On a National ID: It Depends
Matt Yglesias is for a national ID card?!?! Nooooooooo!
Wait. So he’s with Kevin Drum. And Drum writes:
I’d go even further: implement a national ID and give one to everybody, free of charge. You get it when you turn 18 (or whatever), and you get a free update every five years (or whatever). Post offices would handle most of the work, and roving mobile vans would trek through rural areas periodically to make sure everyone has easy access to whichever federal agency is tasked with providing the cards. Instead of simply requiring people to have picture IDs, the federal government would do everything it could to make sure everyone actually has a picture ID, with as little hassle as possible. Once this was in place, everyone with an ID could vote on election day unless they were barred for some affirmative reason, which might still vary from state to state. No registration required.
Okay, this doesn’t sound crazy. But would this be the primary purpose of a national ID card? Generally speaking, we hear about “tamper-proof” IDs to facilitate immigration controls, which is to say we’d want to entire labor market to depend on the tamper-proofness of the cards. As Bruce Schneier has argued, that’s bananas, in a bad way
I’ll note that Schneier is mainly dismissive of a national ID for this reason:
Proponents of national ID cards want us to assume all these problems, and the tens of billions of dollars such a system would cost — for what? For the promise of being able to identify someone?
What good would it have been to know the names of Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, or the DC snipers before they were arrested? Palestinian suicide bombers generally have no history of terrorism. The goal is here is to know someone’s intentions, and their identity has very little to do with that.
And of course your identity matters when it comes to voting, so I take the Yglesias-Drum point on this very narrow issue. But my guess is that the benefit wouldn’t justify the cost, leaving aside the very real problem of mission creep.
Combine it with the national health ID proposed by a recent RAND study. See discussion here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081020120103.htm
— Bill Harshaw · Nov 2, 11:12 PM · #
FWIW, I think a national ID would be useful for a variety of purposes, and wouldn’t really have most of the ill effects that people normally ascribe to it. France and Belgium aren’t exactly totalitarian hellholes, after all, and I don’t think the slippery slope is that hard to avoid. However, I agree with Bruce that an ID card would be of minimal use as protection against terrorism. It sure didn’t stop the Madrid bombers, for example.
Still, it strikes me that it would be useful for things like voting and immigration regulation. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it seems like it would be better than what we have now.
— Kevin Drum · Nov 3, 12:04 AM · #
I really, really don’t want to live in an America where the police are empowered to stop me at any time and ask me for my papers. Really.
— Freddie · Nov 3, 12:51 AM · #
Re: I really, really don’t want to live in an America where the police are empowered to stop me at any time and ask me for my papers.
They can already do that, and have been able to ever since drivers licenses came into general use.
— JonF · Nov 3, 03:37 AM · #
They can already do that, and have been able to ever since drivers licenses came into general use
No, they can’t.
I’m all for stopping illegal immigration and voter fraud, and am willing to have lots of money spent to do it. But if it requires a national ID, forget it. It’s not worth it.
— The Reticulator · Nov 3, 03:50 AM · #