Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2001 14:13:48 -0400
To: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com>
From: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com>
Subject: National ID Card Push Roils Privacy Advocates
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"

<http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170488.html>

National ID Card Push Roils Privacy Advocates

By Brian Krebs, Newsbytes
WASHINGTON, D.C., U.S.A.,
25 Sep 2001, 3:43 PM CST

   In 1986, while the government of Australia was drafting legislation 
requiring citizens to carry a national identification card, civil 
liberties advocates formed Privacy International, a group dedicated 
to sharing information on similar movements around the globe.

The Australian government later dropped the plan after citizens 
literally rioted in the streets in protest.

But in the wake of terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, talk of a national 
ID system among lawmakers in the United States, U.K., and Australia 
is once again putting privacy groups on the defensive.

"This issue is like a bad case of herpes," said David Banisar, deputy 
director for the global privacy group. "No matter how many times you 
try to treat it, it just keeps coming back."

Over the past two weeks, a number of House and Senate lawmakers have 
begun toying with the idea of a national identification card, or 
adding a biometric identifier such as a fingerprint to all Social 
Security cards.

Banisar said the calls for a national ID card in response to the 
recent attacks are misplaced, noting that nearly all of the 
terrorists who directly participated in the attacks were in the 
United States legally. Banisar added that the primary targets of such 
a system would almost certainly be Latin American immigrants.

"The reality is that ID cards will do very little to stop this sort 
of stuff, but it will make it much easier to track everybody else for 
any number of purposes," he said. "In the end, this would simply give 
legal justification for all kinds of profiling that we've seen so 
many bad examples of in the past few years."

[...]



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