The one problem I see with national ID cards is verifiability.
When you issue court documents, for example, they always have watermarks or some sort of custom artwork on them to represent the culture of where they're from.
That artwork shows sophistication, and it is through sophistication that citizens know that something is reliable and authentic.
For a country as big as ours, having national IDs seems very distant. If we lived in a culture with national pastimes (I guess baseball counts, but that's dying, and what else?), then, it would give us something to organically identify with as reliable.
If you want another good example of arbitrary artwork, look at American money. It makes hardly any sense at all besides the numbers and political figures printed on it. There's no "current" behind its currency.
Admirable idea but there are some problems to consider. Information systems don't just spring up, especially when you talking about 330 million people.
If you go through the states, the DMV is the most logical. This is currently in process. In 2005 the Real Id act was passed. It took til 2008 for the DHS to come up with final rules because the many concerns, including the nuts and bolts, privacy, technology and personnel training, that must be addressed in creating a national identification data base. It was determined after surveying states the the cost to them would be $11 billion dollars. See page three because it's going to eat space here to quote it.
http://www.ncsl.org/print/statefed/R...NAL_Sept19.pdf
That is a very comprehensive report on this this topic and even though, it was written in 2006, the substance of it is still pertinent.
There is a real debate to be had over civil liberties and privacy concerns as well.
http://tcf.org/publications/pdfs/pb2...al_ID_Card.pdf
http://epic.org/privacy/id_cards/epic_realid_0508.pdf
There are two papers covering the historical and contemporary arguments against a national ID card and the implementation of the Real ID law.
Civil liberty advocates like the ACLU, worry that it could be abused by the government. From the EPIC report:
For example, a Detroit Free Press investigation revealed that ninety Michigan police officers, dispatchers, federal agents, and security guards abused the police database over the past five years to stalk women, threaten motorists, and settle scores.
Privacy of electronic records from companies and individuals to mine and sell or distribute personal information. This is a real problem now. Under the Real ID act (from the EPIC report)
The Department of Homeland Security rejected encryption in the final rule because of “the complexities and costs of implementing an encryption infrastructure.” We anticipated this and detailed a privacy-protective
alternative to encryption, yet the agency did not take this path either. We said:
We suggest that no personal data be placed on the machine readable zone. Instead, place a new identifier that is unused elsewhere (i.e., not the driver’s license number or Social Security Number). This unique identifier will “point” to the records in the national database. Access to the database can be controlled by password and encryption security, because it is easier to regulate public keys in this scenario. Also, the State should ensure that a new unique identifier is created each time the machine readable zone is renewed or reissued, in order to make the identifier less useful as an everyday ID number – people would not be forever linked to this identifier. This approach would improve data security and privacy.
Instead of accepting this simple, privacy-protective suggestion, the Department of Homeland Security chose to require that a great deal of personal data be stored on the 2D barcode.
This report is from 2008, so under Janet Napolitano under the last three and a half years, there may have been some changes, I can't find a report on it, but it's enough to raise a red flag that this was a problem in 2008. It should be mentioned that Secretary Napolitano has sought to repeal the Real ID act.
Homeland Security chief seeks to repeal Real ID Act - CNN
Then the security of the data base itself is problematical. We hear several times a year how credit card and governmental agencies have their records hacked and made public. It also must be made accessible to state agencies, so the sheer number of people who could get into it, could be unmanageable.
I've only touched on a few major points, there are many more contained in my links. A creation of a national ID card is much more complex than one might think and rife with practical as well as political and sociological concerns and issues.
*To anyone who thinks they recognize this post, yes you do.
