have SS numbers legally.
Criminal conviction status and other issues that might affect eligibility to vote aren't attached to SS number (with the possible exception of military discharge status).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I actually like using my US Passport for identification. It is accepted almost everywhere a driver's license is, but it does not show my street address or phone number. It is a nearly pure identification credential, and other than providing space for foreign consuls to note where I have visited abroad, it has no other use than to prove who I am and that I am a US citizen.
Edith Keeler Must Die
What really blows my mind is this strange addiction to smart cards... digital ID? smartcard smartcard!!!!!!
smartcards suck. The readers are overpriced, the cards are delicate and cannot be worn on the person without clothing or in the shower.
I have an Ibutton ring, I shower with it on, If I'm buck naked (Ok all of you can stop going Ewwwwww!) I still have my ibuton on me. It stores more, can do more(Java VM built in) is pretty much indestructable (stainless steel) and is super secure/tamper proof. (Open the ibutton can and it releases the inert gas inside and causes the silicon inside to quickly erase/destruct)
I log in my computer, unlock my home's doors, and open the garage door with it. I also store my bank accountnumbers inside and when in my reader that cost a paltry $15.00, it also stores my login/password for websites and automagically logs me in.
granted the java ring is expensive ($75.00) bit the ibuton in single price quantity with 32K of flash storage is around $5.00 and about $2.00 if you are only interested in a ID.
smartcards are $5.00 each in lots of 100, the reader is horribly overpriced, and durability is not there by any means.
A national id is a horribe idea, but thinking of using a smartcard for it is plain stupidity.
About as stupid as thinking that Oracle was being nice and generous by offering to design the database.... Geee, what humanitarians.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Barcode tattoos on peoples' forearms?!? That's a ridiculous idea!
The tattoos should be on people foreheads. That way a computer can scan a crowd of people rapidly, provided there aren't too many hats. Forearms aren't nearly as visible.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Robert Heinlen is a VERY well-known science fiction writer. I would guess that at least 90% of Slashdotters have read at least one of his books.
Probably the best known of his books is "Stranger in a Strange Land", a book about a human being who was raised by Martians and later brought back to Earth. Martians (in the book) had an activity called "grokking" which was to understand deeply (deeper than the average human being ever does or will do). This is where the term "grok" (as you have probably seen it used here) comes from.
Another one of his books mentioned a lot on Slashdot is "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", which is about a prison colony on the moon (it's actually mainly inhabited by the descendants of the original inhabitants of the prison colony, but they're still treated like prisoners) that revolts to form its own nation, with the help of a self-aware computer.
Heinlen is also known for being rather vocal about his Libertarian views, and this sometimes comes across in his books, such as in "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls".
Whether or not you agree with his political views, you can still enjoy his works, and I strongly suggest that you try them.
______________________________________
Ever notice how fast Windows runs? Neither did I...
I think I am more comfortable with this than with my data sitting unencrypted, on some doctor's PC somewhere. Otoh, can you imagine teaching a whole nation how to create and use pincodes longer than four digits? Scary.
I recently moved from the UK to the US. In the UK, you can pretty much live happily with no ID.
Here in California ID is required for everything. For example, I just (20 minutes ago) requested some info about cable modems. I needed to provide an ID number before getting any info!
Okay, so I don't have a Californian driving license. I don't have a social security card. If I didn't have a UK passport I would be pretty stuffed. That would mean: no bank account, no apartment, no TV, and (most importantly) no Beer.
So I have to carry my passport everywhere (and risk losing it - which would be a real bummer). I figure it is okay to leave it with my clothes whilst surfing off pacific beach, but technically that's against the INS rules.
Presumably all Americans need to carry their driving license nearly always. That sucks.
So, overall, I don't think a national ID would make any difference to anybody's privacy, and it would make going out considerably easier. (Gesh, half the doormen at bars/clubs don't know where to find my photo in my passport).
I myself am working on software for Traveller. Called travtrack, it is in the middling stages. It's very cool, using gtk+ and glib for data structures, classes, inheritance &c. and guile for its scripting language. Ideally, I'd like it to someday be the emacs of interstellar science-fiction RPGs.
Right now it's surprisingly far along, and is doing fairly well on the SourceForge ratings. It's just me working on it, but I'm hoping that once I get release 1.0 of both travtrack (the actual galaxy-tracking software) and travlib (the library which implements Traveller objects) more developers will pitch in.
Traveller's very, very far from dead.
Here's my little pet theory about why Larry and his bedfellows are so interested in this venture.
Everybody has a social security number. Look at your social security card. It's a piece of cheap paper that you could print yourself. Driver's licenses are more difficult to duplicate. But not so difficult that you'd entrust them for highly secure transactions. What's the point? Let's call a spade a spade. Another work for what we're talking about is authentication. Are you who you say you are? Something you have, something you are, something you know - the triptych of secure authentication. Give everyone a card with their picture on it, containing a unique code, with a PIN. What a sly dog, Lawrence. Good way to beat William to the punch, you good samaritan humanitarian, you.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
Your inability to do so much as type "Heinlein" into Google (~100,000 hits) is not.
If you remain unable to answer even the simplest questions on your own, how can you hope to even understand the daily news without prior spoon feeding of the history, technology, and other information it depends on? I hope you haven't reached voting age yet.
Anyway, the only data they have to work on are just that: data. Every incident, every occurrence, is fed into the database and correlated with as many factors as possible and realistic. There is a problem when the insurance benefit is high dollar (as æroplane insurance must be) and there is relatively little data to collect. On 11 Septemeber we had four commercial plane crashes. That's probably more than in the continental US in the previous dozen years, and certainly more than in the past half-dozen. Suddenly their actuarial tables were thrown all out of whack. So they corrected them.
The intelligent corporation self-insures as much as possible. When large enough, one may collect one's actuarial data, and put aside as much as one would have put into insurance premiums, and come out ahead of the game. Insurance is a sucker's bet, in the real world as much as in Vegas. Anyone who takes it deserves the reaming he will most certainly receive.
Where's any mention of Sun? I haven't even heard of Sun being involved. Did you read the article?
Sun Micro CEO Sees More Support for National ID
I think the advocates of the notion have only themselves to blame for not presenting a good-faith attempt at that goal.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Okay, so now having public officials that don't understand and fear technology seems to be a good thing.
I think the only way to get politicians on your side of any technological issue is to scare them. From now on, we should just push the absolute worst-case scenario of issues we don't want to become a part of policy.
If the DMCA is passed, um, people could be forced to sign complicated contracts just to listen to music!
Actually, that's not quite frightening enough.
Maybe one of you can do better?
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
---
would allow the US the explot undocumented immigrants even more.
---
By chance do you mean illegal aliens?
The only reason they are undocumented is because they're breaking the law and haven't been caught yet.
These euphemisms are seriously getting out of hand. 'Undocumented' indeed.
- Jeff
Nobody ever forced me to get a job but If I want to eat I have to make money. The way things are set up, you have to drive to get anywhere. Also, you idiots, I know that a driver's license is state and not federal, what I meant was how is that any less of an invasion of privacy. If you want to do anything, you have to have a driver's license or a state ID card: open a bank account, buy liquor, rent an apartment, etc.
~ now you know
They have them at the University of Minnesota. At least one person was discovered to have found a [simple] way to re-charge his card for no money. I don't think it even involved a card writer, just some trickery of the vending machines. With a writer you can do more I'm sure. (assuming you can discover the algorythm and key)
And how would a national ID card be any different than a driver's license?
Drivers License databases are shared between states. Those records can also be used to keep track of people. So in this sense there is no difference.
However, Ellison's vision would have these ID cards linked to a database of fingerprints, and people with the ID cards, though they would be optional, would have easier access to airplanes. This could actually reduce security, so I see why the opposition (and Ellison's attempt to make a buck in services after sale).
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
There are a number of problems with manditory auto insurance.
One of the largest problems is non-compliance.
Another problem is the fact that insurance rates are calculated by time period (monthly, quarterly, yearly) instead of by the distance driven. Someone who drives five thousand miles a month is more likely to be in an acident than their neighbor who drives fifty miles a month.
Both these problems would be solved by requiring that insurance be included in the price of gasoline. Everyone who drives would be insured, and people would pay insurance based on the distance they drive.
Motorists who get good gas mileage would get a small break on their insurance costs, which would provide incentives that would please the environmentalists.
Police and the court systems would spend less time pursuing charges of driving without insurance.
New drivers could avoid the catch-22 of needing an insured car to get a driver's licence, and needing a driver's license to register a car.
There wouldn't be so many advertisements for auto insurance.