France May Require Biometric ID Cards

Will Affleck-Asch writes "According to an article on Infoworld today, France may require her citizens pay for new identity cards that hold their biometric information in electronic format. The French government outlined its plan last month to replace the identity cards and passports offered to French citizens with new ones that carry a microchip containing digitized photographs and fingerprints. The plan is to introduce the passports in 2006, and the identity cards a year later. Citizens haven't been forced to carry ID cards since 1955."

Comments

What perfect idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

Forgive me if I am missing the point, but is not the purpouse of biometrics to REMOVE potentially compromised security keys, like ID cards? Biometrics, as I understand the science, allows an individual to use their body as a form of ID. Trust beaurrocrats to get the complete wrong idea about technologies.

Re:I'd Pay For This In The U.S.

[Ann Elk]

Exactly how would a National ID Card make people safer?

Re:I'd Pay For This In The U.S.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you don't realy have any libertarian leanings whatsoever. Nations involving themselves with micromanaging their citizens through ID cards is diametrically opposed to libertarian principals.

Re:Making people extremists...

[El]

Pacifism only works against an oppressor that has a conscience. Do you really think non-violent resistance would have prevented nazi exterminations? (Actually, it did at one point, where good Aryan women were protesting the arrests of their Jewish husbands, but that's a different story. In general, it wouldn't help.)

Other than that, I agree - extremism breeds extremism, and violence should only be used as a very last resort. However, one negotiates from a position of weakness if one refuses to use even the treat of violence as a bargaining tactic.

Re:I'd Pay For This In The U.S.

[anpe]

I was thinking "he's got a point" until I read:
it's a much different world now.
I'm always amazed that people feel so confident that things like nazism are gone forever. Freedom requires daily care and devotion.

Re:I'd Pay For This In The U.S.

[El]

Because God knows the 3 million illegal immigrants from Mexico we now have living in the US wouldn't be here if we all had national ID cards! 1) Suicide bombers probably prefer it if you know their identity after the fact. What magic method were you planning on using that only gives ID cards to law-abiding citizens, and makes sure no persons with criminal intent get one? 2) As mentioned again, millions of people enter the country without authorization of any kind. Unless you're going to post armed guards on every corner to demand passerby show thier papers, I don't think mandatory ID will help at all with the problem of 5000 miles of porous borders.

Re:Many French support these cards because...

[Stop Error]

Interesting how you phrase deporting criminals (they are ILLEGAL aliens) with, "harass minorities".

Re:I'd Pay For This In The U.S.

[focitrixilous P]

Such systems do not help with security. Many of the 9-11 terrorists had valid ids. When you enforce such restrictions, you do nothing but limit the law abiding. Carrying an ID will not prevent you from committing any crime, but it will make some poor soul who forgets their ID once out of a hundred times a criminal. A biometric ID will not jump out of your pocket to stop you from shooting a gun, cannot stop you from robbing someone, cannot do anything. All it can do is inconvience the law abiding. In the end, people get more fed up with the government, leading to MORE violence, not less.

Re:Many French support these cards because...

[totatis]

deport illegal Muslim immigrants from the Maghreb
if its going to be used to harass minorities.

Make your mind buddy, if it's used to deport illegal immigrants, it's not for harassing minorities that are legally in France. Sure racisme has increased over the years here, but I fail to hear other French agreeing to this new ID card, and I even more fail to hear them thinking it's good for harassing Arabs.
I think it's more a new way to take our money, since many people (myself included) tend to not renew any ID card or passport, since driver licence is enough and doesn't need to be renewed.
We have one of the most bloated and inefficient bureaucracy in Europe, and they tend to always look for new ways to get even bigger.

I really don't think racism has anything to do with that, just plain old stupid bureaucracy wanting to be even bigger, even stupidier, and even more efficient. Just like it always has.

And it has the added bonus of justifying recent government employes wages increase.

To quote Clemenceau : "In France we plant taxes and we grow fonctionnaires (state employes)".

Subsidizes French Industry

[mpapet]

I would hazzard a guess and say that one reason they are doing this is to subsidize french IT.

-The French got behind smart cards from their inception.
-Sagem is one of the leaders in AFIS. (automatic fingerprint identification system) They provide a whole lot of biometric hardware and software technology to countries that can afford to install it.

Re:I'd Pay For This In The U.S.

[ElBorba]

Yeah, I have to agree with you there. There are certainly strong arguments for the national ID card, biometric or otherwise. BUT, the notion that the card would somehow prevent terrorism is bunk, and I think that EVERY person, Rep or Dem, in Washington (DC) knows this full well. There is a common notion that we have got to nail down the borders if we're going to take security seriously. I suspect that this will never happen and that the borders will remain wide open. Rather, is the important thing actually just to make us all FEEL safer? I think it may be so. The real terrorists will always find a way to try, which is why the FBI/CIA has to work harder to get to them before they get to us. Oh, it goes on and on...
Anyhow, I'm a geek and I want my Orwellian biometric card so I can use it to go shopping or turn the lights on in the house remotely or whatever. SOUNDS COOL! Liberties be damned.

Re:cancel them in the US then.

[Dorsai42]

This will make it easy for the Nazi's to round them up next time. There WILL be a next time, there's ALWAYS a next time.

civil rights != "spineless government"

[Moraelin]

Yeah, I know that a concept of "rights" is becoming a pretty strange notion in the USA nowadays. Or that thinking for oneself is a baaad thing.

But basically all you're saying there is that France does still treat people as humans, not like a bunch of terrorists until proven innocent. E.g., yes, there was a demonstration. It may be surprising to you, but demonstrations _are_ a legal thing in a democracy.

Was _everyone_ in the demonstration an illegal immigrant? No, seriously? How do you know that there aren't also a bunch of french citizens in there?

(Believe it or not every single country has the current USA-style "immigrant = terrorist" scare, or even the same kind of nationalism. The french kind of nationalism for example is more about language and culture, than about being born there. So there could have been quite a bunch of people born in france who are sympathetic, or at least not hostile, to people whose only fault is not being born there.)

So what do you propose that the police should do? Arrest everyone and keep them in custody several days until they can check them all? Break a legal protest on the excuse that some people in that protest might be illegal immigrants?

Yeah, that excuse will soo come in handy next time when people protest something. Give that idea to Bush while you're at it: I'm sure he'll love doing that to the next anti-war demonstration. Hey, there _could_ be illegal Mexican immigrants or some wanted terrorists in that demonstration. Must make sure.

If you really believe that burying democracy alive is the right way to gain some vague promise of safety, you're so mistaken it's not even funny.

Or how about the common sense of being tactful there? You propose, what? That the police clashes with an already agitated group of demonstrators, to show them who's boss? Yeah, way to go to turn a peaceful demonstration into a riot.

So you're telling me, what? That unlike you, someone in the French police actually had a brain?

Briefly: put down the crack pipe, join a 12 step program, or see a competent surgeon about having your head removed from your ass.