Consensus and Controversy

It is refreshing to take part in a discussion about national ID systems that -- unlike most discussions  of this topic -- is not dominated by hysteria.

Here are a few propositions that I think might form a basis for going forward in reasoned debate.  (I of course welcome debate on the accuracy of these propositions as well as the conclusions that might flow from them)

Base propositions:

1.  A national ID is not the magic bullet that will make the country safe from terrorism.   Given the very poor controls we have on birth certificates at home (not to mention the impossibility of relying on the quality control foreign credentials) it at most it creates a speedbump for foreign terrorists who will need to get phony versions of the credentials used as the basis for issuing the US ID.

2.  A national ID system cannot secure our borders.

3.  A national ID system can, however, assist in making illegal immigration more unpleasant for immigrants by, for example, making it more difficult to employ them.   All other things being equal, this should reduce the incentive for that part of illegal immigration driven primarily by economic considerations.

4. More generally, a national ID system has some substantial potential to be the cornerstone of a national fraud-prevention system.   

5. A national ID system potentially creates new avenues for super-fraud and highly effective identity theft.

6. A national ID system potentially creates new avenues for governmental dossier creation on all citizens who use the national ID.  These opportunities exist even if the system is not misused, and are greater if it is misused.  As Lee Tien put it "'national ID' is not a card, but an entire system of databases, information gathering activities, and human beings making fateful judgments about individuals based on that overall system."

7.  A National Research Council report ("Who Goes There -- Authentication Through the Lens of Privacy") noted this:

Finding 6.5: State-issued driver's licenses are a de facto nationwide identity system. They are widely accepted for transactions that require a  form of government-issued photo ID.

Real ID substantially increases the likelihood that driver's licenses will become a defacto national ID for an even greater range of offline and online transactions.

8.  The extent to which we reap the costs and benefits listed above is very sensitive to how the system is actually implemented.   For example, a well-implemented biometric identifier makes fraud and identity theft more difficult, but also makes it more devastating when it happens since people become more reliant on the ID's security (and it is hard to grow a new retina).

Am I correct that the above propositions are (in the abstract) uncontroversial, and the controversy is in fact about how big and how likely the positive and negative effects are, and how they compare to each other?

Or, as Dan Combs put it in his contribution,

1. REAlID done right = good

2. RealID done wrong = very bad

3. The bar is high for such a system to be good.

        We aren't close yet!

I will add the following personal observations, which I suspect might be more controversial than the above:

I.   For any ID system to be implemented competently (let alone in a fashion that inspires trust) supervisory authority must be taken out of the hapless Department of Homeland Security.

II.  For Real ID to be implemented competently it must have federal funding rather than being left to the states as an unfunded mandate.

III.  Real ID driver's licenses are likely to become a de facto national ID -- much more than current driver's licenses -- not just because of the federal pressure driven by national security needs (or rhetoric) but also because of commercial pressure from a variety of industries.

IV. The ID must be transparent -- end users must be able to read everything coded on the ID itself. 

V.  If we are going to have a real or de facto national ID card, all citizens must have a right to review and correct information held on them in both public and private dossiers linked to the ID.

(For more about what I think, see my paper, The Uneasy Case for National ID Cards.)

Comments

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Is the NATIONAL ID SYSTEM the weapon against TERRORISM?

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[Steven Davies]

Um, guys, it was the US that insisted on a useless and bureaucratic requirement for a passport for Canadians. The US used to accept a Canadian Driver's License test. The Canadian passport office lets Canadians use a driver's license as ID.
So they are not widely accepted..

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[Publius Gravespinner]

The "Real ID" act does not, (and no law can constitutionally), require state governments to act. Instead it penalizes the citizens of states which do not act -- changing license procedures, changing licenses, and joining a continent-wide database to make it easy to spy on their citizens.

If one or two state governments made a deliberate decision to NOT meet the requirements of the "Real ID" act, then it would be impossible in practice to force them. The country would not accept the mass disenfranchisement of millions of citizens of those states. It would not accept that people who live in Illinois are not permitted to get on airplanes or trains or buses. Or that people who live in the proud state of Alabama are not permitted to enter federal buildings to talk with their Congressman, witness a "public" trial, or speak to the IRS.

The whole law is a scam designed to coerce. A single state with a backbone would prevent this from working; two or five states with backbones would render it totally impossible and send it back to the drawing board.

I think we should focus our efforts on making that happen in our state legislatures and with our Governors.

[James Moyer]

Some of the propositions are inherently contradictory (in particular 4 and 5 and to a lesser extent 1.)

Dissecting them a bit...

1.) "it at most it creates a speedbump for foreign terrorists who will need to get phony versions of the credentials used as the basis for issuing the US ID."

A worse case scenario should be added to that as well. "It's possible too that a national ID card can, when either obtained legally or illegally, legitimize individuals who would otherwise not be legitimized, allowing them to blend in with society and become greater threats than they would have been without a national ID card."

3.) "A national ID system can, however, assist in making illegal immigration more unpleasant for immigrants by, for example, making it more difficult to employ them. All other things being equal, this should reduce the incentive for that part of illegal immigration driven primarily by economic considerations."

I believe that it's fairly evident that the successful employment of illegal immigrants is not related to documentation deficiencies; instead, the failure rests with employers who do not care/show vigilance in assessing current documentation, or simply want to employ illegal immigrants. This situation will likely not change because there is little political interest to enforce compliance at the employer level.

The current wording of proposal 3 alludes to this, but just barely. I would suggest something like...

"Assuming that documentation deficiencies assist in the employment of illegal immigrants, and that a national ID card would correct those deficiencies, it's possible that a national ID card would reduce the employment of illegal immigrants."

In either case, I believe that those supporting proposition number 3 should be prepared to offer proof that there are sufficient instances of documentation deficiency that allows illegal immigrants to work to justify support for #3; all of this is in light of bountiful examples that were the result of employer malfeasance.

Here's another proposition:

A national identification card can dramatically change the concept of what it is to be human and/or a citizen. There are places in the world today, and certainly in the history of humanity, in which the failure to have an ID card makes a person a "non-entity" in the eyes of the state (with various repercussions for that.) Sometimes this is an intentional feature, sometimes it's a functional outcome. At some times in history, ID cards were used to prevent the movement of certain groups of individuals (blacks in South Africa during Apartheid for instance) which parallels some of the reasoning for the REAL ID Act (preventing an amorphous group of "undesireables" from travel/normal life in the United States. Amorphous because what makes someone undesireable is an abstract concept (motives or paperwork.))

It's entirely true that some countries have national ID cards and suffer relatively little loss of liberty because of them. What helps/augments such an outcome?

And yet another proposition:

National ID cards are really just little plastic cards. What happens when they are issued and "unleashed into the wild" is actually not well understood. One anecdote is that homeless vagrants wearing an ID card get more donations that one without; why this would happen is clearly rooted in a psychological reaction to ID cards which is both important and not understood.

Even another proposition:

Most Americans have had a photo ID for about 20-30 years now. While it's certainly defendable that the uses of ID cards are more varied, the frequency is justifiably a lot less. The main use of ID cards for their first 15-20 years was as an identifier/tracking key in financial transactions. Thanks to ATMs, debit cards and credit cards an American can use their photo ID just once (to open a bank account) and never use it again for a financial transaction. Some would say that ID cards are simply no longer relevant to banking. Isn't it possible that some of the same technologies that allow debit/credit cards to be used safely without ID will allow other transactions to occur without ID cards, and that ID cards are a rather old-fashioned solution that's slowly becoming irrelevant?

[Kenneth Judd]

If I recall, when I purchased my first drivers lic. I was required to present my SSN and my birth Cert., so I believe that it is relevant. If you lose your lic the same documents are needed to reinstate.

[Paul Gowder]

Peter, I disagree with your assertion that "it's not the gathering and dissemination
of that data alone, it is the ends to which that data
is put." There are several problems with your case against technological dystopianism:

1. The gathering and dissemination of the information implies the potentiality to use the information. The mere fact that there is information in usable form out there, held by actors who can never be made perfectly accountable, creates an everpresent threat of use.

As the security state progresses, I find myself making more and more Foucault references -- the sociopolitical situation in this countryis just so patently Foucauldian that I don't know why we don't have biopower being discussed in the New York Times. That's by way of preface to my suggestion that you check out Discipline and Punish, and specifically the latter sections concerning panopticism. One of the major Foucauldian insights about society is that power is exercised by the threat of exercised power, and that invisibly gathering of information on people is a method of threatening power exercise.

Because stronger identity cards and companion databases make it possible to surveil people, the threat itself constructs the relationship between those who have access to the databases and those who don't.

2. There's something inherently wrong aobut a society where information about people is as stored and accessible and omnipresent as information about things. Humans are not things, and the whole of any human is more than the sum of the data that can be gathered about him or her. Yet by gathering more data, we face the irresistable temptation to act on other humans based on that data. We "reduce" humans to that data, rather than considering them as individual humans who transcend their data. Thus, to take an example, the rise of credit reporting has probably (I'm engaging in a little informed speculation here) made society as a whole more efficient, but also reduced people's individual ability to deal in the marketplace: a trustworthy person with lousy credit because of temporary income loss, say, can probably no longer rely on his or her PERSONAL qualities to verify trustworthiness (i.e. with the neighborhood banker), because the OBJECTIVE data-bound qualities have, by their accessibility and seeming effectiveness, taken control of the transaction.

[Peter Bachman]

I think we need to be very careful about engaging in technological dystopianism regarding national identity requirements.

I don't need to predict a society which abuses personal information regarding it's citizens when historical examples already exist both in the last century and the near past.

However, it's not the
gathering and dissemination
of that data alone, it is the ends to which that data
is put.

As long as we are going to have Driver Licenses, pay for them, issue them, etc. then by all means let them be real. Why not? And let's continue to prosecute those DMV employees that provide false identity documents, as well as prosecuting those who simply produce "fake" identification.

But those efforts, including standardization efforts between states in terms of data, and attempts at gaining better accuracy in breeder documents are a totally different issue than the creation of a "defacto" national identity which is not the purpose of a document which says you are licensed to drive. This also goes for abuse of a document which says I'm entitled to recover some funds when I retire as part of a social safety net.

[Kenneth Judd]

I apologize for my lack of articulation, grammar and spelling. I just want to get things moving in the right direction.

[Kenneth Judd]

It would seem Real ID is going to be in play anyway, so we need to set the ground rules for what it should and shouldn't be. An Real ID Bill of Rights as others have stated is a must!!
Lets all make a list.
1-No RFID
2-No GPS tracking
3-No database access without owners written permission or at least a notifcation of authority accesses-who is looking at my data I want to know who and why
4-Database should only contain basic info that is presently on a DMV lic.which can not be captured by or used by private or commercial entities.
5-If a smartcard is used, it must be contact type only tamper proof and can not be forged.
6-Well vetted and trained State police officers only allowed to create id with dual audit (Justice or Treasury Dept)of materials
7-All 50 states use same system barcoding would be cheapest I believe.
8-State clearing when and why and ID needs to be presented.
9-Independent auditing of system for security compliance.
10-Can only be tied to DMV records and criminal records.
11-All biometrics should be stored, Iris, finger , face,dig photo,hand,DNA, gait,dental,voice, signature,smell/chemical make up and whatever else identifies someone.
12-Any device that can be used to ID someone can not be used on every street corner, like CCTV cameras in London, because one day soon your every move will be tracked-1984 is a very real threat here folks and it needs to be stopped now.
I want to stop crime, fraud and terrorism, but not at the expense of what I believe to be one of our true freedoms.

We can not afford this, but that won't stop it from happening.

Please add, and/or dispute to this list.
I know I have a driver lic, SSN, birth Cert.and gun permit so I'm alreay on a FBI list, and I assume just being involved here I will be added to a gov. list, but I'm not too worried about it, because I have not done anything wrong and I don't plan on it. But I do beleive privacy/automony is paramount in this quest. We need to start at birth with a quality uniform ID system for this to truely work.