PROVIDENCE -- A national identification card -- safety precaution or invasion of privacy?
To Robert Ellis Smith, publisher of the Privacy Journal and sponsor of this weekend's National Conference of Privacy Advocates, a national identification card -- regulated and mandated by the federal government -- is an invasion of privacy.
"It dehumanizes people," by turning them into a number, Smith said yesterday during a debate at the Providence Biltmore. "In a democracy, I certify that the government exists. Not the other way around."
But to Shane Ham, senior policy analyst for the Progressive Policy Institute, a national ID card is a safety device that could help prevent terrorism and cut down on identity theft.
"ID cards protect you, as well as the people around you," Ham said during the debate. The PPI, a think tank for the Democratic Leadership Council, is advocating linking information from driver's-license directories in each state into a nationwide database.
"If we can decrease these problems without a major violation of privacy, I think that is a good thing," Ham said.
Smith and Ham spent over an hour yesterday morning debating the merits of national ID cards, a discussion that wrapped up the weekend-long privacy conference. The gathering was the first to be sponsored by the Providence-based Privacy Journal and attracted privacy advocates from 24 states and four Canadian provinces.
The highly structured debate drew heated responses from the about 40 attendees, who are concerned that ID cards would give the government control over an extensive database of personal information about U.S. citizens. They are also worried that the government would use information in the database to restrict people's freedom, or to deny them basic rights.
"I'm declaring war on the ID," said Florence Rice, the 83-year-old president of the Harlem Consumer Education Council in New York, who used a question break in the debate to express her worries that a national ID card would be used to profile minorities.
The concept of a federally mandated identification card has attracted significant attention nationwide since Sept. 11., after it was discovered that terrorists easily picked up fake driver's licenses to avoid security checks.
Immediately after the attacks, support was high for a national ID card to help unveil potential terrorists and improve national security, according to Richard Sobel, a senior research associate in psychiatry and the law at Harvard Medical School. Larry Ellison, president of California-based technology giant Oracle Corp., even offered to donate the technology to implement the system.
National ID cards are used in European countries as well as Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public-interest research center in Washington, D.C.
Consequently, groups such as the PPI and the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, a trade association, have advocated turning driver's licenses into a type of national ID card.
By linking state databases across the nation, the government would be able to cut down on the people using someone else's identity to gain a driver's license. Ham's group is also behind putting a biometric identifier on the card -- such as a fingerprint -- that would allow the card holder to be verified by something other than a photograph.
The overhaul of the existing driver's-license system would cost about $300 million, according to Ham. And at least one congressman is expected to introduce legislation to Congress in the next few weeks that would require linking state DMVs, forcing states to start issuing these smart cards, Ham said.
"By modernizing the states' ID system, we see it as the federal government taking control of our DMV system. There would be no other additional control given to the DMV or any other branch of government," said Ham, who was the only pro ID card backer in the room. Ham met Smith, the Privacy Journal publisher, in March during the taping of a debate on the issue for PBS, and Smith asked him to speak at this weekend's conference.
Smith and other privacy advocates see the cards as an indiginity -- a governmental requirement that erases a citizen's worth and freedom.
And in recent months, nationwide support of a government sponsored identification card has started to wane. About 41 percent of Americans are opposed to building a nationwide database for identifying citizens and immigrants, according to a survey taken last month by Gartner Inc., a Connecticut-based market research firm. Only 26 percent of Americans think a database should be created, according to the survey.
If one is created, those surveyed said they would rather have a bank or a credit card company administer the system, since they trust private institutions more than the federal government, according to the Gartner survey.
Last week, a study by the National Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board recommended that the issue be studied more in depth before any laws are passed, since it is so complicated and fraught with possible civil-liberty violations.
It's a study that helped Smith win points with attendees during yesterday's debate. And while he did concede to Ham that a national ID card system could prevent child abductions, he said the threat to Americans' privacy and freedoms outweighs any potential benefit.
"It's one of the greatest threats to privacy in the next five years," Smith said.
