Well lots of blogs out there on the internet exist solely to disseminate political opinions. I tend to stay away from them on my blog, but I’ll weigh in on one that has been on my mind recently:
National Identity Cards
Sure, this isn’t as big of a political issue as social security or Iraq. But it’s something I feel like discussing. In short, I think a national identity card would be a good idea. Not because I believe that it would somehow eliminate the threat of terrorism. More than anything, I think I driver’s license should license you to drive, and an identity card should identify you.
Most countries in the world already have a national ID card, including most of those European countries that aren’t particularly fond of us. A few months ago at work I was talking with a guy from France who was here on business and he showed me a French driver’s license. It was about the size of a 5x7 index card (which is to say, approximately 5 x 7 inches), and I think it is typically left in the glove compartment with the registration and proof of insurance. It had a small photo on it, but I don’t know how often they have to get it updated, because this guy still had a photo from when he was eighteen (and he’s like thirty now).
So back to the point. With a single national ID card, security features could be designed to be more cost effectively and more effectively. That just makes sense. Then it would be easier to identify fake ID’s (a Food Lion near NCSU’s campus wouldn’t take out of state ID’s for that reason--they wouldn’t know how to identify a fake Arizona ID, for example). Not that fake ID’s won’t get made. They’ll just be harder to make. The use of a driver’s license as ID should eventually be phased out, and they could be cheaply made things that you only really need when you rent a car or get pulled over by a cop for speeding.
Now, about an assigned number. People seem to have a problem with being assigned a number by the government. As a computer scientist, I submit that your name is already a number. “KIP” is the number 4,933,968 (or 4B4950, if you prefer). And your social security number is already being used to identify you, and it wasn’t really designed for that purpose. Why not let your social security number be simply a number that identifies you to the social security system. Your national ID could have a number. If it were up to me to design the number, it would look a lot like an IPv6 address (3ffe:ffff:0100:f101:0210:a4ff:fee3:9566, for example). And some of those numbers would exist solely as checksums, so that you couldn’t just pull a number out of thin air. Not that this would prevent anyone from making up a valid fake number, it’d just make them have to work harder. Plus, such a long and difficult-to-memorize number would decrease the frequency with which you are asked for that number, which would make identity theft at least a little harder.
When I was in New York last summer for the HOPE conference, I heard some whining about ID cards. People seem to think it’s very Orwellian. This would be true if the card were a microchip implanted in your brain. It would be true if you were required to present your card before entering a restroom. It would be true if stores were required to scan your card whenever you purchased something and then report what was purchased to the government. I’m not talking about anything like that. I’m just talking about a better solution to the problem of identification, both photographically and numerically. Having a number with no check sum used as an identification number, and fifty different types of driving eligibility documents used for photo identification, is not the best solution.
