Many people and organizations have sharply criticized the "national ID" aspects of the REAL ID Act. Even before REAL ID, the National Academy of Sciences recognized that a system of national ID not only poses a "wide range of technological and logistical challenges," but has "serious potential for infringing on the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens."
ID system proponents seem to think that the security problem lies in being unable to verify identity. But as security expert Bruce Schneier puts it, “much of the utility of the national ID card assumes a pre-existing database of bad guys. We have no such database.” Thus, a basic issue is that "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.
The obvious implication is that the idea of a national ID carries with it a powerful commitment to databases of "bad guys," which in turn seems to bring the commitment to widespread social surveillance in order to try to distinguish the suspicious from the ordinary. As Prof. Daniel Solove has argued, we should fear such risks as “hasty judgment in times of crisis, the disparate impact of law enforcement on particular minorities, cover-ups, petty retaliation for criticism, blackmail, framing, sweeping and disruptive investigations, racial, ethnic, or religious profiling, and so on.”
Let's not forget, btw, that "REAL IDs" will probably be more technologically "interesting" than the gov't ID cards we're familiar with (in the sense of the Chinese curse, "may you live in interesting times"). Not only are computer databases and networks a very different thing today than when, say, Social Security Numbers were introduced, REAL IDs appear closely tied politically to two general technologies -- RFID (radio-frequency ID) and biometrics -- that privacy advocates anticipate will radically alter the contingencies of individuals' control over their personal information and the association of one's identities with one's activities, affecting our ability to act privately and anonymously.
So let me throw this out: A national ID system, especially one augmented by RFID and biometrics, is an expensive enterprise with many civil liberties risks and little prospect of success in fighting terrorism. As a security system, a national ID system is a form of thin perimeter security with many vulnerable links. Thus, a national ID system points in only two directions. It will either be meaningless (but expensive) because it will be easily penetrated at its weak points, or be effective because it is tough at every point — but at the cost of a free society.
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