The Australian government later dropped the plan after citizens literally rioted in the streets in protest.
In the wake of terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, talk of a national ID system among lawmakers in the United States, UK 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 ID 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 weve seen so many bad examples of in the past few years."
In fact, the most vocal proponents of a national ID-card system have traditionally been lawmakers in states on the U.S.-Mexico border and those in charge of immigration committees in Congress.
Rep. George Gekas, R-Pa., who heads the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims, recently said Congress could no longer reject the idea of national ID cards for citizens.
Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, a long-time proponent of stricter immigration laws, has said he would like to explore requiring Social Security cards and certain immigration documents to have biometric identifiers, such as fingerprints. Aides to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., also have said the senator would be interested in a national ID program.
The last time Congress attempted a similar move was with the Illegal Immigration Act of 1996, which among other things would have required states to list Social Security numbers on all drivers licenses. That section of the act was later repealed.
Lori Cole, executive director of the conservative Eagle Forum, said while the national ID proposals being discussed of late are more high-tech in nature, the overall concept remains the same.
"We believe that bad ideas before are still bad ideas," Cole said.
There have been no recent concrete proposals to institute a national ID program, and aides to both Gekas and Smith say their bosses have made no indications that they plan to introduce such measures any time soon.
The debate has already shifted to the private sector. During an interview on San Franciscos KPIX-TV last Friday, Oracle Corp. Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison offered to pony up the software needed to create a national ID system.
"We need a national ID card with our photograph and thumbprint digitized and embedded in the ID card," Ellison told the television station.
U.S. residents identification and fingerprints would be stored in a database to check against ID cards presented at airports to tighten security in hopes of stopping terrorist attacks.
Banisar said given the companys history and the huge profits to be made, he wasnt surprised to hear Oracle calling for a national ID system. Oracle, the worlds largest database-management-systems company, grew out of a contract with the CIA.
"Sure theyll give away the software, but whos going to maintain all the databases needed for such a project?" Banisar asked. "The important point isnt the ID card itself, but what databases are going to have to be combined and [made] compatible to support it. Oracle would be right there selling support to every subsidiary database that hooks in."
Ari Schwartz, a policy analyst for the Center for Democracy and Technology, said a national ID program could be done in a privacy-friendly way as long as the goal is to allow individuals to be in control of the information held about them.
Maintaining a central database containing personal information on every American could have grave "unintended consequences," Schwartz said. "There are some measures that we should definitely be moving forward on today, and then there are some other ideas that we need to have a longer-term discussion about. This is definitely one of those longer-term ideas."
Brian Krebs, Newsbytes
