by One of the things that has always distinguished the United States from the authoritarian countries of the world in that we have the freedom to travel anywhere and everywhere within the country – at will and without any required national documentation. We don’t have internal passports and we don’t have national ID cards.
However, our betters at Pravda on the Potomac (or the Washington Post, if you prefer) think we all should have a universal national ID card with biometric identifiers built into it. They propose this as a means to keep employers from hiring illegal aliens and as a means to deter illegal immigration.
An effective solution would be to issue tamper-proof, biometric ID cards
— using fingerprints or a comparably unique identifier — to all
citizens and legal residents. Last week, both President Obama and a bipartisan group of eight senators
seeking immigration reform urged something along those lines, without
calling it a universal national identity card. That’s a major step
forward.
The Post thinks this is more effective than securing the border. They also dismiss concerns held by civil libertarians.
Critics on both the civil-liberties left and the libertarian right have long resisted such cards as the embodiment of a Big Brother brand of government, omniscient, invasive and tentacular. Their criticisms ring hollow.
More than a third of Americans (35 percent) possess passports, up from just 6 percent 20 years ago — and all passports issued since 2007 contain chips that enable biometric use of facial recognition technology. The proliferation of passports for foreign travel has not encroached on Americans’ civil liberties. Why would another form of ID, used for employment verification, pose such a threat?
I’m surprised that the Post doesn’t argue that we need to be “chipped” just like your dog or cat. Wouldn’t that make it even easier to determine who is legally in the country or is a citizen?
As to the Post’s argument that a national ID card won’t encroach on our civil liberties and wouldn’t pose a threat, that’s BS. It is the height of control by the government. It is their key to our lives, our privacy, and our freedom.
I say thanks, but no thanks.