While You Sleep

You can stop worrying that the forces of autocracy in America are going to require all of us to carry national identification cards. That’s so old school.

[…]

”Next Generation Identification,” [a system being developed by the FBI] is intended to “fuse” our fingerprint data with our iris patterns, palm prints, earlobe shapes, facial contours and even the unique ways we walk and speak. This fused, digital image of our persons is to be shared with every police agency in the country... as well as agencies abroad.

[…]

If the very existence of this national ID system doesn’t make you worry about your privacy rights, you might want to know about a quiet little change that the FBI made in the management of such databases in 2004. Officials exempted police databases from a Privacy Act requirement that the personal data stored in them has to be accurate.

  Jim Hightower

That's pretty ambitious. I wonder how they propose to get everybody processed. There must be an old Soviet style thirty-year plan. Oh, wait. Do you suppose I'll soon have to submit to all those measurements if I want a driver's license?

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Protect Your Freedom with a National ID Card

With states and citizens objecting, the Congress and the Bush Administration have moved ahead to require a national identification card — abandoning decades of opposition to such a system on civil liberties grounds. I testified against this proposal when it was first made in the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks. What is truly remarkable is that the REAL ID has become little more than an excuse to do something that the Bush Administration has been trying to do for years: create interlocking databases on citizens.

What is particularly galling is that the card has been watered down to reduce costs for the states. So that main selling point — a micro chip — has been removed. This is one of the reason that the card programs has been reduced in cost by roughly 75 percent from $14.6 billion to $3.9 billion. Now anyone born after 1964 (I missed the cut-off thankfully) will have to get a new REAL ID to get into federal buildings or to fly.

  Jonathan Turley

Because we know that terrorists cannot get us any other way than to have a valid ID - excuse me - REAL ID, they aren’t concerned with anything other than federal buildings or something that can only be penetrated by flying a plane into it, and they can’t forge IDs.

The real purpose of the card program was to get Congress to allow the Administration to allow the use of a massive data bank system checking and monitoring citizens. Private information on citizens will now be passed from agency to agency. The Administration has long sought what is called “total transparency.”

For everyone besides the Administration itself.

REAL ID.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.