Page 11 - National ID Cards

Yes, having a nationally recognized ID is a terrible idea. How are honest hard working crooks going to impersonate you and steal all your assets while you're sound asleep if everything is tracked and controlled and traced back to you? How can prosecutors pin felony charges on innocent people when their transaction records clearly show they were nowhere near the scene of the crime? How will the dead-beat parents get out of their support payments? How will businesses be able to defraud you? How will released sex offenders be able to reside next to your child's school and set up their little cameras?

You want to be anonymous?



Way back in the 20th century ... had to show ID back in them dark ages too to get on a plane.

They are talking about bringing this idea into the united kingdom too. personally i see no problem with it, as i think it will partly help to reduce crime etc and underage purchases of drink, cigarettes & gambling

Oh wah. The mean cop might give me a huge ticket for driving 15 miles over the speed limit when I was only going 14 miles over. Please.

First off, an actual DWB claim starts when you got a ticket for driving 5 miles over the speed limit better yet, when driving at the speed limit. Only idiots and whiners claim DWB when they were actually violating the rules.

Secondly, the speed limit exists because that's the speed they want you to go. Not 14.35 mph over it. You can turn yourself into a vegeatable at 30 mph and the faster you go the worse it gets.

Thirdly, just be glad I'm not writing the laws. Speeding more than 10 miles over? First offense, $2500 fine. Second permanent loss of license.

Your whole argument against both the speeding penalties and the national ID card is that it will impede your ability to break the law. QYB. Come back when you have a real argument.

And national ID will help... how?

I think some people are looking at it as if National ID were the first time ID has come into play. We *already* have ID, the question is *who* issues the ID, what they do with it, and how secure their ID system is, both by inherent design and implementation. We already have to show ID to do a lot of things, the question is who issues the ID and what rules does that ID have to play by.

I like our current system of IDs. Fairly non-intrusive and it gets the job done. RFID is an absolute no-no, and the degree to which the Fed's propose storing information worries me. We're talking about the federal government, remember, they don't exactly have a good track record of doing things efficiently or securely. Usually when it's a situation that the Fed's don't handle well the answer is to privatize said industry, but ID isn't really something that should be privatized (that's another thread), leaving the only option being your state or local governments. And it would be highly impractical for local governments (counties, for example) to each issue their own ID, so using state-issued IDs seems like the most plausible idea to me.

If there are complaints about the current ID system, my reaction would be to attempt to fix the *current* system before running off to create a new one. Better to refine than to scrap and try again (usually). If the problems we have are inherent to the system itself then it may need to be redesigned, but I really don't see how that's the case.

Then read the rest of your argument and we wind up with 51 forms of ID. That's how.

I'm not taking a side, btw, just counter-arguing.

I'm not paranoid about The Government collecting data on me. They already have it. Have it scattered among 51+ systems or consolidated? You make the call I guess.

Better The Government than the crooks that collect my data now. Store "club cards" and even things I patronize and benefit from like Amazon.com ... seems they always know what I want. They're always recommending these weird bands you probably never heard of and never even once suggested the likes of a top-40 album. How do they know me so well? Hmmm .... :-)

Is it better to play by and enforce one ruleset or 51 of them?


And the states are so much better at this? Or maybe you don't hear about what happens in Maine because you live in California? Security issues are there regardless and having 50 different systems just gives crooks more targets.

---John Holmes...

Why are we pretending we don't already have a national ID, its called your social security number, it justs doesn't have a smiling picture of you to go with it. So what would be the big deal if we just added your picture to your SS card????

I'm rather like tim actually in this. I don't support National IDs but I don't oppose it. My biggest problem with those opposed is the outright stupidity and paranoia involved in most of the arguments. Not that yours is stupid.

The current syste is not ok. It's far too easy for someone who shouldn't have identification to get identificaton. Especially when you consider that all you need in most places is a birth certificate of the appropriate gender, race and approxamate age. Don't get me wrong, I'm no terrorism paranoiamonger. But there's paranoia and then there's a reasonable degree of safety and security. Having a national standard of some type is a reasonable degree of safety and security because it prevents one state with piss poor standards from issuing IDs to every Tom, ****, and Harry and those IDs being accepted nation wide as legitimate.

Now I'm not scared of RFID tags. If all they store on the tag is the same info that's on the front encoded then is there really a problem? I'm also not scared of databases. The databases already exist. What needs to exist regardless of the creation of a (declared) national database or anything like that are rules on how that information can be used.

Frankly, I'd rather it be scattered. The more organized data is the more easily it's expanded. When you have one nice database the temptation to add a couple more columns is there.


The crooks will still collect it. And they use telescope lens to do it. (Never buy a house on the hillside, that is the advice of the Data Protection Association.)

(By the way: I'm reminded of the time Sep posted... what was it... a book recommendation by Amazon? Whatever it was I remember it was funny.)


Frankly I'd rather have each state take care of its residents. Sure they won't be perfect, but I really don't see the Federal government doing much better of a job. At least on the local level if you have a breach it's only local. Ten state breaches -- while not good -- are less catastrophic than one national breach. The down side is that they'll probably be more frequent.


Mass gathering techniques. When I can read your card from your pocket, that's not good. If I can read the cards of a couple dozen people standing in line that's worse. If you limit range to a couple inches, that's better but still not good. I just think that broadcasting your information into the space around you, especially unencrypted, is inherently a bad idea. I've been to DefCon. The naivety of politicians worries me.

In the olden days, before Nixon set a National Speed limit, normal practice was to survey the speed that real drivers did on the road, and set the speed limit at the 85th percentile. This used the assumption that a rational driver will drive at a proper and reasonable speed. The wacko drivers would go much faster, typically in the 95th percentile, and they would get tickets for being dumb asses before Darwin took over.

At that time, the speed limits varied. Montana and Nevada had no fixed limits. This did not mean that you could drive 120 when you wanted, it meant that 'reasonable and proper' varied.

Nixon, no friend of the Constitution, put in the National Limits to save gas because his policies resulted in a perceived gas shortage.

Since then, the nanny state has decided that fast is bad. And that bureaucrats are better at deciding speeds than sober drivers being reasonable. If they were consistent, they would set the speed limit at 10MPH, because with modern cars, its nearly impossible to kill yourself at 10MPH. But they are not consistent, and picked one arbitrary speed.

Speed kills is propaganda unless you are talking about the drug speed.

On topic: silly laws that are arbitrary and make reasonable citizens be labeled as 'criminals' are wrong. Bad, idiotic, insert your favorite slam here. National ID cards that are mandatory are arbitrary. If they are not made mandatory, they will not be used, so they will fail. So they will have to be made mandatory to make us 'safe from terrorists'

This country was started in a revolution against stupid and arbitrary laws made by the clueless far away. Its a good tradition.

The Boston Tea party was not about the tea, it was about the idiotic creation of laws that made drinking "unapproved" tea illegal.

What real problem does a National ID solve? The threat of Osamma Bin Laden? The threat of guys named Pedro working mowing lawns and picking grapes?

I have a state issued drivers license with picture that does not contain my SSN. It is technically illegal to use a SSN as an identity card.

My SSN was issued when I was five. My kid's SSN was issued when she was less than a week old. How useful is that picture now that the kid has graduated from college?

Wow. You actually are stupid. Thanks for letting us know.

Did you just pick that statement out of the ether? Or is this a standard defence mechanism?

The problem of 50 individual standards and their enforcement across the united states. To state it in programming terms, do you want one standard for HTML or 50 that your browser has to support? Back to reality, the bars, convienence stores, clubs, etc. are the browsers responsible for supporting/recognizing/dealing with 50 standards when it could be just one.

Your paranoia about big government, the man and security are separate issues.

Ever heard of expiration dates and renewals? "Illegal" or not, your SSN is a national identifier.

Standard, but I gotta agree with her in this case. When people are complaining about "big government" telling them how fast they can drive, they obviously have a problem with anything and everything "big government" does and can't argue with any logic or truely attempt to understand a situation.

---John Holmes...