National ID Policy

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/25/the_joker_gets_id/

 

Cato Policy on National ID

A national ID has long been regarded as contrary to the American
character, and it has been opposed by leading American political figures
whenever it has been proposed. For example, when President Ronald
Reagan’s attorney general William French Smith advocated in a cabinet
meeting for support of a national IDcard for illegal immigration control, the
president reportedly scoffed, ‘‘Maybe we should just brand all the babies.’’
In the same context, Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale
said: ‘‘We’ve never had citizenship tests in our country before. And I don’t
think we should have a citizenship card today. That is counterproductive.’’
Democratic Speaker of the House Thomas P. ‘‘Tip’’ O’Neill Jr. (D-MA)
called out the ills of national ID systems in a 1987 debate over immigration
reform, saying: ‘‘Hitler did this to the Jews, you know. He made them
wear a dog tag.’’
A decade before that, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) recognized and
objected to the surveillance consequences and power shifts caused by
national ID systems. In a debate on the Privacy Act of 1974, he said:
Once the social security number is set as a universal identifier, each person
would leave a trail of personal data behind him for all his life which could
be immediately reassembled to confront him. Once we can be identified
to the administration in government or in business by an exclusive number,

we can be pinpointed wherever we are, we can be more easily manipulated,
we can be more easily conditioned and we can be more easily coerced.
One of the first groups to formally consider national ID issues was the
Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Automated Personal Data Systems
within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. In 1973, it did
an important study of record-keeping practices in the computer age. On
national ID systems, the ‘‘HEW Report’’ said: ‘‘This Committee believes
that fear of a standard universal identifier is justified. . . .Therefore, we take
the position that a standard universal identifier should not be established in
the United States now or in the foreseeable future.’’

Members of Congress and state legislators should carry on theAmerican
tradition and resist creating or implementing any national identification
system. Yet what Senator Goldwater warned of a quarter century ago is
now a real threat.

Read More;

http://www.scribd.com/doc/22388664/Keeping-With-Tradition-on-National-ID-Cato