National ID Cards at Center of Civil Liberties Debate

in Connecticut, Fall 2001 Newswire, Jill Weinberg, Washington, DC
October 24th, 2001

By Jill Weinberg

WASHINGTON-Connecticut Representative Nancy Johnson (R-6th) thinks a high-tech national identification card is needed to combat terrorism against the United States.

Earlier this month, Johnson said she favored a bill establishing a National ID card that would use biometric surveillance such as retinal and fingerprint scans to strengthen U.S. security and find suspected criminals faster.

Johnson told Congressional Quarterly that she was considering proposing such a bill. In the Oct. 9 article, Johnson said: “We need these biometric devices to tell who someone really is. We want a system that will make sure that people who get on planes are not on the list of 200 most wanted list of terrorists.”

In a more recent interview, however, she said she was too busy drafting other legislation, including prescription drug benefits for the elderly, to sponsor ID card legislation at this time, although she still favored the idea.

Her press secretary, Jennifer Schaming, said that Johnson wants to Discuss and explore the subject. She hasn’t drafted a bill yet, Schaming said, because she wants to be sure a national ID card “doesn’t pounce on civil liberties.”

Johnson said last week that “modern technology now allows the rather easy falsification of papers. It’s quite easy to get a false driver’s license, a false passport, false everything.”

“There’s a whole underground that sells these papers and does very well, so given the advances in imaging technology and the possibility if the wrong person is allowed access to the wrong place at the wrong time, I think we simply have an obligation to know what identity cards do accomplish in other societies,” said Johnson.

“I think we have to raise the issue whether that [Social Security] number, connected with a picture or a driver’s license connected with a picture, is a sufficient identification that you are you. And they are going to be more and more circumstances in which we are going to decide we really do need to know that you are you and you don’t just look like you,” she said.

Rep. James H. Maloney (D-5th) said he wants to see any national ID cards limited to non-citizens. “Obviously there was no American citizen we know yet involved in these terrorist activities,” he said. “All of these were foreign citizens, and I very much believe that we need to improve our identification for purposes of people coming into this country whether they’re tourists or student visas or work visas or whatever circumstance it might be.”

He added that when dealing with civil liberties, ” I think that the public needs to be heard on the issue. I’d like to have a sense of what my constituents think about it. The most valuable thing the United States has, the most valuable possession of this country is the Constitution. That is what makes the United States the United States. And whenever we’re dealing with issues that come up to touching the Constitution of the United States, I think it has to be very carefully thought through.”

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-3rd) cautioned that Congress has just acted on a broad anti-terrorism bill and that “we ought to see how that’s working before we move in the other direction.”

The American Civil Liberties Union has consistently and strongly opposed the idea of national identification as an infringement on personal privacy.

Gregory T. Nojeim, legislative counsel of the ACLU Washington Office, said in a past press release “a national id card, and national ID systems-sort of the national ID in virtual reality-mark the gravest of threats to personal privacy in the United States,” he said.

“Proposals for a national identification card or system have appeared over the years as tempting quick fixes for national problems to one segment of the population or another,” Nojeim added.

In a newsletter from the libertarian Cato Institute, Adam Thierer, Director of telecommunications studies, said that national ID cards would be a burden and an invasion of civil liberties. “The bottom line is that mandatory national ID cards aren’t going to help us catch many bad guys. While the first responsibility of government is to protect our lives and property, we shouldn’t rush into giving up some of our freedoms,” he said.

“Instead of providing such a meaningful solution, national ID cards will become, at a minimum, an unnecessary nuisance for most citizens,” Thierer added. “Worse yet, in extreme cases it could produce massive breaches of individual privacy.”

Lawrence Ellison, chairman and chief executive officer of Oracle Corp., has offered to donate the computer software to create databases for the government to help create a national ID card system. But he has said that use of the cards should be voluntary for American citizens. In a statement, Ellison said that “the single greatest step we could take to making life tougher for the terrorists would be to ensure that all the information in the myriad government databases was copied into a single, comprehensive national security database,” he said.

According to Ellison, the cards would contain personal information currently found on driver’s licenses and Social Security cards but that computer technology such as a retinal, palm or finger prints would connect personal data to an intelligence, immigration and law enforcement database that includes wanted lists from the CIA, the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The ID cards would be used to verify a person’s identity, particularly at airports.

He said that ID cards should be voluntary for U.S. citizens but mandatory for foreign citizens, including visitors who are on work and student visas.

On Oct. 17, Ellison said in an interview with the San Jose Mercury News that he had met with. Attorney General John Ashcroft and officials at the CIA and FBI in Washington , over the past week to discuss the idea. “We are in the process of putting a proposal together and analyzing what it would take to get something running in a matter of a small number of months, like three months, 90 days,” Ellison said. “We think we could put up this technology very, very quickly.” Oracle, in Redwood City, Calif., is one of the leading makers of database software.

According to Forbes magazine, Ellison is the fourth-richest man in the world, with a wealth of $25 billion. According to Privacy International, an independent, non-government organization that keeps track of national surveillance systems, about 100 countries have national identification card systems. In Argentina, for example, all citizens over the age of 8 must obtain an identification card are fined for registering late. In Spain, citizens must carry a “Documento Nacional de Identidad,” which proves the bearer’s nationality and eligibility for work and for the Spanish health care system.

European countries that have compulsory national ID systems include Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Luxembourg, Portugal and Spain. Generally the cards are used to reduce illegal immigration and voting fraud and to serve as proof of eligibility for health care and other government services. The United Kingdom established national identification cards in 1939 to identify aliens but abandoned the cards in 1952. The British government, however, has been considering reintroduction of ID cards in the aftermath of last month’s terrorist attacks in the United States.

John Damino, professor of criminal justice at Southern Vermont College in Bennington and a former Albany, N.Y., police captain, said his concerns about a national ID card are with the amount and kinds of information is stored on the card. “My concern is not that you would have a national ID, which would be I think a very good idea, but to how much information that we are willing to allow the federal government to collect on us,” he said.

“It shouldn’t go beyond what normal drivers’ licenses collect, except perhaps a fingerprint,” Damino continued. But if it goes beyond that to “let’s throw in their credit record,” or similar unnecessary information, he said, the card would have “the potential to follow us and be big brother. But that’s why we need oversight and response to it.”

“National ID cards themselves are obviously not an evil,” said Swarthmore College political scientist Jeffrey Murer, whose research focuses on European countries where cards are prevalent.

“However, past experiences show that the issuance of such cards is demonstrative of expanded state power, particularly police power. The regulation of movement, the pretext for random searches, the connection of the cards to citizenship rights–these are some of the many aspects which should be considered before the United States rushes into this.”