NATIONAL ID Proposal
Threatens OUR LIBERTY
By Ken Boettcher
After President Bush signed the Patriot Act of 2001 into law in October,
The People noted that provisions of the newly enacted law "expand
previous federal encroachments on civil rights and liberties and further
grease the skids toward a police state in the United States." Given the
post-Sept. 11 social environment in which Congress found it feasible to
pass the draconian act, Bush found it easy to hail its provisions as
merely "new tools" to fight terrorism.
Momentum now appears to be building for another "tool" that would be
very useful to a police state--a national identity (NID) card system.
Since Sept. 11 the public waters have been continuously plumbed for
political support for a system of identification similar to the worker
ID or "internal passport" systems that once bolstered apartheid in South
Africa, fascism in Germany and bureaucratic state despotism in the
former Soviet Union and its satellite nations.
Capitalists and their propaganda mills have had a field day with the
idea--in the name of antiterrorism. The week after the attack, the Pew
Research Center released poll results that it claimed showed "seven of
10 Americans favored a requirement that citizens carry a national
identity card at all times to show a police officer upon request." A
week later, a New York Times/CBS News poll reported 56 percent supported
the notion and a CNN/Time poll reported a similar figure.
That week also found Oracle software chieftain Larry Ellison, as a San
Jose Mercury News report put it, "calling for the United States to
create a national identification card system--and offering to donate the
software to make it possible" (although he later admitted that
maintenance and updates wouldn't be free).
On Sept. 27, a Bush administration spokesman rejected the notion,
claiming "We are not even considering the idea." But an Oct. 7 article
in The New York Times noted that "at least one company that makes
scanners has reportedly said several federal agencies had been in touch
about using the devices in connection with ID cards."
By mid-October, Oracle's Ellison said in an interview with the Mercury
News that he had already "met with U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft
and officials at the CIA and FBI in Washington, D.C....to discuss the
idea." On Nov. 8, according to a Reuters news report, the Bush
administration's special advisor on cyber-security, Richard Clarke,
conceded "that the administration doesn't yet have a formal position on
the concept."
Others have jumped on the national ID card bandwagon--including, of
course, the CEOs of other companies that stand to gain financially if
such a system is established in the United States. As a
SiliconValley.com article headlined "Support Grows for Ellison's
National ID Card Proposal" put it, one estimate says "the U.S.
government could end up spending more than $3 billion on computer chips,
hardware, software and services that go into creating so-called 'smart'
ID cards" that would be used by such a system. Liberals like Sen. Dianne
Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz have also
lent their support to a NID system.
By the time this issue of The People went to press, hearings on the
subject were being convened in the House, and a New York State
antiterrorism committee had reportedly already called for the creation
of such a system.
No matter what the reason for a NID system--as a hedge against
terrorism, crime, drugs, illegal immigration or merely against
inefficiency in distribution of government services, all of which have
been used as rationales for various identification card schemes, workers
should lend them no support. Whether the cards are for particular
purposes--such as boarding airplanes--or for universal identification,
they cannot serve workers' interests.
Proponents claim that everyone will gain personal safety and security,
albeit with "a little less privacy." But such schemes actually work to
decrease individual security while doing nothing to curb the activities
of terrorists and criminals. Any NID card system conceivable would do
far more for corporate bottom lines and the possibilities for
police-state repression in the service of capitalist-class control of
society than for individual security.
The "Inside Risks" column in the December 2001 issue of Communications
of the Association for Computing Machinery corroborates that view. "It's
instructive to consider the problems of passports and drivers'
licenses," says the column. "These supposedly unique IDs are often
forged. Rings of phony ID creators abound, for purposes including both
crime and terrorism. Every attempt at hardening ID cards against forgery
has been compromised...."
Some proponents contend that "smart" NID cards would provide infallible
biometric matches--to face, fingerprint or retinal data, for example.
But low-tech human bribery can always provide a workaround. Moreover,
CACM contends the notion of card data without "false positives and
negatives is fallacious. Also, such systems will still be cracked, and
the criminals and terrorists we're most concerned about will find ways
to exploit them, using the false sense of security that the cards
provide to their own advantage--making us actually less secure as a
result!"
"Another set of risks arise," says the CACM article, "with respect to
the potentials for abuse of the supporting databases and communication
complexes that would be necessary to support NIDs....The opportunities
for overzealous surveillance and serious privacy abuses are almost
limitless, as are opportunities for masquerading, identity theft and
draconian social engineering...."
CACM also dispenses with any notion that voluntary cards could be
different. "The discriminatory treatment that non-cardholders would
surely undergo," it contends, "makes this an obvious slippery slope--the
cards would likely become effectively mandatory for everyone in short
order, and subject to the same abuses as other more conventional IDs.
The road to an Orwellian police state of universal tracking, but
actually reduced security, could well be paved with hundreds of millions
of such NID cards."
Such observations rest on empirical data. A spokesperson for Privacy
International, a London watchdog group, said in an article in The New
York Times that ID systems already exist in "about 100 countries." PI's
spokesperson says "the card is just the visible part of a vast
information spectrum...[that] is worthless without some sort of
integrated computer system behind it."
Such systems allow governments and their police agencies to more easily
assemble dossiers on everyone. Such data can be used to keep track of
nonconformists, political dissidents, militant workers and anyone else
some reactionary state functionary considers a threat to the state or
capitalist rule. It can be an effective tool for domestic spying,
harassment, repression and the regimentation of workers in general.
History demonstrates that these possibilities are not far-fetched. When
Social Security was set up, its supporters gave solemn assurances that
Social Security numbers would be kept secret and would be used only for
Social Security purposes. Today, however, those numbers are a virtually
universal identifier. One can hardly get a job, open a bank account,
apply for credit, rent an apartment, and so on without presenting a
Social Security number.
The political state targeted political activists in the notorious
COINTELPRO and other operations; it has spied on protesters and
assembled extensive dossiers. A uniform, supposedly counterfeit-proof ID
card would simply make it easier to conduct such actions, and for
capitalists who illegally garner such data to blacklist "troublemakers."
The full repressive potential of such a system may not be apparent. But
the reactionary tenor of the ruling class is unmistakable. A national
identification system would be one more step toward the police state
that a desperate capitalist class could one day resort to in an effort
to save its system.
