Following are selected passages from the Special Report, “Your Papers Please: How a National Identification Regime Would Threaten Privacy, Freedom—and Security.” For information on ordering either an Adobe pdf copy of this 46-page Special Report or a printed copy, please send a message to our distributor, Emergency Tips,
at emergencytips@yahoo.com, asking “How to buy YOUR PAPERS PLEASE?”
"The system is
perfect. It’s never wrong. Until it comes after you." —trailer for the movie "Minority
Report" * * * In
the overtly
and suddenly. The two main avenues to a national identification regime
currently being pursued
are a "hardening" of the state-issued driver’s licenses, and a
"trusted traveler"
card to be dispensed to those air passengers who have passed a background
check. We are more familiar with the driver’s
license as a means of authorization of movement, because of its original purpose of verifying
that the cardholder is competent to drive a vehicle. But in the past several years,
at least nominal identification has also been required to board airplanes. And more
recently, of course, we have been subjected to even more invasive procedures. So Americans
are prepped for... * * * Robert
W. considered to be politically libertarian,
are among the advocates of [surveillance and screening at the airport]—even though
each has previously staked out positions opposed to the kind of ubiquitous data
collection and surveillance that would be entailed by a full- fledged national ID card. A few
years ago, for example, Representative Paul supported repeal of legislation aimed at ... * * * ...The FAA already implements a Computer-Assisted
Passenger Prescreening System, which the government is
struggling to expand into a far more comprehensive and extensive program called CAPPS
II. All the data would be crunched using "data-mining and predictive software to
profile passenger activity and intuit obscure clues about potential threats, even before
the scheduled day of flight." Patterns of activity would generate a mind-reading "threat
index," and passengers with a too-high index would be.... * * * As part of their rationale
for a national ID card, advocates often lament the ease with which current ID requirements may be
sidestepped by those who would violate an individual’s privacy to commit credit-card fraud
or identity theft. And so, in the name of protecting individual privacy, they want to make
it harder for the individual to protect (his own) privacy. But
these advocates rarely ask why particular ID requirements a) exist in the first
place, and b) why they render the
individual so vulnerable.... * * * Once
an individual is compelled to provide his personal information in conjunction
with a single identifying number, that is not the end of the matter. His
private information
is not only known, it is used, and
not only for originally stipulated purposes. The solemn
import of [the Social Security Administration’s] Regulation Number One notwithstanding,
government agencies who acquire identifying information have indeed readily
divulged that data to other government agencies—and sold it to private companies.
In turn, private companies have often sold private information to other private
companies and to the government. Meanwhile, thieves bribe both and steal from both. * * * Policemen
and others in law enforcement have also pilfered databases—in pursuit of personal, political, and
criminal ends. In quest of a girlfriend, an Australian policeman performed thousands of
unofficial searches of a police database. He later claimed that many of the searches were "training
exercises." Police in deprived of access to an FBI
database after officers were accused of repeatedly abusing their access. A criminal background checks on
organizers of a campaign to recall the sheriff. A sheriff’s lieutenant in * * * No
database, regardless of purpose or any public assurances, can be entirely secure from careless or
unscrupulous persons. Even the most robust security system is susceptible to an inside job—or
to typos. No matter how heavily armored, no functioning database can be entirely sealed off from intrusion. That
is because every database must be capable
of being read and updated. Someone is doing the reading, someone is
doing the updating. Many of these people
are.... * * * If a national identification regime
cannot enhance, but only jeopardize, the individual’s
privacy—his ability to control what
personal information about himself is released
to whom, and when—neither can it enhance his freedom—his ability to act peacefully
without being controlled or stopped by others. It can only jeopardize his freedom. * * * Although
the friends of a national identification regime assure us that it is not ipso facto totalitarian, the goal of
universal oversight and authorization to which a national identification regime aspires
is certainly totalitarian in scope, and hardly empty in political import.....In a
regime of permanent, ongoing surveillance, neither probable cause nor reasonable suspicion of a crime
or intention to commit one would be required before the government could check up
on a person. We might hope, should a national identification regime come to
pass, that.... * * * One motive
of governmental authorization is social control. To obtain a national ID card—a license to live—Americans
may well be required to conform to certain standards of governmentally
prescribed behavior. We know this is likely under a national identification regime because
it is already happening in this country. Draft
registration is a telling example. Some fourteen states already require applicants for a driver’s
license to... * * * In the
name of security, a national identification regime may also hinder or prevent movement. Post-911, we
are already seeing examples of travel plans being delayed or denied not because
of any criminal activity or suspicion of same, but because, for example, the name of the
passenger is similar to the name (or
alias) of a terrorist (or criminal) on a watch list. Johnnie
Thomas, a 70-year-old black woman, suffered catch-22-like travails because "John Thomas
Christopher" is an alias of a man who murdered his wife and children (but who was also, not
irrelevantly, captured two days after being placed on the FBI’s Ten-Most-Wanted list).
After the first incident.... * * * By law,
national ID cards are typically presentable on demand. This often means that a person may be detained
and investigated simply for failing to have an ID card. Or perhaps he will simply be
unable to live. * * * If the
mere possibility of preventing (or delaying) a crime constituted a sufficient justification for violating our
rights and freedoms, there could be no principled curb whatever on such violations. At
every step on the road to a completely totalitarian surveillance regime, there
would be chinks in the armor of surveillance which unscrupulous and wily individuals
could exploit. Their successes would provide rationale for still further tightening of
the noose around the necks of the rest of us. And we would become more and more hemmed in,
constrained—punished—despite our innocence. It is
true that freedom to act in a society also gives bad guys freedom to.... * * * If
direct investigation and surveillance of terrorist plotters provokes no reasonable
suspicion
of a terrorist plot—and if reasonable suspicion of a terrorist plot provokes no
investigation—does
it matter whether the plotters do or do not have a national ID card? * * * The
most demoralizing aspect of a national identification regime is that it would treat all citizens, all
residents, as criminal suspects who.... # # #
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at emergencytips@yahoo.com, asking “How to buy YOUR PAPERS PLEASE?” To view the table of contents of this paper, go to: http://www.davidmbrown.com/excerpts/nidcontents.html To view a description of this paper, go to: http://www.davidmbrown.com/excerpts/nidpromo.html