- :Maybe you remember the quaint old days,
early in 2001, when privacy still mattered.
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- That was before Big Business used its
clout to sweep aside or neuter an assortment of legislative and regulatory
proposals. They might have given you and me a modicum of control over how
our most personal information could be traded and sold.
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- That was before Sept. 11, when so many
Americans decided that liberty mattered far less than safety. Since then,
Big Brother has reasserted his increasingly absolute right to snoop and
pry and invade the deepest recesses of our bank accounts and private lives.
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- And that was before this month, when
the unelected officials who run state motor-vehicles departments started
pushing to create a national identification card based on driver's licenses.
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- These are the worst of times for your
right to be left alone. Governments are carving away fundamental liberties,
seeking to know where we go, what we buy and what we say. Business desperately
wants the first two of those.
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- Both kinds of surveillance freaks want,
in effect, a real-time dossier on every one of us. The national ID is just
their ticket, or at least one of them. (Another can be imagined in Microsoft's
wish to create a cyber `Passport` for all of us, a foot in the door to
continuous online surveillance. Luckily, there's some powerful resistance
building to this truly hideous idea.)
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- For a national ID to make any sense to
law enforcement, it needs to be a smarter card than the ones we use today.
It would have to include biometric information, such as fingerprints or
a retina scan. It would store personal data, probably including a Social
Security number, home address, phone number and other information. All
of that data would have to be available quickly, captured in a scanner
or other kind of card reader at a moment's notice and then compared against
a centralized database.
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- Oracle's Larry Ellison made himself a
contender in last fall's war-profiteering contest when he told the world
how he'd be happy to provide the national ID database software for free
(extra for updates and support). He got a respectful hearing from Congress
-- including California Democrats such as U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, one
of many purported liberals and moderates who treats civil liberties as
a non-essential luxury.
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- But the flaws in the ID scheme were painfully
obvious. It would do little to deter terrorism, at great cost to freedom.
Ultimately, enough principled conservatives spoke out against the notion
that it seemed to be a non-starter.
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- Some bad ideas have their own momentum.
This one appealed to the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators,
which spotted a way to grow its members' bureaucracies and budgets. The
association wants the taxpayers to fork over $100 million, no doubt a mere
down payment. These conscientious bureaucrats are correct when they say
it would be simpler to tweak existing driver's licenses to create a de
facto national ID than to create one from scratch. That doesn't make the
idea right.
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- Judging from information on its Web site
(www.aamva.org), the association is positively thrilled by the possibilities.
It would standardize the look, feel and technology of licenses. It would
add data of various sorts, probably including biometric information. Crucially,
it would link state licenses in central data banks, and then link those
to other data banks; some are already linked, notes the Privacy Foundation
(www.privacyfoundation.org), one of several organizations challenging the
initiative.
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- The lesson of Social Security -- turning
a retirement plan into a de facto national ID -- tells us that such an
ID would be misused, because the incentive to turn it into something larger
would be irresistible. Think of a national ID as your Social Security number
on steroids.
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- Do you think government will block such
misuse? Government at all levels is in the pocket of the industries that
would profit the most. Congress and state legislatures, collecting millions
of dollars in legal bribes (also known as campaign contributions) from
business interests, have shot down practically every recent attempt to
legislate even modest improvements in privacy -- and this in an era when
protecting privacy had political support.
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- Government considers our right to be
left alone a danger to society. Big Business considers it a threat to commerce.
Right now, the odds are against us.
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- © 2001 KnightRidder.com http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/opinion/dgillmor/dg013002.htm
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