106 Comments

1. JB:

“I will do my part by stating clearly here my deep and abiding respect for Arab culture. And my unremitting militant opposition to those who have distorted it through terrorism.”

And you will likely get the sound of chirping crickets from the other side, or at best a “…, but” semi-non-apology. Sincerely hope I’m wrong.

It seems those speaking up against the prejudice should LOUDLY AND STRONGLY DEMAND IN RETURN, not EXPECT the other side to speak out against terrorism.

Jul 14, 2004 - 11:13 am 2. Knucklehead:

Maybe its just me, but I think the last thing we need to be worried about is “fanning the flames of anti-Arab feeling”. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see any evidence that the average American Joe Sixpack with a Bigotry Chaser is running around blowing up mosques or busses full of Arabs (hyphenated, muslim, or otherwise). Americans are NOT, for the most part, bigots and the vast majority of the few who are bigots are unwilling to act upon their bigotries. They just sit home and spit.

We need to find and stop those who are fanning the flames of anti-infidel feeling and, with malice and forethought, converting feelings into actions. They are the ones who have demonstrated, and continue to demonstrate, that they are oppressed by a seething, uncontrolable hatred. It is their seething, ancient hatreds that are oppressing them.

Sorry, the school stuff got me all riled up. I’ll calm down soon.

Jul 14, 2004 - 11:13 am 3. WichitaBoy:

I’m not sure that what you suggest is possible. Is there any historical precedent? Winning a war seems to always require some sort of villification/dehumanization of the enemy. I’m curious: how does this story fit into this narrative?

Jul 14, 2004 - 11:15 am 4. RogerA:

Roger: I dont see it as a box. I have always assumed that most Americans (erroneously perhaps) understand that most Arabs are not jihadists. I think these events do need to be publicized (1) because they are news and (2) they underscore for the public the particular nature of the threat we face. When folks criticize the alert system as too general, this sort of incident drives it home.

Another issue–tangential to the immediate discussion–concerns profiling. No matter what one’s feelings about profiling, it does have a place in security. Recall Al Gore was stopped at airport security. Does anyone honestly believe the former Vice President of the US constitutes the same sort of potential threat that a person of middle east origin, travelling via Syria and Amsterdam? (OK, perhaps Al Gore is a bad example). “Racial profiling” has its place IN THE WAR ON TERROR and we should stop apologizing for it. What did Lenin say about selling the hemp to make the rope…..

Jul 14, 2004 - 11:20 am 5. MeTooThen:

Roger,

Are you certain, or even confident, that publicizing this event will fan hatred of Arabs?

Is there any evidence of that?

I agree, we are in a box, but perhaps one different that you describe.

War is upon us. Three thousand of our countrymen have been incinerated and an entire city block in Manhattan destroyed. Civilians from this country and others are daily attacked, some beheaded, others blown apart.

And although the perpetrators are easily identified, they are rarely named. This is the box, the clear and certain knowledge of who is waging this war against us, and our inability, nay fear, to name them.

It is jihad Roger. A Holy War. It is called for daily in the madrassas, and every Friday prayers throughout the Middle East, Indonesia, Europe, and at times here in the US.

When will we, as a country, have the courage and good sense to change the calculus of interdiction at our borders, and press for the much needed increased surveillance of young men (and women) who try to gain entry into this country who are (at the least) from the Arab or Muslim world?

Or would we rather continue to kid ourselves into thinking we are braver yet still by stopping Mr. Gore at the airport for additional security, and claim a Pyrrhic victory for political correctness?

Jul 14, 2004 - 11:25 am 6. Nicole Griffin:

Doesn’t it seem strange that the guy was carrying a suicide note but (as far as the report said at least) no obvious plans of committing suicide? (i.e., he didn’t have a means of hijacking the plane or anything) I mention this only because I hope they are scanning this guy for potential pathogens, because if someone wanted to mount a biological attack (assuming a communicable pathogen), sending an infected person around on crowded planes would be the way to do it. That’s enough to send chills down your spine.

Jul 14, 2004 - 11:32 am 7. Knucklehead:

Witchita,

I’m not sure that all wars require that we villify/dehumanize the enemy. Certainly it is true of most wars, but I think we could find examples (the US Civil War?) where the villification/dehumanization was at least “controlled”. Obviously WWII is a counter-example, but even then we turned the villification spigot down real fast.

I think we can defeat Islamofascism or whatever it is without dehumanizing all Arabs and/or Muslims. That presupposes, of course, that some or most Arabs and/or Muslims aren’t the enemy and will (SOON!) begin to pick a side (the right side) to stand on. One of the things that worries me most about fighting off the jihadis is that we don’t seem to be hearing much from the non-jihadi element of Islam. Either that element is cowed into submission by the jihadis or it is a small, irrelevant element. I suppose it is entirely possible that the majority of practicing Muslims do, indeed, believe that everyone else must ultimately submit to their definition of religion and law. I hope, for their sake, that it is not the case. But they don’t seem to be throwing the hate mongers out of their mosques and communities.

I believe it was Golda Mier (sp?) who said, “They will stop killing us when they love their children more than they hate us.” Very interesting observation. Its past time for whatever portion of Islam that isn’t jihadist to stand up and proclaim that they love their children more than they hate anyone and that they will not tolerate the jihadis among them.

Jul 14, 2004 - 11:37 am 8. WichitaBoy:

Knucklehead

You may be right. I don’t know.

But I don’t think you’re right about the Civil War. In fact, I would go further, and maintain that not only did villification of the other side occur, but that it’s still occurring. Just the other day I had a Bush Lied/People Died fellow from Philadelphia over to my house who confessed that he really hates Southerners. They’re racists! They’re stupid! Aren’t Southerners always portrayed as stupid prejudiced hicks in the movies? And I know that in the South there is no great love of yankees or Sherman, even today.

Jul 14, 2004 - 11:52 am 9. Bryan C:

It seems to be a popular thing to worry about, but I have to agree that I don’t see much evidence of hateful conduct toward Arabs. And if it didn’t happen after 9-11, I don’t expect it will be sparked by lesser suicide or terrorist attacks.

Jul 14, 2004 - 11:59 am 10. lindenen:

Yeah, Southerners are usually depicted quite negatively. If we’re not marrying our sisters, we’re lynching people (like that never happened up North).

Villification and dehumanization always happen in war. I’d say that it’s probably a necessary condition for war. If the tv in the US broadcast the very graphic things that Al Jazeera broadcasts don’t you think people would have been clammering to get out of Iraq? If Americans had been able to see the victims of the bombing runs in Germany, how much do you think they would have wanted to depose Hitler?

Jul 14, 2004 - 12:02 pm 11. Paul:

It seems to me there is a big difference between racial prejudice, which categorizes people by their bloodstock, and antipathy towards a culture…particularly one whose acts of barbarism are so over the top and ubiquitous as is manifest by many in the ME.

There is no PC way to prevail against these people, and by now it should be obvious that the quickest way to fan the flames of rage and violence amongst them is to show weakness or indecisiveness.

I have a new slogan:

Liberal Democracy, Radical Islam, WMD. Pick any two.

I’m not yet convinced that Radical Islam should not simply be replaced with Islam in this slogan. I do wish that the vociferous condemnation of terrorism by the mainstream Islamic community that seems to be so glaringly absent would appear in order to put such doubts to rest.

Jul 14, 2004 - 12:04 pm 12. lindenen:

It would be interesting if there was a poll done measuring American attitudes toward Islam and Muslims. Honestly, I’m not too keen on Muslim immigration.

Jul 14, 2004 - 12:07 pm 13. Kevin P:

Roger:

I think this story needs to be told because I think the American pupblic needs to realize that we are at war and that security measures are a necessity, not a violation of civil rights.As far as air travel that includes both random checks and targetted checks.If you exclude little old ladies then the terrorists will find some 90 year old anarchist to carry the hijacking tool for them. If your passport has Syria,Lebanon and Germany as it’s last three stops then get ready for a complete shakedown, no matter what race you are.

Yes waiting in line is a drag,yes taking your shoes off is a pain, but an extra two hours at the airport and smelling smelly socks are gross but I do not think they are so bad when you think of 9-11. Do you want hassle free air travel or do you want a tight security system. I would rather lose a few hours of my time and have some airport cop quiz me about my destination, and yes horror of horrors, pick me out of the line and give me a complete inspection of my luggage and my body then to face the prospect of finding out that my flight has been picked as someones method of reaching heaven.

This is not the beginning of a police state. We are in a war whether people chose to think so or not.Al Queda has declared it,we have suffered attacks on our soil and overseas.They will not stop until they are killed.It’s ugly and we as a people are going to have to put up with things that in normal situations we would not stand for.

As far as racial profilling is concerned a certain amount of it, within reason, is required.If we find out that a mosque or a political group has financial or political ties with groups that are involved with terrorist then they will be under greater scrutiny then the frisbee golf association of America.When we woke up to the fact that the IRA was getting funding from certain Catholic churches and political groups we did not investigate Temples out of fear of racial or religous profiling.They targeted church groups in Boston and New York because that is where the money was coming from. That wasn’t a example of anti-Catholic bigotry it was common sense. That doesn’t mean we go back to the Herbert Hoover style of paranoid inspection of anyone he is pissed off at. But I also don’t want the ACLU in charge of security because they won’t do a thing until the act has already happened.

Jul 14, 2004 - 12:09 pm 14. Dave Schuler:

I think we can defeat Islamofascism or whatever it is without dehumanizing all Arabs and/or Muslims.

I don’t think that this is really the question at least right now. As I see it Americans are merely caught up in the real conflict which is between Muslims. So the real question is can Muslims defeat the Islamofascists in their midst before Muslims become inhuman? Suicide bombers, beheading people, flying planes into buildings filled with people who had never harmed them. Sounds like they’re well on their way.

Jul 14, 2004 - 12:10 pm 15. photoncourier.blogspot.com:

“Herbert Hoover style of paranoid inspection of anyone he is pissed off at”…I never heard of HH doing any such thing. Maybe you mean J Edgar Hoover, or Mitchell Palmer?

Jul 14, 2004 - 12:14 pm 16. Katherine:

When a serial killer is on the loose, isn’t it true that the police build his profile, which include psychological and external characteristics, and then is on a lookout for a suspect that fits this profile?

Would we prefer that instead of doing this police started randomly arresting people?

Does it make sense to detain and search a 70-year-old grandma of Scandinavian origin when our serial killer is described as a 30-40 year old male of Mediterranean appearance?

Yet this is what we seem to be doing with those so-called “random” searches at the airports.

Jul 14, 2004 - 12:23 pm 17. 88keyman:

Roger,

This is what frustrates me in our war on terrorists — that liberal impulse that even you, notwithstanding your support for the war, cannot purge, to “respect” everybody and everybody’s culture. Your inclination to get angry at what such “culture” has imposed on us seems utterly outweighed by your desire to see and present yourself as a reasonable, good and tolerant person.

What part of “Arab culture,” exactly, do you have an “abiding respect for”? Since you don’t specify, I assume your “abiding respect” is for Arab culture more or less as a whole — that while you recognize that all cultures have flaws, you believe, as liberals always do, that all cultures are generally positive entities. But are they? Ought we to, on balance, respect cultures that produce nothing of use to mankind, that subjugate women, that vilify gays, that almost across-the-board seeth with anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism? Do you respect, say, the “Arab culture” in the “West Bank” that creates summer camps where children learn to play kill-the-Jew? (I guess they’re bored with canoeing and making whistle lanyards.)

Granted, when you travel to an Arab country, you’ll find individuals who are good, friendly, and gracious hosts. But individuals and cultures are two different entities.

I agree that nobody sane would want to create another Manzanar — but who has called for that? Why would you even set up such a straw man? And why would you equate creating a Manzanar with restricting travel from Arab countries? You think that, say, Saudis have the RIGHT to enter this country, just as people have a right not to be placed in concentration camps? That restricting travel from a foreign country, when we conclude that such restriction is in our interests, is equivalent to rounding people up and putting them in such camps? What nonsense.

There’s a time for platitudes about respect and there’s a time for simple determination to see your enemies dead. I suggest focusing on the latter now, and if and when that’s accomplished, we’ll all have the luxury of showering ourselves with congratulations for our boundless tolerance, goodwill toward and respect for others.

Jul 14, 2004 - 12:24 pm 18. Clio:

Roger,

I’ve been busy for a while (too busy for blogs? alas, yes) and now as I went to post a comment ran into a roadblock which involved being more or less “fingerprinted” and scanned by two separate parties (one of whom, I presume, will be you). Is this a violation of my civil liberties? Maybe not, but it certainly qualifies as an imposition on absolute freedom of movement and expression in cyberspace.

Of course, I understand you have good reasons for imposing these new restrictions–I have been reluctant to start a blog of my own because I have no desire to attract the attention of lonely/psychotic losers (well, I don’t want a wave a red flag in their face, at any rate–they find us all in the end).

My point here is (and here I’m going to echo earlier posters) we have ALL had to suck it up a bit in the post 911 world. We have all had to endure extra security measures, which mean greater expense, greater hassles, etc. I write this while awaiting a “security check” call from the State Dept so I can FINALLY get my son’s passport, because God knows seven year old terrorists are preparing to strike! You see what I mean.

Again, no one’s talking here about stopping traffic from the MidEast or rounding up Arabs in detainment camps. But stories like this will inevitably make Americans look a little more suspiciously at Arab men travelling alone, skulking in malls, etc. It may not be pretty, it may not be “right” but it may just save lives when Aunt Betty calls the cops about an agitated looking dark-skinned foreigner hanging out at the food court all afternoon. People will call her a racist before and after he is arrested, but at the very moment someone finds a bomb in his backpack (perhaps only for that moment) she will be a hero.

Jul 14, 2004 - 12:31 pm 19. ajf:

As an naturalized American citizen originally from Iran I’d like to know what aspects Arab/muslim culture you have a deep and abiding respect for.

I don’t think I could say it any better than 88keyman:

There’s a time for platitudes about respect and there’s a time for simple determination to see your enemies dead. I suggest focusing on the latter now, and if and when that’s accomplished, we’ll all have the luxury of showering ourselves with congratulations for our boundless tolerance, goodwill toward and respect for others.

If you don’t agree with that statement, I really see how you could claim to “get” the WoT. It’s a WAR not an f’in’ cocktail party.

Jul 14, 2004 - 12:41 pm 20. ajf:

Sorry, that last bit should read:

If you don’t agree with that statement, I really don’t see how you could claim to “get” the WoT. It’s a WAR not an f’in’ cocktail party.

Jul 14, 2004 - 12:45 pm 21. PeterUK:

“I will do my part by stating clearly here my deep and abiding respect for Arab culture. And my unremitting militant opposition to those who have distorted it through terrorism.”

Surely there has to be an element of reciprocity and whilst there is wholesale abnegation of Wester culture there seems very little criticism of Arab culture.When we say Arab do we mean that or do we mean Islam?

On the face of it, Muslims do not seem to be exactly straining every sinew to defeat the Islamofascists and indeed one of our main excuses for inaction is that attacking them only increases recruitment.This would imply that Islam as a whole is not infertile soil for Islamic Fascism to grow.Those opposed to terror must stand up and be counted,every effort should be made to protect those who do.

BTW One way to remove obstacles to the deterrence of terrorism is make it law that an ACLU official travels on every flight.

Jul 14, 2004 - 12:52 pm 22. Knucklehead:

Interesting comments. I am not about to launch into a deep study of Islam. I’m willing to respect and tolerate any religion provided its adherents respect and tolerate all other religions or absence thereof. In matters of religion and its relationship with government I simply turn to a handful of “Jeffersonian wisdoms” in pretty much this priority order (Tommy had a ton to say about government and religion, I just chose to cherry-pick for my own purposes, but this is one area where I insist on consistency from myself):

“… the operations of the mind as well as the acts of the body are subject to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” –Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XVII, 1782. ME 2:221

“Our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions more than our opinions in physics or geometry.” –Thomas Jefferson: Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. ME 2:301, Papers 2:545

“The declaration that religious faith shall be unpunished does not give immunity to criminal acts dictated by religious error.” –Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1788. ME 7:98

“The proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right.” –Thomas Jefferson: Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. ME 2:301, Papers 2:546

Which all says, to me at least, we can do whatever the heck we want wrt to religion but civil law overrides any and all religious law and religious beliefs, or lack thereof, neither confer nor deny any privilege or responsibility to anyone.

But in what little effort I have put into having a look at Islam there seems to be this inherent refusal to abide by civil law rather than religious law or, perhaps more accurately, that Islamic religious law overrides all civil law. There’s also a confusion (on my part, I suppose Muslims understand it) regarding “peace” and “submission”. That said, I certainly am aware that there are practicing Muslims who show every outward sign of submitting to US law.

These are BIG sticking points to me because if Islam insists upon submission to Islamic law then clearly it cannot logically allow for submission by its adherents to US law. If this is true it throws a big monkey wrench into my “guiding principles” regarding religion and government. How can allow for the freedom of any religion which insists upon holding its laws above the civil laws?

I hope y’all will forgive the language, but I sure as shit ain’t shuffling along under sharia nor am I prepared to tolerate the imposition of any of its tenets that conflict with civil law upon anyone, adherent or otherwise. Selling drugs is illegal even if they are only sold to infidels and I don’t give a rat’s patoot about anyone’s honor if it requires killing a wayward wife or daughter or the female victim of a wayward neighbor. Its 2004 here in the good ol’ USA. If England and Australia want to go all stupid and tolerate sharia law for the Islamic population in their countries, well, I don’t know what to say to them other then, “You might wanna rethink this one, Bubba”.

It seems to me that Islam needs to decide if it is willing to play nice with the rest of us or not. If not, they really might wanna rethink their position because once we get to the “no more Mr. Nice Guy” stage we have demonstrated a pretty substantial aptitude for villification/dehumanization of our enemies and then going out and pounding them into submission.

Its in that sticky little bit about submission where the threat of real ugliness resides. One or the other of us has to submit. I sure as shootin’ ain’t gonna vote that it be us who do the submitting. It seems to to me that the UK, France, maybe Australia and much of Europe are trying to whistle past this graveyard. I don’t see how it can work out well for them.

Jul 14, 2004 - 12:53 pm 23. Carl in Atlanta:

SMALLPOX

Regarding the terrorism-by-smallpox scenario, read DEMON IN THE FREEZER, by Richard Preston.

You will never feel the same again about the danger of biowarfare.

Sorry that I don’t know how to create an active link –can someone tell me?– but here’s a paste of the address at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375508562/ref=ase_writerswrite/104-8555233-7421565

Carl

Jul 14, 2004 - 12:53 pm 24. Kevin P:

To all:

Thankyou for the correction. Yes I did mean J.Edgar not Herbert. I didnot say that 70 year old grandma should be arrested, I was saying that random checks are important because once you exclude anyone that is who the terrorist will wittingly or unwittingly use to get their tools of destruction on the plane. Swithching luggage with a unsuspecting senior or tricking them into “helping” you bring something aboard the plane is not that tough a thing to do.If the security groups say that this type of person or that age will be excluded then that is who the terrorist will use. Drug smugglers have used that technique to trick good hearted people to become unsuspecting mules.

Remember these terrorists use ambulances to escape detection and 13 year old children to deliver nail bombs.

I don’t like the crap we have to go through anymore then all of you do. I have just accepted that in the current climate we have to put up with more hassles to protect ourselves.I think we need both random checks and targeted checks. If we knew that a specific person was planning a specific action on a specific day then you could narrow your search techniques down.If you don’t think that down the road some blonde haired blue eyed 19 girl isn’t going to decide that the US government is the epitome of all evil and that because of her solidarity with the downtrodden Palestinian people she is going to hijack a plane and eliminate the crypto facist President Bush you should revisit the sixties and see how many WASP college grads decided they wanted to play at being a revolutionary for a summer.

Jul 14, 2004 - 1:17 pm 25. Morgan:

I would like to think that the general absence of public disavowal of the jihadis by the Arab/Muslim mainstream reflects a feeling that the jihadis are so aberrant that disavowal is unneccessary. Every night I see reports of crimes committed against women by men, but I feel no need to issue a public apology to women for the actions of my fellow men, because I don’t see myself as being anything like the offenders. Am I being naive?

Jul 14, 2004 - 1:46 pm 26. Knucklehead:

Kevin P,

Excellent explanation of why some grandmas and even the occassional blonde-haired, blue-eyed 19 year old woman require periodic searching (no doubt security folks the world over are thanking you for your understanding ;>).

There is a wide gap between being inconvenienced – even as SOP – and having one’s civil rights trounced upon. This is an area where I differ very stongly with the libertarian view.

Traveling by air provides a useful example. Airports operate under some sort of public charter. Airlines adhere to some list of requirements and so do travelers. Provided I pay the fare or otherwise legally procure a ticket and agree to all of the requirements of travel, then I have as much “right” to fly as anyone else. But the length or inconvenience of the list or requirements is not a matter of any “civil right” I am aware of. If the requirements include being thoroughly searched or handing over my shoes for closer inspection, then so be it. If the requirements are too onerous for my tastes I may decline to use that form of transport but my refusal to accept the requirements is not indicative of any loss of a “right”.

I’m not trying to hijack the thread, but the notion of a secure national ID card, to me, fits into this category. I don’t see how requiring such a thing is an affront to civil rights. I’m not aware of any inherent right to be free from carring secure identification that is also required of everyone else. Keeping track of the ID card and going through whatever process it requires would surely be an inconvenience, but I fail to see the violation of my rights provided that the card is not used for “unreasonable search” in some fashion. Proving who I am and that I am no threat to everyone else about to board a commercial aircraft does not strike me as unreasonable search. This thinking on my part drives my more purist libertarian friends bonkers.

Jul 14, 2004 - 2:02 pm 27. Kevin P:

Morgan:

Yes, You are being naive.

Jul 14, 2004 - 2:04 pm 28. Katherine:

Kevin,

I have no problem with increased security; I don’t have a death wish . Also, I support random security checks, but in addition to, not instead of targeted searches. But I am afraid that we would rather search that Norwegian grandma than young male from Saudi Arabia. Case in point: I happened to be at an airport when large group of young Muslim of both sexes on hajj were boarding a plane. Since my elderly mother was on the same flight, I was watching all of them to go through security. Guess who got nabbed for a search.

Knucklehead,

If I read my Bernard Lewis correctly, problem with Islamic laws is that they are the only laws. There is no concept of civil vs. religious laws. There never was equivalent of pope issuing excommunications for errand kings, and kings defying papal edicts. No giving to Caesar what is due to Caesar etc. Jeffersonian concepts have no meanings in Islam. I recall that Ataturk with his Turkish experiment was reviled throughout the Islamic world as an apostate and a traitor. Sharia is the only law, though there are some provisions for the faithful living in the infidel lands. (I am no expert and I speak under correction).

If Western governments decide that Sharia can be applied to Muslim who live within their borders this may have unpleasant consequences. Currently Christian Scientist parents who refuse life saving treatment because of their religious beliefs can be prosecuted. What about devout Muslim father who kills his daughter for the” family honor”? What about Muslim parents who mutilate their daughter genitalia? Are we supposed to be OK with that?

Like Knucklehead says, we better think long and hard before we toy with this Sharia thing.

Jul 14, 2004 - 2:06 pm 29. Nicole Griffin:

Carl in Atlanta -

Thanks for the link to the Richard Preston book. I read The Hot Zone by him (on Ebola) a number of years ago, and I didn’t realize he’d written one on smallpox as well.

Jul 14, 2004 - 2:08 pm 30. Katherine:

“Currently Christian Scientist parents who refuse life saving treatment because of their religious beliefs can be prosecuted”

This should read:

…who refuse life saving treatment for their child….

Jul 14, 2004 - 2:12 pm 31. MeTooThen:

KevinP,

I totally agree with your assessment of the relative strength and weakness of profiling.

Yes, there will come the day, when a young woman, likely of fair hair and complexion, and very likely from a home of comfort and relative affluence, will board a plane, or bus, or wander into a crowded theater, and commit mass

Jul 14, 2004 - 2:18 pm 32. JamieIrons:

Roger wrote:

“I will do my part by stating clearly here my deep and abiding respect for Arab culture.”

I’m having trouble with feeling deep and abiding respect for Arab (and Muslim) culture lately.

And I really *do* want to feel such respect. In the early seventies I spent several months living in Morocco, and encountered some extremely good and generous (Arab Muslim) people. Generally, I am inclined to like people unless they give me some reason not to.

What we hear lately from most of the Arab (and Muslim) world is not encouraging, though there are important exceptions (I think of some of what is coming out of Iraq lately, perhaps especially from some of the Iraqi bloggers).

Jamie Irons

Jul 14, 2004 - 2:20 pm 33. Kevin P:

Knucklehead:

I do not have a untrusting view of the negative aspects of giving government to much knowledge of my private activities.But I am in complete agreement with you on the need of national ID card.The government already has the ability to track every aspect of my life. Unless someone only uses cash the information of what every person buys with credit cards, debit cards, and over the internet is avaiable for a price or with someone who knows how to operate the machine we are now talking to each other on.The horse is already out of the barn.At this point all the national identity card would do is give our police and security forces the same tools that Albertsons and the Bank of America already has.Right now we use our Drivers liscence or our passport to cash a check or buy a plane ticket.Instead of having 50 different forms of ID we would have one uniform system.This would make it harder for criminals and terrorists to hide in this country. I know that the many will see this as Big Brother taking over but if you are willing to show your individual state ID to prove who you are I see no problem in having one national card that does the same thing.

Jul 14, 2004 - 2:21 pm 34. MeTooThen:

KevinP,

I totally agree with your assessment of the relative strengths and weaknesses of profiling.

Yes, there will come the day, when a young woman (less likely a young man), likely Anglo, with fair hair and complexion, and very likely from a home of comfort and relative affluence, will board a plane, or bus, or wander into a crowded theater, and commit mass murder by means of detonating an explosive device, or spreading a communicable disease.

And when this happens, the box will seem inescapable.

Jul 14, 2004 - 2:22 pm 35. Knucklehead:

Morgan,

I can’t make a judgment about naivette on your part, but I think you’ve misapplied the analogy.

Violence against women obviously occurs – too often. None of us go out an apologize for each or any instance of it. But our society has laws against it and we prosecute it and, sometimes, people will call the police and/or testify against the perpetrator. One of own personal shames from long ago is that I once heard what I was almost positive was a man beating up on his girlfriend. I did not call the police immediately (someone else did, fortunately) and to this day I consider that a very real failure on my part. We don’t need to apologize for the acts of others we do have a responsibility to support the laws and resist those who break them.

It seems, on the surface at least (there could be thousands of devout Muslims calling in tips to the FBI every day for all I know), that Muslims are not prepared to stand up and denounce and refuse to tolerate jihadis. I don’t pretend to know the reasons for that. It may be happening and kept a closely guarded secret for, I suppose, obvious reasons.

We may all someday learn that the Islamic community has been a valuable friend in the fight against jihadis. It may also be that jihadis are very careful about concealing themselves even among fellow Muslims. I don’t expect to discover that this is the case, however, since it seems that the the more vile the blather imams spout the more popular they are as speakers.

My suspicion is that the jihadis have won either through intimidation (the non-jihadi Muslims are afraid to stand against them) or persuasion or, perhaps, jihad is accepted as a matter of religious canon.

Jul 14, 2004 - 2:28 pm 36. Knucklehead:

Kevin P,

Yet another series of good points. I was only speaking about the civil liberty aspect of a national ID. But we are tracked, de facto, constantly. Your local grocery probably hands you a targeted coupon every time you check out – they track and analyze your buying habits. We carry drivers licenses but that means anyone who has good reason to ask to inspect it also has more than 50 possible flavors to keep track of. The young lady at the Avis counter can’t be that much of an ID expert. We have ID, we are tracked, and even using cash doesn’t stop it unless we avoid banks and ATMs. If one carries a cellphone it has a notion of who you are and knows darned well where you are. EZpass for us toll road users?

There are ideas who’s time has arrived and for which the counter arguments no longer make much sense. I think a national ID is one of them, but I never had a Big Brother so I never learned to fear them.

Jul 14, 2004 - 2:40 pm 37. mrp:

Sharia is a lot closer to our doorstep than France, Britain or Australia. The Toronto Star has been following closely a proposed implementation of Sharia courts in Ontario. Due to strong resistance to the measure, the proposal is now under review.

From the May 22, 2004 Toronto Star article “Ontario sharia tribunals assailed”:

Sharia-approved but illegal activities already occur in Toronto, and she fears this will give strength to them. Muslim women are battered but don’t dare report it. Bigamous marriages occur. Among her clients are two 14-year-old girls who were married last year to older men, in defiance of Ontario law prohibiting marriage before age 16.

“This is child abuse, sexual abuse,” Arjomand says scathingly. “These girls were born in Canada. I want to tell them to leave and get them into group homes, but if they do they’ll be disavowed and isolated.”

In a May 7 letter to Arjomand, John Gregory, general counsel to the attorney-general, acknowledged “the oppression that some Muslim women experience in Canada.”

But that was not reason to deny the Islamic Institute the right to use the Arbitration Act.

Jul 14, 2004 - 2:48 pm 38. Erik:

Personally, I am not sure a national ID card is a solution. I see this from a Swedish perspective, where every citizen has a Personal ID number, that is used to identify every person.

It’s basically a SSN, but much more connected to a person, and it is given to each person at birth, and follows all thru life.

The government loves it, because it gives them a very good way to keep tabs on everyone, since the same number is used in all different registers.

The upside for citizens is that they usually only have to give their personal number to any agency, and the agency will already have access to all other information, address, income, tax returns, family members, etc… (Yes, this is really Big Brother watching)

I’m not sure that it would solve the security problem in the US. I dont think there is anything to be added with a national ID card that isn’t allready accomplished with driver licenses.

The only way to make a national ID more secure would be with some sort of personalized IDnumber. And to have any effect, that ID will be needed to be included in all kinds of databases, to allow searches. This means tax returns, property registers, employment, etc…

Then add your travels, so you can be tracked for travel patterns that might be suspicious, and it could also be useful with a weapon registry so it can be established if you buy too many weapons…

Well, I think you can see where I’m going…

And since everyone will need to have one, the card in itself will not be a sign of honesty.

My point is that a national ID card in itself is not a magic bullet. To do any good, it must be able to be used to track all kinds of information, and that information, once established, will be very tempting for various government agencies…

I’d suggest another way, a sort of “opt-in”.

You want to get on an airplane faster? The airline already tracks your frequent flyer miles, just sign a paper allowing them to run a background check with Homeland Security on you, and your frequent flyer miles will have a flag on them saying you’ve been checked out.

If you want to make this more generic, do the same thing for drivers licences. If you volonteered to be checked out, you will have a certain sign on your license, whatever state it is from, and that means you were checked out.

However, like other people have said, it would just be a matter of time until someone where everything checks out is the one that should have been searched in the first place…

Jul 14, 2004 - 2:52 pm 39. Knucklehead:

Can one of our Canadian friends explain why allowing sharia laws and tribunals is considered a good idea? I really don’t get it.

OT, but to show how I have to fight off the “conspiracy theory” urges, about the time that mosque out in Michigan or wherever was trying to get permission to put out the call to prayers over loudspeakers (was permission granted?) I first noticed that a nearby church seemed to have stopped playing their bell-chimes on Sunday mornings. They would always chime “Morning Has Broken” at 9AM and then simple bells to ring the hours until noon.

I don’t know if the chime broke or someone complained about the “call to prayer” or the town asked them to stop so they wouldn’t have to allow any other call to prayer or what, but I’ve wondered. Probably something to do Freemasons.

Jul 14, 2004 - 2:57 pm 40. Katherine:

I would advocate caution before we jump on the national ID bandwagon. Not necessarily because of a potential for abuse, but it seems that such a system would be vastly expensive and not make us safer by one jot.

I suggest reading this article from The Atlantic, published in year 2002.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/09/mann.htm

I have chosen few excerpts, but you really should read the whole thing.

“Computer networks are difficult to keep secure in part because they have so many functions, each of which must be accounted for. For that reason Schneier and other experts tend to favor narrowly focused security measuresómore of them physical than digitalóthat target a few precisely identified problems. For air travel, along with reinforcing cockpit doors and teaching passengers to fight back, examples include armed uniformedó not plainclothesóguards on select flights; “dead-man” switches that in the event of a pilot’s incapacitation force planes to land by autopilot at the nearest airport; positive bag matching (ensuring that luggage does not get on a plane unless its owner also boards); and separate decompression facilities that detonate any altitude bombs in cargo before takeoff. None of these is completely effective; bag matching, for instance, would not stop suicide bombers. But all are well tested, known to at least impede hijackers, not intrusive to passengers, and unlikely to make planes less secure if they fail.”

“Equivalents of the big, centralized databases under discussion already exist in the private sector: corporate warehouses of customer information, especially credit-card numbers. The record there is not reassuring. “Millions upon millions of credit-card numbers have been stolen from computer networks,” Schneier says. So many, in fact, that Schneier believes that everyone reading this article “has, in his or her wallet right now, a credit card with a number that has been stolen,” even if no criminal has yet used itî. ”

“Large-scale federal databases would undergo similar assaults. The prospect is worrying, given the government’s long-standing reputation for poor information security. Since September 11 at least forty government networks have been publicly cracked by typographically challenged vandals with names like “CriminalS,” “S4t4n1c S0uls,” “cr1m3 0rg4n1z4d0,” and “Discordian Dodgers.” Summing up the problem, a House subcommittee last November awarded federal agencies a collective computer-security grade of F. According to representatives of Oracle, the federal government has been talking with the company about employing its software for the new central databases. But judging from the past, involving the private sector will not greatly improve security. In March, CERT/CC , a computer-security watchdog based at Carnegie Mellon University, warned of nineteen vulnerabilities in Oracle’s database software. Meanwhile, a centerpiece of the company’s international advertising is the claim that its software is “unbreakable.” Other software vendors fare no better: CERT/CC issues a constant stream of vulnerability warnings about every major software firm.”

“All security systems eventually miscarry. But when this happens to the good ones, they stretch and sag before breaking, each component failure leaving the whole as unaffected as possible. Engineers call such failure-tolerant systems “ductile.” One way to capture much of what Schneier told me is to say that he believes that when possible, security schemes should be designed to maximize ductility, whereas they often maximize strength.”

“To forestall attacks, security systems need to be small-scale, redundant, and compartmentalized. Rather than large, sweeping programs, they should be carefully crafted mosaics, each piece aimed at a specific weakness. The federal government and the airlines are spending millions of dollars, Schneier points out, on systems that screen every passenger to keep knives and weapons out of planes. But what matters most is keeping dangerous passengers out of airline cockpits, which can be accomplished by reinforcing the door. Similarly, it is seldom necessary to gather large amounts of additional information, because in modern societies people leave wide audit trails. The problem is sifting through the already existing mountain of data. Calls for heavy monitoring and record-keeping are thus usually a mistake. (”Broad surveillance is a mark of bad security,” Schneier wrote in a recent Crypto-Gram .)”

Jul 14, 2004 - 3:00 pm 41. Erik:

To get back on topic:

I think it’s a real danger to try to be too PC about information.

Swedish newspaper seldom state ethnicity, because it is believed it will promote racism. This leads to people assuming that everyone that is not explicitly described as being of swedish ethnic origin is in fact an immigrant.

“Swedish citizen”, “young male” and “born in Sweden” is more or less considered key word for not being an “ethnic swede”.

I believe this is actually worse, because it moves discussions from the public eye. People see the government and media as hiding information from them. This have a tendency to promote more suspicion, people are less likely to trust people from other countries, because they know the media and government are holding information from them, so the gut feeling is “what else are they holding back”…

I believe it would be much better to just state facts, openly, and then deal with the result. Should there be any hatecrimes as a result, then find the people that did it, and let the courts deal with it. The majority of people will get it anyway, as long as they know what is really happening…

Information is the key, as long as it’s open, correct, and not used for spin.

Jul 14, 2004 - 3:02 pm 42. Clio:

I have to disagree with the widespread consensus about the 19 year old blond she-hadi. It may not be outside the realm of possibility, but it is only slightly more plausible than the offside chance that a mother will plant a bomb under her sleeping child in its carriage. True sociopaths are rare, and practically nonexistent in the 19 year old girl department (whatever bad experiences you guys may have had dating them).

The SLA terrorist/flower child (name escapes me–Sullivan?) who surfaced twenty years after playing a part in blowing up a car (no one injured) and killing someone in the act of robbing a bank–she was about as hard-core as they came, but she still valued her life pretty highly.

Let’s keep our eyes on the ball here. Young Arab men travelling alone or in pairs–insert boilerplate here about how most such individuals are charming and law abiding, blah, blah, blah–will be (and should be) red-flagged for the immediate future as fitting the MO of 98% of would-be terrorists here. Let’s leave the corn-fed teen girls out of it.

Jul 14, 2004 - 3:15 pm 43. mrp:

Erik

Your 03:02 comment brought to mind Mark Steyn’s column (reg. required) in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph.

The tendency for today’s nanny-state bureaucrats is to shove religous conflicts into the nearest available statutory closet, using the coercive power of the state to smother dissent (for the time being).

Jul 14, 2004 - 3:20 pm 44. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

The duties of citizenship (or residency) are always unfairly distributed. Some serve in the military. Some pay high taxes. Some have to move to make way for a new road. In big wars, youth of certain ages get drafted.

Middle eastern Americans and Muslim Americans have special duties right now. One is to tolerate gracefully the very necessary profiling that should be applied to them. They have another duty (more to themselves than the country) to denounce the acts of terrorism taking place in their name or by their co-religionists and people who resemble them (triggering profiling).

They also have an affirmative duty to find and report extremists among their community, and to take jobs providing language and other intelligence support to our military and intelligence agencies.

These are the duties of good citizens. Our society should expect this of those who by chance are capable of them. It isn’t fair. But people with these characteristics, to be good citizens, have duties different or more onerous than those of the rest of us.

Such is reality. Such is living responsibly in a great nation.

In a war of this sort, stereotyping and profiling will be necessary. The fact that we can’t bring ourselves to do it (or admit to doing it) means that our civil society is not yet serious about the war.

We cannot be PC about this. Not everyone can be treated the same in some misguided attempt at fairness. War is never fair. Terrorism is not fair.

Not reporting facts to the citizenry out of fear of inflaming emotion is typical of the arrogance of the elite. “We don’t trust those ordinary people. If we show this beheading or reveal the race of that perpetrator, we will cause bias, stereotyping or discrimination.” That is not a suitable attitude. Nobody appointed elites to do this for us lesser beings.

We often see cases where the race of a suspect is not described, even though the police consider that a critical part of a BOLO. This is done purely out of PC considerations. It is another example of elite censorship.

Jul 14, 2004 - 3:20 pm 45. Knucklehead:

Katherine,

I don’t see how the points hold. Yes, such a system would need to be huge and somewhat complex. But we have similarly huge and complex systems (IRS, SSN, Passport control, call detail record systems mandated for telephone companies – HUGE, BTW – etc).

If federal IT systems lack security that’s a problem that should be addressed just because it exists and needs to be addressed. It doesn’t hold that we shouldn’t do federal IT systems or any new ones because there’s a security is always an issue with all IT systems. Our current system of ID’s is subject to insane levels of abuse and fraud. What portion of our HS and young college age kids do you think have fake ID’s? How many illegal aliens have legit ID’s?

As for expense… well, there is, last I recall, a very large Air Traffic Control Trustfund (or whatever its called) that seems to continually be unused. The expense would be very high but that doesn’t seem to stop us from doing stuff. Take $1B or whatever out of wherever – peanuts to the government. And it could be a user fee system similar to driver’s licenses, only at a national level. Every X years you get a ridiculously high bill (ever wonder why the heck a driver’s license costs $12 or whatever per year? It sure isn’t the cost of the bits that never change on some disk drive!)

The complaints laid out by the Atlantic article strike me as little more than, “Gee, what we have now is real freakin’ mess therefore any attempt to make anything better will be a real freakin’ mess, so let’s just do nothing and live with the real freakin’ mess we have now.”

Jul 14, 2004 - 3:27 pm 46. Knucklehead:

Clio,

If they dated me they were, by definition, sociopaths. I think Kevin P made an excellent case for this. Whatever you ignore those who wish to crack the system will take advantage of. And notfuhnuttin but females ain’t half as sane as people think they are regardless of hair and eye color!

Jul 14, 2004 - 3:31 pm 47. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Carl in Atlanta

Recent studies indicate that smallpox may not be as contagious as previously thought. Hence an intentional outbreak might be more quickly stopped than many of the scarier scenarios suggest. However, if you want to worry about it, a Russian scientist in the ’90s published in open literature an experiment where he genetically added ebola toxin genes to smallpox. Or check here for another way to make smallpox so deadly that vaccination would probably do little good.

Even more fun is the Soviet Smallpox Conspiracy – which is not what those familiar with Biopreparat would expect. It is remarkably evil and I have never seen it written up.

Another fun little fact: there are two nations believed to illegally possess smallpox: North Korea, and our old friends, the French!

On 9-11, my greatest surprise (other than the date) was that they didn’t use a biological attack.

Note that we have spent many billions on biological defense, with more to go. That is a huge reaction to a threat that has only killed a few people so far. The reason is that biological agents are relatively easy to get, modify (using genetic engineering or older technique to add antibiotic resistance and/or additional virulence), and spread (especially with an organization with suicidal attackers).

Erik and Katherine

I am strongly in favor of a national ID card. I have designed very large, distributed computer systems (1/4 or the world’s hotel reservations go through the biggest one), and systems subject to attack (Bank ATM switching systems). I am not unfamiliar with security or cryptography. See my article for suggestions on how it can be done in a reasonably secure way. Furthermore, the government can already track people through credit card systems (yes, I’ve worked on them too) and reservations systems.

My main argument is that privacy advocates who spend their time trying to show why such systems are wrong should instead be trying to figure out how to design them right. If we have any of a number of types of big terrorist attacks, people will demand security that will lead to national ID cards, with a system probably created in haste with resulting security holes and other malfunctions.

Anyone who fears national ID cards but uses credit cards is fooling themselves.

I also am in favor of a surveillance state, where many public areas would be under video surveillance, but with some twists different from the abused British system. See here.

Clio Your point is correct. I have, however, had the misfortune of knowing a 19 year old sociopath. But that doesn’t damage your argument.

Jul 14, 2004 - 3:45 pm 48. ambisinistral:

I’m very pessimistic about what the future holds.

The Islamists seem to be determined to attack with either chemical, biological, or radioactive weapons. Although I don’t think that such an attack will necessarily be as damaging as we fear (recall that the Japanese sect that used gas in the subways had attempted earlier attacks that were never even noticed), it will be crossing a psychological line that will drastically alter the way the world views this conflict.

I believe that in the Secular West such an attack will definitely lead to a severe backlash against Moslems. They have had years since 9/11 to stake out opposition to jihad. They have done a very poor to nonexistent job of doing that. Weak protestations of being the “Religion of Peace” and complaints about racism is about all I’ve seen.

If a chemical, biological or radioactive attack occurs Moslems are going to be asked bluntly what their stands on Dar Al Islam, the Islamic punishment for apostasy, Islamic treatment of women, and Aisha really are. An unambigious answer to those questions will be demanded.

Islamists clearly state they are fighting a religious war. Our Western Secular sensibilities make us shy away from that concept. However, when we are pushed far enough, and hard enough, we will begin to look at the religious nature of this conflict. That’s when it will get very ugly, because at present most Moslems will have no good answers to the questions I’ve posted above.

I believe the true end of this sad war will be us under the Shi’ra, or Islam torn asunder and rebuilt or discarded. Neither of those ends will be easily achieved. Neither will leave a pleasant after taste.

Bah, I hate religious nuts of any stripe.

Jul 14, 2004 - 4:19 pm 49. marek:

John, Katherine, others,

As a designer and implementor of large computer systems, never mind the complexity, I do not agree that the nation wide ID management system is very complex. It will be massive because of the number of IDs, but there is’t very much complexity in it. The security of the computer system iteslf is not that complex either. The actual problem is as usual with the administration and secure, really secure handling of the raw materials, eg. the blank ID’s, user access, etc. And all these problems have already been solved many times over.

Jul 14, 2004 - 4:24 pm 50. PeterUK:

The argument for ID cards dosn’t hold up ,because the problem is not identity, it is intent.There was plenty of information on the perpetrators of 9/11,what there wasn’t was a knowledge of what their intentions were,this is only meaningful in retrospect.Yes there were some suspicious activities,but that applies to most of the criminal fraternity as well.

One thing is certain, future attacks will be by people with impeccable documentation,in fact the only clue will be how clean their records are,they won’t even have been stopped jaywalking.After the event having ID will be mostly useless because the perpetrators will be dead.

Rather than spend billions on knowing who every one is,it would be better getting human intelligence operatives into the organisations which plan these crimes.

Jul 14, 2004 - 4:26 pm 51. Syl:

Remember, everyone, please! The Iraqi people are denouncing the terrorists as are their clerics!

We’ve laid a heavy burden on them and they are bearing it. And this will not go unnoticed in the larger Arab world.

I do not expect every muslim woman, man, and child in America to openly do the same…not yet. When the time is right, they will.

There will come a time when the groups that intimidate them, such as CAIR, will be ostracized. Right now they have free rein, but I don’t expect that to last. Especially if there’s another attack.

Jul 14, 2004 - 4:27 pm 52. Erik:

John Moore,

I see your point, but personally, I dont think I agree with you. Now, I’m not american, and might have the wrong idea about circumstances there, I see this from the perspective of a Swede, living in a country that has in fact implemented a system like that.

To me, this question is really two separate questions:

1. CAN we do this?

2. SHOULD we do this?

To the first question, the answer is obviously yes. It is not a technical problem, and a system like it is implemented in Sweden and has been for decades. Faking this system is extremely hard, and faked Swedish drivers licenses I think is virtually non-existing. Add the biometrics you describe, and it would be even safer.

The main question for me is the second, whether is *should* be done.

As you say, people can allready be tracked through credit cards, and so on, so I then wonder what this particular card would add in that sense.

My experience with systems like this, is that it gives government an easy access point to peoples lifes. For instance, they can run latest census against the tax record, and see if people live together without being married (for tax reasons). They can run the property records against the weapons registry, to see if you still have any land to hunt on, or if your gun license should be revoked. And so on…

I believe now that companies that sell TVs (or rent them) are required to send information about their customers to the government, so the government can trace those that has a TV but hasn’t paid the TV license.

Government tends to look for the easy score. It produces more results to look for the small fish that catches a lot, than to wait for the occasional big one. That’s just the nature of government, once they have such a way to track people all over the country, they will try to expand it to more areas, “just in case we might need it”.

And then, what will the card itself add? It’s already possible to track people. Drivers licenses establish identity, and they can be made safer using the techniques you describe, if that’s a problem. There are millions of visitors to the US each year that wont have a card, how do you handle them? And then there will be people that has the card, but still might not be a problem.

Would the national ID card only be for citizens? Then you have students, and forreign workforce on green cards and other visas, and you need to deal with them too…

I still dont really see the big improvement that a national ID card would add, except a way for the government to easily track citizens in all aspects of life.

I speak from the view of someone that has lived in a country with such a system all my life, and I dont really see any advantage to be gained here, security wise. Your views may ofcourse be different, as I said I am not sure I totally understand US circumstances here.

Jul 14, 2004 - 4:43 pm 53. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

marek

I agree that the system isn’t terribly complex, as such things go. Did you read the link I had on issues about how to design a system like that?

It would require some characteristics that complicate things – such as redundancy and switchover so that the loss of a computer or site wouldn’t take it down (although again, I have some ideas on how to deal with that). It would require some good security… but the credit card companies process enormously valuable transactions electronically, using old encryption (DES) and are not hacker prone.

If you are a big system designer, then you know that hack attacks are dramatically less likely or possible against such a system than they are against smaller systems. In this sort of system, vulnerabilities would most likely be at the endpoints.

PeterUK

A national ID card system by itself does not constitute anti-terror security. It is part of a much larger effort. For example, if you read my link on a surveillance state, you would find other (controversial) techniques. Infiltrating organizations is important (and implicitly one of the duties of Americans with the right language, appearance, etc). But sometimes a terror organization is an extended family, and is very hard to infiltrate.

If the system proposed by Poindexter had been built, it could have used data from surveillance cameras, national ID cards, reservations systems and credit card systems to look for patterns, which would then trigger closer scruitiny.

But since we aren’t serious about the war on terror yet, the whole scheme was thrown out – even the innocent electronic market in future events.

Sometimes I wonder if we are too stupid to survive.

Jul 14, 2004 - 4:49 pm 54. Dave Schuler:

There are any number of smaller-scale, more narrowly tailored systems that would be more to the point than a national ID system. One of these would be biometric machine-readable ID’s for aliens. Another would be micro-chipping.

Jul 14, 2004 - 4:53 pm 55. jerry:

Roger:

What is wrong with anti-Arab/Muslim feelings when Arabs/Muslims send people to kill us? So far very few Muslims in America have come forward to actively denounce terrorists. The Arabs who come forward are Christians. You say there is much to admire in Arab/Muslims cultures Well, there was much to admire in German culture during the Nazi reign as well. There were many fine Germans who did not support Hitler. Not every German wanted to kill Jews. But Nazi German Culture was dangerous and evil just as much of Arab/Muslim culture is evil. Muslims societies have been killing gays and treating women as chattel long before the rise of Wahabist Islam. It is part of the culture that is adhered to by even non-Jihadist Muslims. Non Jihadist Muslims continue to support slavery and remain anti-Jewish. People who are unwilling to make judgements ultimately succumb to evil because they lose sight of the good.

Jul 14, 2004 - 4:53 pm 56. Erik:

I really need to work on my “K.I.S.S.”-skills…

Just one more thing, as PeterUK allready pointed out.

To take 9/11 as an example, information *was* available at the time, the problem was that it didn’t raise a flag. I honestly dont think that would be different even if a national ID card had been existing then.

What is needed is simply more cooperation between agencies, and a better handling of all different kinds of intelligence.

Another big improvement, to get back to topic again, is to give out as much correct information as possible to all people. There is no better intelligence than ordinary citizens, especially when they are well informed.

Tell them what is going on, and be upfront about it, and they will be your biggest and strongest asset. Keep them in the dark, and you will need to rely on government officials only.

As a fun note, I understand it that Swedish intelligence regularly ask citizens returning from other countries if they would like to share information about thier travels… They apparently think this is a cost effective way to get intelligence..

Jul 14, 2004 - 4:54 pm 57. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Dave Schuler

What do you mean by “micro chipping?”

I am assuming that a national ID card will include encrypted biometrics.

ID’ing aliens is needed too.

But I’d bet Al Qaeda will use Americans for at least part of their next strike. If they have adequate operational security, they would be idiots not too.

Jul 14, 2004 - 4:59 pm 58. Kevin P:

To everyone:

When I argue for a national ID card it is with the knowledge that this isn’t a “magic bullit” or that there are not some hazards involved.My main points is that if a person is id’d as a terrorist a national id card might make it easier to track himor her down. As it is we have fifty different forms that are not connected.As far as my privacy is concerned the fact that I have a credit card, a ATM card, acell phone, and a e-mail address practically every transaction I make is available a nd traceable from virtually every company I deal with.Most of these companies share or sell most of this info. Any decent computer hacker can find out these facts as well. So at this point I don’t have the same reservations that I might have had twenty years ago.If Borders can tell American Express what book I bought I don’t really care if the government knows it too.

As is is now, if someone gets into the country he can go from state to state and it is very easy to get fake ID and hide your activity.You can go to a park in downtown LA and get a green card for about 40 bucks and a SS card for about $60.I wouldn’t know what half of the state ID’s look like so I, and most cops, wouldn’t know what a ID card from New Hampshire looks like so I couldn’t tell a fake from a real one.A national ID would not solve all our problems but it would be a start.

As I stated originally we need both random and targeted inspections at the airport. So I guess I am saying that your grandmother and the group headed to mecca should have been inspected.It might be easier for the Muslim citizens of this country to handle the fact they they are going to be selected more often for inspection if they are not the only ones. And if you go to a coffee shop near one of our university and hear the heat of the rhetoric of some of our more radicall students the thought of the 19 year female jihadist might not seem so out of bounds.

Jul 14, 2004 - 5:01 pm 59. Dave Schuler:

John Moore:

Micro-chipping.

It’s also being used for children right now.

Jul 14, 2004 - 5:06 pm 60. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Erik

A National ID card would certainly not have worked on 9-11. And by itself, without other systems, it doesn’t provide security. It does have some value, such as reduction in identity theft.

But security systems in general need to identify people (forcing a challenge on those who would defeat it), track people, track patterns, and provide hierarchies of access levels, and detect attempted breaches. Having an ID that is tied tightly to an individual is a critical part of that.

There is a reason that outfits that are real experts in security – such as the militiary or NSA – use identification cards: it improves the security, as part of an overall security system.

Given the vulnerability of our society, the only way to really prevent attacks if to watch and limit those who would attack it. Basically, we cannot prevent attacks without profiling, and ID cards are useful because one can attach information such as suspicion level (or security clearance level) for people.

Jul 14, 2004 - 5:06 pm 61. mrp:

John

There’s more about the secret Soviet bio-warfare programs at PBS’ Frontline (PBS) page. The Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov interview is especially chilling.

On the topic of national ID cards…

What defense would they provide against foreign nationals with identities assumed (or even validated) in their country of origin? Biometric data encoded on the ID card doesn’t matter if the foreign governments certifying the data have histories of endemic corruption. The recent cases of DMV IDs for cash here in the US do not bode well for for the ID advocates. Money (at the well-financed international terrorist level) will defeat any government ID system designed for public use.

Jul 14, 2004 - 5:17 pm 62. PeterUK:

John Moore

The problem isn’t with a working system it is what documentation constitutes an identity,this is the point from which all the fraud will stem.Having seen the “townhalls up” that inputters at banks can make I am not sanguine about the system.

In the UK we probably have the most surveillance cameras in the western world and a street crime problem,the videos are great for use in scourt but of course the crime has been committed then.

The mafia was penetrated by agents and John Walker, a very confused young liberal, got to hang out in the same urinals as Osama bin Laden.I would have thought that the USA has thousands of people from the middle east,eastern Europe and the mediterranean who could fit the bill appearence wise.

ID cards will prove the usual get out for government,they will be seen to have taken measures which cover everyone in a suitably PC manner,but as Belmont Club says they won’t do anything to upset the supreme court.

Jul 14, 2004 - 5:19 pm 63. Rick Ballard:

Lots of great comments concerning security issues and identification. There are some practical limitations to the proposals that I don’t feel are important to comment on at the moment. Nor do I think it important to champion diversity with regard to other cultures.

I am rather surprised that no one is looking at the information provided. We have in custody a single individual with obviously evil intentions. The fact that the government is confirming this information is very unusual – terror suspects usually “disappear” for a bit (a few days anyway) and I don’t believe I’ve seen such a clear acknowledgement of the suspects intentions. We also have been advised by Homeland Security of a higher than normal amount of disturbing SIGINT. We have a national political convention starting in about two weeks.

Does anyone think that the suspect in custody is a loner working solo? Does anyone doubt the existence of islamicist “sleeper cells” here willing to provide assistance?

If there is date, time and final destination available for this fellow, how long should the government sit on it? Would exposure of the info deter the attack? Perhaps the nine nincompoops will have a change of heart concerning their recent decisions if this fellow turns out to be one of fifty.

Jul 14, 2004 - 5:25 pm 64. Syl:

Erik

Just the fact that our government would have the database doesn’t mean they’d be allowed to use it for just ANYTHING the citizens didn’t give them permission to legislatively.

It wouldn’t be the first time such restrictions would be in place. We have them in government already in a lot of areas. Remember we had a ‘wall’ here between the FBI and CIA that didn’t allow them to share certain information. Two guys could be in the same room, each with different info on the same person, and they couldn’t tell each other. In fact the wall as used was taller than the wall as legally set forth.

Jul 14, 2004 - 5:28 pm 65. Nicole Griffin:

John Moore -

“Another fun little fact: there are two nations believed to illegally possess smallpox: North Korea, and our old friends, the French!”

Do you have a link or a reference for that info? I had never heard that before.

Jul 14, 2004 - 5:44 pm 66. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Erik

Your points are valid. It is a “slippery slope” argument – that if the government has the information, it will use it for unintended purposes.

If I were terribly concerned about privacy, that might bother me. But the system as proposed does not make that easy. Again, this is why privacy advocates need to be involved in specifying the system, instead of spending all their energies fighting it.

I see such a system as a replacement for drivers licenses and green cards, etc for ID. If you are in the country, you have an ID card. It is issued according to well known standards, so you don’t have the nonsense associated with the various ways and reasons people get drivers licenses.

I suspect that some of the arguments here are from people who didn’t read the link to the more detailed ideas.

As far as implantable devices, I don’t think that adds anything and is most likely to be resisted.

As far as identities, one way to determine identity is by behavior. Is it more important to know that card X is owned by Joe Schmoe, or that card X is owned by a guy who commutes back and forth to Pakistan? Furthermore, a well specified systems will have safeguards whenever an ID is transformed to a real identity. Most users of the system don’t need to know the associated identity, just the characteristics of that person as determined by the system.

Such a system needs appropriate safeguards. It needs to operate like most of the Patriot Act – with all three branches of government involved.

PeterUK

The camera system indeed does have benefits other than tracking terrorists (or detecting patterns). It performs the function (if done properly) of a “Fair Witness” – it allows you to reconstruct history. For criminal events it should result in improved conviction rates and reduced false conviction rates – in other words, a camera system protects the innocent. If you read my proposal on that, I suggest an automated system, to avoid the abuses of having cops leering at people through a camera lense. I also suggest using cryptographic techniques to authenticate the video recording, so that forging evidence becomes essentially impossible.

The whole system I am talking about improves with time, as it learns. It also assumes some improvements in artificial intelligene – specifically pattern recognition. It isn’t a short term solution, but a proposal for a society with somewhat less privacy (but only in those places where you are not private anyway), an ability to reconstruct history (very useful for tracking terrorists or proving you are not the suspect in something), and a way to identify people in terms of their characteristics as opposed to names.

Another issue is the value of privacy when in public (or conducting commerce). We have made a minor god of privacy in the US. But how important is it really? I would argue that the importance of privacy is related to who gets information and what do they do with it.

In that sense, a government system can have controls. Governments are uniquely position to apply harsh penalties to people who violate their rules, which would include those misusing private information. There would always be failures – abuses would occur – but that is not going to happen often (if the system is designed well). Again, the Patriot Act provides the issues:

1) It has a lot of protections built in, requiring judicial input in almost every case.

2) It has been used outside of terrorism, showing that information systems (and Patriot Act provides for ways of gathering information) will be abused if not constrained (Patriot Act results should be limited in their usage).

Jul 14, 2004 - 5:47 pm 67. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Nicole

WAPO reported the smallpox info. Of course, it’s a CIA estimate, so who knows what that means

Jul 14, 2004 - 5:51 pm 68. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

MRP

Alibeck doesn’t connect the extensive Soviet effort and assistance in the eradication of smallpox with the improved utility of smallpox as a weapon – probably because he wasn’t involved in the eradication effort. It appears that the reason the USSR was so helpful to Henderson’s effirt at WHO in eliminating smallpox was twofold: (1) Eradication of smallpox results in the end of vaccination and hence makes smallpox a more useful weapons, and (2) participating in the effort allowed them access to many strains of the virus, allowing the best to be selected for weapons use.

However, Alibeck does make some statements that I think are worth pondering as we consider security systems:

The problem is that the 21st century is the century of information technologies and biotechnology. More people and more countries will get knowledge by technology. But when a level of general biotechnology becomes high, it’s [said] that the level of so-called military biotechnology is high as well. More people would know how to manufacture, how to develop and manufacture biological devices, biological weapons. And this situation will be changing very seriously in the future.

Now think about Iran (working through their US Hezbollah cells) and their recent threats to the US as you read:

here is a very high probability that biological weapons in the future could be some kind of instrument for blackmailing. Just imagine this type of scenario. A group of possible terrorists, now located here in the United States. They have some devices. And for example, if the United States tries to organize some kind of military action against an Arab country (because this country supports terrorist groups and such), and the leader of that country declares that if the United States tries just to fight this country, 50 terrorist groups armed with biological weapons would commit these acts, how would the United States behave in this situation? Nobody knows. And what kind of consequences this government should expect if they really used biological agents and biological weapons, is relatively severe consequences. This is a possible way just to blackmail a superpower.

As I have mentioned before, my daughter does genetic engineering and has worked in a BL-3 lab. We considered a business idea (not involving pathogens) and determined that a suitable lab would be $50,000 to $100,000 with $2000/month for reagents. That would let you genetically alter pretty much anything, using plasmids and, if needed, RNAI. I don’t know about viruses, but certainly you could do bacteria such as plague or tularemia. If you wanted a BL-3 or BL-4 facility, it would be more expensive, but a terrorist organization is not likely to care if a little pathogen leaks out of their lab, so they would be likely to set up a BL-2 (cheap) lab.

Biological agents tend to be pretty awful. Anthrax (hard to weaponize) essentially eats you. Ebola causes bleeding. Smallpox causes terrible painful blister-like sores and then kills you. Pneumonic plague (same bug as bubonic plague) destroys your lungs very quickly.

You can see why we spend so much money on biodefense, and why I think we are going to be forced to a surveillance state.

Also, you ask about foreigners. Issue them an ID card from the same system. The system should be unforgeable (see my link) and hence this becomes a visa or a green card.

Jul 14, 2004 - 6:17 pm 69. Erik:

John Moore, Syl,

Yes, my resistance to it is definitely a “slippery slope” argument. It’s not the best of ways to argue, because there’s no way of prooving that “if A then B then C…”.

However, I am sceptical to government not overstepping their bounds, because I live in a country where that is more of a rule than exception. Once in place, it is always too tempting for the government to use it for other purposes. Walls are easy to tear down, if you want what’s behind them…

Again, this is from my perspective. To me, there is no way that such a database in Sweden would *not* be used for other purposes, eventually.

The argument about privacy is actually the same our government use. Basically, they say that “if you have nothing to hide, why would it bother you. We will only use it for good purposes.”

I am deeply sceptical to that argument. I live in a country where the government knows everything about me, and can control every aspect of my life.

That does not make me feel all warm and cosy, protected by the government. Far from it. I cannot see any advantage for the US to adopt a Swedish system, that would not mean larger disadvantages.

I believe Sweden is seen as a “soft” country for terrorists, meaning it is easy to get in and establish an identity here. One of the people the US blacklisted after 9/11 was even put up for Parliament seat by the Social democrats… (*After* he was blacklisted….)

OT (kind of):

A swedish citizen has just been released from Guantanamo. He just made the media appearance anisd claiming various tortures, and the media is eating it all up. One of the more creative ones is he claims a nude american woman was sent into his cell to solicit sex, to break down his islamic faith.

The guy is a convicted bankrobber, and gives two different accounts as to why he was in Pakistan, but the media dont seem to mind that.

Does anyone has a link to any (impartial) report debunking torture at Guantanamo? Amnesty, Red Cross, etc… I know they were there, and they complained about cell sizes, no trials, etc… But I havent seen anyone of them claiming that there was any torture there, and I think it could come in handy here when people start citing this model citizen…

Jul 14, 2004 - 6:22 pm 70. Katherine:

I wonder, has anybody actualy read the article that I linked to? I very strongly recommend doing this before dissing the content.

Being in a bit of a hurry and trying not to hog too much space I highlighted few points, in a rather disjointed manner and I apologize.

Yet, the security expert quoted in the article actually suggests few solutions, one among them being more human involvement. What he is concerned about is brittleness of the system: once you have one central database all the hacker needs to do is to break to one central database. Brittle means that once the failure of the system occurs, it is catastrophic. Internet was designed as a communication system that would survive nuclear attack, therefore it was designed as ductile, not a brittle system, and this is something that we should be striving for.

And in reality, how exactly would the national ID card help to keep terrorist at bay? If I recall, the 19 hijackers had papers in perfect order. If would make just a bit more sense if we were issuing temporary IDs to the visitors to the US, but, as I recall, we already have such a device and it is called a visa.

Maybe we simply need to enforce existing laws, eliminate the visa express (deis it still exists?) for e.g. citizens of Saudi Arabia, with this extra addition: let all visitors register with local authorities. This may sound harsh, but I believe that it was a law of the land at least until 1980s.

Also, regarding cost, it IS a concern. If we spend security budget on high-tech solution that does not work but lulls us with false sense of security, we are not spending this money on solutions that actually can protect us.

I entirely agree with Erik regarding potential abuses of national ID. Once the bureaucrats manage to impose such a clever device on us there is no end to what merry havoc they can wring. Yes, we are all in all sort of the databases, but this just adds one extra level of ease for control.

I personally love technology and am a great fan of technological solutions. But this is not a game, we are fighting for our very survival and the BEST option must be found, not merely something makes us feel better.

Jul 14, 2004 - 6:28 pm 71. Knucklehead:

Just a little more on the national ID card discussion.

There are three major elements involved with identification:

- authentication (you are who you say you are)

- access (you may be where you are)

- authorization (you are allowed to do what you are doing)

Our current hodgepodge of 50 drivers licenses does a terrible job at authentication. Fake drives licenses are cheap and readily available. Passports are better at authentication, but are not universally held and could be strengthened (John’s biometrics)

The current system of drivers licenses pays no attention whatsoever to access. They play no role in determining if you may be where you are. I’m not sure how significant a role a national ID could or should play in matters of access, but it could easily be used for air travel to at least determine if you have any outstanding warrants that suggest you should be denied access to a terminal even though you have been authenticated.

I don’t see that a national ID would play any role in authorization other than, perhaps, to social and some self-selected set of commercial programs, but it is possible. For example (and this is a weak one but I can’t come up with better off the top of my head) consider “Megan’s Law” type legislation which has varius degrees of offense which each have coresponding levels of notification. A national ID check of someone behaving suspiciously near a grammar school might be used to trigger an alarm that the person has no authorization to be on school property and that the unauthorized presence needs to trigger a certain notification chain. Another potential role for a national ID might be to carry license information which would be another form of authorization.

The following has nothing to do with the national ID topic, but it does touch on other topics in this and recent threads. Long reading, interesting, try it you might like it. I find some of it convincing, some not, YMMV:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FF23Aa01.html

Jul 14, 2004 - 6:30 pm 72. Knucklehead:

Katherine,

When it comes to IT systems there are various things that effect the availability and security of the system (whether or not it can be accessed when it is needed and whether or not the information needed can be retrieved in a timely fashion and whether or not the information, when retrieved, can be trusted). These include things like hardware reliability, power source, and human “touch”. Humans are the source of some of the nastiest problems with availability of systems – even when they are not trying to hack or otherwise defeat a system. People do some things really well, but what computers do well should be left to computers.

Systems can be made survivable through distribution and redundancy and, additionally, recoverability. Nothing says the database needs to be centralized in one location and nothing says there needs to be only one copy of it being operated against. For example, data could be regionalized and accessed as necessary. People are, by and large, mostly near home and the VAST majority are of no interest to any security system. Alarming against the exceptions is what one is after as far as national security goes. But please keep in mind that nobody is suggesting that a national ID be the sole level of security. It is just one cog in the machine that makes it that much more difficult to break. Right now identification is the simplest cog to break. There’s no reason that needs to be true.

Jul 14, 2004 - 6:43 pm 73. Morgan:

KevinP -

“You are being naive”.

I admire pith.

Knucklehead -

While my question specifically regarded public denouncement of the jihadis, I agree that the question of covert anti-jihadi action is very relevant. Neither of us knows what is going on covertly, and there was a good deal of “explanation” (read justification) of terrorist acts subsequent to 9/11. But the spare handful of Muslims I have known strike me as being as different from the extremists as I am from a wife beater. I’ll keep thinking about it.

Jul 14, 2004 - 6:51 pm 74. Katherine:

But how would that national ID make us safer? While the potential for abuse is so great?

Jul 14, 2004 - 6:51 pm 75. Knucklehead:

BTW, a national ID system is not THAT huge. In terms of database we’re talking about (very round numbers rounded up) 300M citizens, double that for visitors and visas, call it 600M people. Keep a thousand bytes of data for each and we’re only talking 600GB – child’s play. We could easily build a system that kept several times that much info.

As for transactional load, that is also child’s play. A lot of people come and go and use ID all the time in the US, but it really isn’t anywhere near a large percentage. How often do we normally produce our driver’s license or passport for ID, once or twice a month? Once a week? I go weeks or months without producing ID and I’m no shut in. It wouldn’t surprise me if we are talking about less than 5M transactions/day. Again, child’s play. Just the CDR database for even one Big Phone Company handles 100M or more transactions per day.

Jul 14, 2004 - 6:55 pm 76. Katherine:

One more confession to make: I would not put my security and safety in the hands of Larry Ellison and Oracleís software.

That’s just personnel prejudice.

Jul 14, 2004 - 7:15 pm 77. Clio:

Okay Katherine! I have now read (or skimmed) most of the article you linked to. Thanks for that. It called back to mind an interview I heard last year on NPR with Schneier, who seems like one of those whacko geniuses with whom ordinary souls cannot compete. Except that I found him horribly wrong on his main point. As I read his argument, it boils down to: “all solutions to serious problems will backfire.” As a codicil, perhaps because he is mathematically inclined and a man (not unrelated), I would add: “statistically, your odds of being hurt/killed by terrorists is extremely low, we just all have to adjust to the idea of being blown up/liqufied by microbes etc. at any moment–what’s for lunch?”

To swing this back to the national ID argument, the point is made (cogently) by Erik and others that these are a) not altogether reliable and b) subject to creeping abuse by the state. Fair enough. But, Erik, most Swedes are born and bred in their land, look fairly similar, speak a mutually intelligible language, etc. Moreover, the Swedish state (with the approval of a large majority of voters) is intimate with its citizenry in ways we Yanks would never countenance. Where is the line crossed, precisely, with the ID cards? I’m not saying you’re wrong, I just don’t see that it is a discrete problem–ID cards are just a small piece of the puzzle.

Here in the States (as John and others make clear) there ARE no reliable sources of identification. Essentially, a 2 by 3 inch piece of paper with no photo and one nine-digit number allows you to get any number of other legitimate documents saying you are who you claim to be. It’s a mess. A national ID would have the advantage of providing a stable floor for all other documentation. Right now, there is none. I doubt any other western nation allows for such a hodgepodge mess. Believe me, Erik, we won’t be catching up to Sweden in intrusive state powers anytime soon.

Jul 14, 2004 - 7:16 pm 78. Katherine:

that is: “personal”

I think I need to go away and have a drink

Jul 14, 2004 - 7:17 pm 79. Katherine:

Clio,

I wish I could have your faith in not catching up to intrusive powers of a state. But bureaucrats are the same everywhere and so are temptations for abuse of power.

Perhaps I am oversensitive, being brought up in a totalitarian state when ìthe papersî had to be produced on demand. But I feel that suspicion of governmental powers served American nation well and preserved us from most gregarious abuses of state that are commonplace by now in Europe.

That is why I urge caution before handing the state more control than they already have over us. And this is all I do.

Jul 14, 2004 - 7:40 pm 80. mrp:

What’s so reliable and sacrosanct about a government-mangaged database? Like federal employees don’t rifle through citizens’ electronic dossiers today for thrills?

Just to throw a little flammable fluid on the fire, there’s no doubt in my mind that a ‘National ID’ would eventually devolve into an internal passport with all sorts of interesting vistas opening for ambitous bureaucrats (hey, why not mandate the insertion of one’s ID into a car’s ‘card slot’ before the car will start?… then tie that into a federally-mandated GPS system and …).

The Brits are already discussing the use of satellite wireless transmissions that would constantly beam each auto’s location and speed to a Traffic HQ. If the driver is exceeding the speed limit for the jurisdiction, he’s ticketed from the HQ. No traffic cops or traffic cameras needed, and the car’s owner pays for the surveillance equipment mandated for the car.

One more point on a national ID database, one every IT guy and gal knows by heart: GIGO

A database is only as good as the information that goes in, and right now, the government-entered data for our foreign visitors leaves a lot to be desired. Senator John Kyl makes the case.

Jul 14, 2004 - 7:42 pm 81. PeterUK:

An electronic ID card will be used to store more and more information about citizens.

More and more agencies will for reasons of security,law and order,health and safety or any other excuse they can come up with,demand the right to read information.

What I cannot understand is there have been two horrendous World Wars,a cold war with an opponent which was and still is a terrifyingly armed nation.The US fought a long and bitter war in Vietnam,there have been two Gulf wars.All this without the need for IDs and now terrorists can blackmail us into restricting our liberties,I say us because my country is at it as well.

You might trust the government you have now but what about President Kerry?

Jul 14, 2004 - 7:53 pm 82. PeterUK:

mrp,

The current shower running the UK have presided over a serious of technological debacles that are of mind boggling incompetence.

The Inland Revenue is trashing millions of self assessement tax forms because they can’t handle the traffic,the forms incidentally are compulsory , there is a fine for non-compliance and late submission.This idiocy has been carried through most government departements,a prime example is the passport fiasco.

Where our jobsworths excel is in fining motorists for doing 32 in a 30 mph zone,to coin a phrase “You couldn’t make it up”,You really couldn’t.

Jul 14, 2004 - 8:10 pm 83. Erik:

Clio,

it would be a centralized person registry. As a (simplistic) example of potential dangers Holland had one in the 1930s, making it easy for occupying forces to round up certain people.

A national register needs some kind of national ID code for every person. In Sweden, the personal number is the birthdate, and four unique digits. For instance, a person with the number 700704-0013 would be a 34 year old male, born in Stockholm on 4th of July.

Even if the code would just be random digits, it would have to be unique for one person.

Once you have this code assigned to everyone and in a register, it is just too useful to not use.

The IRS will want it in their systems too. After all, it’s very useful for them to make sure they dont mix up people, and be able to keep track of tax returns and speed up the process. (IRS *loves* this, I dont think the US is different than the Swedish in that regard…)

Same for the military, it’s a great way to do background checks. So it will probably be used for background checks when buying guns, seeking employment, etc..etc..

And why estimate census? With this system, you know exactly how many people there are, and where they live. That’s very useful for healthcare, education, etc..etc..

Same with voter registration, you dont even need it anymore, just create rolls based on the census count.

Then all banks will want it in their systems, so they know the person is the one they think, car rentals will want to keep it to make sure they know who rents their cars, airlines will want it to be sure they dont mix up people, etc..etc..

Are you a trying to move to another state, to start over? Maybe escape an abusing spouse, or other people threatening you? Forget it with this system, it’s centralized, and there is always a way to get that info. (”Hi, I’m calling from Avis, and 700704-0013 hasn’t returned his car. Where does he live?”)

Basically, once the system is in place, it is simply too practical not to use it for everything. In Sweden, most companies now use it in their customer databases, as well as all employers.

The US already have driver licenses. Why not start there and improve them, making them difficult to fake. Add biometrics if you want, add a validation database that can check the authenticity, and you have the same advantages.

Add a similar card for people that dont have driver licenses, a “non-driver driving license”.

Making a centralized registry is just a too big temptation for governments not to abuse down the road.

Remember, Sweden hasn’t always had this system, it was implemented 1947. But once it was implemented, it was just too easy to extend it, and little by little, it is now used everywhere…

Jul 14, 2004 - 8:25 pm 84. Kevin P:

To everyone:

I respect and I understand many of the fears that some of the posts that are against anational ID card. I have no desire for the government to have any of my personell info. But the system that we have is a joke.

Ayear ago I lost my social security card. I went toget a replacement.I got my original birth certificate, I brought my bank accounts, and a tax return. I was given a form, I filled it out and waited. The women at the desk looked at my form asked me a few questions that were on the form, asked to look at my birth certificate, and that was it.All the questions that she asked me are available to anyone who has even minor hacking skills.The birth certificate is realitively easy to forge.Half of the material I brought for proof of ID she didn’t ask for. It was far too easy.Once you have a SS# you can get just about anything.

Will the ID card fix everthing. NO.I just think we should make a tad hard for someone to slip into this country and assume a false identity. Right now if someone in the CIA or the FBI wants to go to the computer bank and find out just about everything about me they can do it right now.I think the card will help local authorities help national authorities track down potential terrorists in a emergency situation.Whether I have a state ID or a national ID I don’t think it will make that big a difference in my life. Will there be abuse. Of course.There is abuse now.But no one would say that we shouldn’t have a state ID that is tied to a state data base. Expanding it to a national level is not that big of a leap.

Jul 14, 2004 - 8:36 pm 85. David [.net]:

I believe the danger of someone infected with small pox being planted in our society was “war-gammed” even before 9/11.

Now that’s what our war is missing:

War Gams

As for smallpox, I’m sure you mean Dark Winter. I haven’t read it since late September 2001, but if I remember right it got way out of control all too quickly.

Dark Winter

Jul 14, 2004 - 9:11 pm 86. Yehudit:

“an entire city block in Manhattan destroyed.”

More like 10 sq. blocks

Jul 14, 2004 - 9:17 pm 87. Katherine:

It is interesting, is it not, that people who experienced national ID papers and abuses that are almost automatically connected with their use (be it in totalitarian or democratic systems) are urging caution, and people who never experienced anything like that shrug and say: Bring it on.

Please do keep in mind the frog in a slowly warming water, and surety of citizens of many civilized countries who were absolutely sure that ì IT cannot happen hereî right until IT (coup/abuse/atrocity etc) had just happened.

Jul 14, 2004 - 10:15 pm 88. TmjUtah:

RogerL…

It does bring a kind of a wry smile to my face when your past betrays you.

I admire many things Arab, too. Tough people impress me. Anybody who rises to the top of the heap over there is tough – and don’t let the taints of corruption, nepotism, or tribalism put you completely off. That is the way things are, and those who function in that arena don’t make it out of the minors without being disciplined, tough, and at least moderately intelligent. I also like their notions of hospitality…

I wish I could think of anything else, though. I don’t do it here very often, but I often use the appelation ‘barbarian’ when referring to the Islamists. I’m not being perjorative, I’m being succinct. My reading of the Koran has given me much, much pause in contemplating the ultimate cost this conflict will demand. At the extreme, the enemy we fight explicitly rejects almost every convention of human worth, dignity, or freedom that we take for granted. The whole of the Arab/muslim world does not necessarily share that view. So be it. The part that does cannot be given the slack to act out their wettest dreams. The here-to-fore sideliners better pick a side soon lest they become perceived as the enemy.

Once a sufficiently traumatic incident arises, this civil society will respond in a direct and meaningful manner. There are much, much worse things than 9/11 within the capabilities of our enemy.

That’s all I need to know about them, really. That they exist, what they intend, and hopefully where they operate.

My two cents on a national I.D. is simple. If you can travel across the country with an ATM card and two credit cards and don’t break out into a rash using your grocery store premium program and an online service to pay for products, I don’t think you have a valid argument against the concept.

My concept of a national I.D. card would be a biometrically keyed document that was encoded with your discrete national I.D. serial (which you wouldn’t know),the last four digits of your SSN or INS number, your citizen status, contacts with law enforcement (for tracking frequency of interest – remember that Atta was stopped for a registration violation but there was no systemic tie to immigration for wants or warrants?), and here’s the killer: voter privelige status.

The I.D. would be presented only for travel on public/public charter systems, at request of law enforcement, and WHEN YOU VOTED. And there you have the real reason that a national I.D. is anethma to those in government. There are regions of this country that have never had an honest election…and the people in power in those cities and states want it to stay that way.

Jul 14, 2004 - 10:27 pm 89. Nicole Griffin:

John -

Thanks for the link, that was interesting. Like you, I take all the CIA intel about who has what with a grain of salt, but this was the part that I found particularly interesting:

The last case was in 1978, and the disease was declared eradicated on May 8, 1980. All but two countries reported by Dec. 9, 1983, that they no longer possessed the virus, but the World Health Organization had no means to verify those reports.

Now I’m not a bioterror expert or anything, but I do have a background in molecular biology and have taken recent courses in virology, so I’m reasonably familiar with this, and as far as I’ve ever seen, it seems to be taken on faith in the research community (granted, that’s different from the intel community, but still) that after 1980, the only two stores were in the CDC and Siberia. The weak link is always presumed to be the fall of the USSR, and some Soviet scientist looking to make a quick buck by selling off some smallpox. But that seems like a pretty big assumption to take on faith if the WHO had no way of even confirming that those truly were the only existing stores even in 1980. Makes the whole smallpox situation much more leaky, it seems.

Jul 14, 2004 - 10:37 pm 90. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Erik

Your concerns are valid. This is one reason that I wish the privacy advocates would work on designing the inevitable system rather than opposing it. Today, the US government can get all that information on you without an ID card. Only cost and procedural rules prevent that.

Katherine

I get the feeling you did not read my link, because it is a direct attack on the writings of the person cited in your article – Dr. Bruce Schneir. Schneir is probably the privacy advocate I would want the most on the design of such a system. However, if you read my link, you will see that I find many of his concerns to be exaggerated or not well thought out.

Contrary to Schneir’s assertion, a centralized system can be extremely secure, and in fact, unless the system designers do something really stupid, it can be a much, much harder target than any others. I used to work for VISA, USA. They had two gigantic systems for credit (and debit) card processing – one on each coast so that there was always a hot spare. I know of no attacks on those systems. They appear to be unhackable. The only security issues would involve insiders (where most corporate computer security threats originate) and appropriate procedures can minimize those threats. I also worked for First Data Corp, the largest third party credit card processor. Again, same story. Airline reservation systems (at least the majority on PARS/TPF) are also apparently unhackable.

Large, custom systems, which follow certain principles, can be fairly easily designed to be secure. Don’t use Windows, for a start. Only allow a small set of transactions into the system, which means that implanting executable code can be made impossible via communications.

In a National ID Card systems, the primary target would be the end point terminals, so one would have to design assuming that a hostile individual is able to get hold of and put his own code into such a system. Steps could be taken to limit the amount of information that could be stolen in the event of a breach. A system which assumes that biometrics are unforgeable fails. One needs to take into account the likelihood that a serious attacker would defeat the biometrics (although I think biometrics is going to get a lot better in the not distant future).

Schneir is very smart. A friend of mine knows him from the cryptographic world. But he brings an academic approach to a field (security) where effective systems have been around for a long time.

As my friend says, if you want to know about security, go to a bank or the military. They have the real world experience and have long proven systems. For example, the way your debit card number and PIN gets from the acceptor bank (whose ATM you are using) to the issuer bank uses some remarkable, but not complex, security techniques.

Schneir recommends Kerckhoffs’s principle – the idea that your system’s design should be public. This is a long established principle in cryptography. It makes a lot of sense. But the NSA keeps a lot of its codes secret. Foolish? No, because there are other issues. Academics recommend open systems so that various civilian experts can examine them, and thus detect very subtle problems – modern cryptography is based on advanced and subtle matthematics. Furthermore, any amateur inventing a code is almost certainly going to invent one that is breakable. Even the experts do that occasionally.. But NSA has a vast collection of their own cryptographic experts, so they can keep codes secret and yet still be confident that their codes are as good as if they publicized them.In the right circumstances, these secrets make a cryptoanalyst’s job harder. BTW, the NSA sends overt representatives to crypto conferences, who will sometimes make suggestions that make civilian codes stronger.

A long studied code is DES (the recently replaced commercial data encryption standard). It came out in the ’70s and is used for banking (FedWire, for example), but is disallowed for classified material (which is odd – when I last worked with classified material, it was okay to send SECRET material through the mail). DES was designed by IBM with a 128 bit key. NSA required them to reduece the key to 64 bits. Everyone assumed this was so NSA could crack it more easily. 20 years later, academic cryptographers discovered that under a particular new method of cryptographic attack (differential cryptanalysis), DES was harder to crack with a 64 bit key than 128 bit. Presumable the NSA had known that way back when they had IBM cut the key length in half.

Other systems use secrecy to add additional barriers. Schneir is right that often adding layers either adds no security or weakens the code. But not always. Like any principle, it matter who does it and how they do it. A well known example of useless added security was the World War II Japanese Naval code. It consisted of a code (look up word in code book, come up with a string of characters) and a cypher (apply transformations to the text). The US Navy crypto people cracked this system in a single step. They could decode it faster than the Japanese could, because they would go straight from the cypher-text (what was actually transmitted) to the plaintext (raw, unencrypted information).

So in summary, while Schneir says a lot of surprising things, and they are all true in appropriate context, they are not necessarily appropriate in all cases. That Schneir is a privacy advocate, I think, biases his thinking. That he has seen lots of stupidly designed systems may leave him with a bias in that regard also. Also, if you read my proposal, it has the ductile property. For example, when the system is down, you, the potential hijacker (or whatever) can’t tell. Lines don’t come to a stop, and some people still get selected for more careful checks. It’s just that the local terminal, unable to talk to the central database, makes its selection randomly.

But the following should happen: There should be a panel of people like Schneir who are intimately involved in the detailed design of the system. There should be a long term technical oversight panel of experts.

Finally, we have to look at reality. Future attacks are going to create growing public demands for security. These will result in demands ranging from ethnically based restrictions (Roger’s fear) to better security technology. If things get very bad, those demands are going to force the creattion of a surveillance state (as mentioned in my link). It is better to be ahead of the wave (and this is where I take issue with Schneir) that to be left sputting and complaining when it suddenly happens without the input of those, like Schneir, who could make the system more secure and most respecting of civil rights as is possible under the circumstances.

The biggest danger with a system like this, assuming it is designed and implemented correctly, is a government expansion of the uses of it to violate civil rights. Our best protections include having a board of independents who watch the system and proposals, the Supreme Court (if they ever see fit to pay attention to the Constitution instead of their social engineering fantasies), and congressmen who will blow the whistle for political reasons.

Jul 14, 2004 - 10:52 pm 91. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Nichole

I was relieved when the plans to destroy the US and USSR smallpox stocks were shelved in the ’90s. Naive scientists wanted to do away with it. But the idea was always dumb – there is no way the Russians would get rid of it, much less the French and Norks.

Furthermore, there was some reason to suspect that Iraq had smallpox. The last case there was in the ’70s. Smallpox is easy to preserve – a refrigerator does the trick. I believe (not sure) that smallpox scabs can be kept at room temperature.For that matter, how do we know that Cuba doesn’t have it. They’ve been totalitarian and interested in WMDs since 1960 or so.

For those talking about Dark Winter, it was a terrifying scenario. There is some reason to believe that the critical number in an epidemic, the number of people infected by a sick individual, would probably be significantly lower in a real event than was modeled in Dark Winter.

But there are worse things than smallpox – for example, influenza with an additional toxin gene added – tetrodotoxin, botulinum toxins, ebola toxins, etc. That’s harder to do than adding genes to bacteria, but it’s doable by a virologist and molecular biologist.

Katherine

Americans already have two identity cards – a driver’s license and a social security number. Both can be obtained by imposters. The NCIC computer (FBI) report allows any police officer to use your driver’s license number to get all sorts of information about you. They used to call them in on the radio (where I was monitoring), but these days they are usually sent in by “Mobile Data Terminals” – a computer in the cop car. It is possible (and it happens) for that information to contain incorrect warrant information, so you can get arrested far from home by a cop who runs your DL. Or, he may just run your license plate, discover (incorrectly) you are a felon, and do a felony stop on you (multiple cops, guns out and ready to fire, etc).

A national ID card could take the place of those. Furthermore, if it had biometeric capabilities, once you get the darn thing right, it becomes very hard to duplicate/forge, so now you have something more useful, less failure prone, and no more privacy revealing than your DL.

By the way, your reference to the boiling frog got me curious. Although the human behavior analogy is appropriate, frogs in slowly warming water will jump out.

Jul 14, 2004 - 11:27 pm 92. Katherine:

John,

I am sorry I did not read your link (kettle, meet pot- that’s me!) being presed fro time, but now I read you post carefully.

I am not denying that at one point we may be compelled to adopt drastic measures and frankly I would rather that we discuss them in detail and tackle them before catastrophic event will prompt our lawmakers to write another Patriot Act that will be voted without any scrutiny and will saddle us with some horrific regulations before we have a chance to make any judgment whether they may sense or not. Incidentally, I do not have a knee-jerk reaction against Patriot Act. I simply feel very uncomfortable knowing that majority of legislations are voted on when legislators barely know what they contain, but that seems to be standard operating procedure, alas.

Look, you proposal is sensible, and may very well be the way for us to go. With all the oversight that you suggest it may offer enough protection against the abuses. All I am trying to say is that we should always keep in mind potential for abuses, laws of unintended consequences, and we should carefully weight the benefits against the costs because we may walk into something that will burden us with more than we bargained for. That is why I am frightened when people say: “you have no privacy already, get over it”, or ” there should be a law”. Well, there are still vestiges of privacy left, and before we surrender it completely we better be damn sure that we are not instituting another hugely expensive “feel-good” program that will end up with turning free citizens into subjects of the omnipotent State.

Jul 14, 2004 - 11:38 pm 93. Katherine:

PS. I know that real frogs will jump out when water will get to warm. My frog was purely metaphorical

Jul 14, 2004 - 11:43 pm 94. Kevin P:

katherine:

I take no pleasure at all at the thought of giving the Federal government more power and surrendering part of my privacy.I read your article and I have read John’s post and both seem to carry valid arguments.I am not a techie and thus I am probably the worst judge as far as who is closer to the truth.

The problem I have is a sense,and if I am off the mark I apologize in advance,that we are acting as if we have years to study the issue and the luxury of time to decide.Part of this is my own sense of guilt. I happened to catch a large chunk of the Hart- Rudman(I could be wrong on Rudman) hearings on the state of security of our airports, harbors, and other sensitive points of entry. This was before 9-11 and what they said was very dire. I can’t remember specifics but the basic thrust was that our security systems were atrocious and we were very vunerable to terrorist attack. I heard their testimoney, was alarmed but forgot about it after a day or two.The news coverage was minimal. I did not e-mail my reps or senators. I, like the vast majority of the government and citizens, stuck my head back in the sand and naively clung to the notion that no one would be fool enough to attack us on our on soil.

When I hear people whine about long waits in line at the airport or complaining about taking off their shoes I get the sense that people are re-inserting their heads back in the sand.The possible results of three or four 9-11 style attacks on this country would catostrophic.If the terrorist got a hold of any type of WMD it would be off the scale. I think we need to be pro-active now, that we can’t wait until after it happens.Your fears of government abuse of a national ID system are not paranoid and I do take them seriously.I do think that some of them will probably happen. But as John said we can set up a system of checks and balances and try to keep the abuses to a minimum.But to have a system where someone with warrants in one state can be pulled over by a cop in another and not have that info available thru his ID is insane in the world that we are know living in.The system we have know is so lax of even the most basic safeguards.Your posts in the past have shown me that you are a very serious person and that your concerns on this issue are valid.I may be over reacting but I see this as a time of war and that the people who we are fighting are both crazy and determined.This war could go on for decades and I think we have to look at this issue in the context of war time thinking.

Jul 14, 2004 - 11:46 pm 95. Katherine:

PPS. My spelling gets more and more atrocious. Time for bed, methinks

Jul 14, 2004 - 11:49 pm 96. Katherine:

Kevin,

I share your concern and basically agree with you (see my post at 11:38).

But let us do what is necessary with open eyes and clearly understanding what we are doing.

Sunset clauses on some restrictions that may turn up critical for our safety should help.

Jul 14, 2004 - 11:57 pm 97. Katherine:

One last thing: does anybody know how Israelis tackle their security problems?

If anybody has any real life practical solutions dealing with terrorists, that would be them.

Jul 15, 2004 - 12:14 am 98. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Katherine

Giving any sort of power to the government is a risk. However, the primary purpose of government is protection, and I think some degree of privacy can (and will ultimately) be sacrificed [warning: he who quotes Benjamin Franklin in response runs high risks]. The ultimate reason is that modern technology allows lots of people to create and use WMDs – specifically bioweapons and chemical weapons, but more the former.

Hence we live in an age man has never experienced before – one where a single individual or a small group can produce and release something that can kill from hundreds to billions of people.

This development is very dangerous. It isn’t clear if it is possible to continue a modern society in these circumstances. The danger is not only from on Islamic terrorism, but also from cults (like Aum Shinrikyo) or other groups including eco-extremists such as people like these. Aum Shinrikyo was remarkably inept, fortunately, carrying out several biological attacks that nobody noticed. We can’t count on this for everyone.

Image a Ted Kaczynski who is a virologist rather than a mathematician. Kaczynski is brilliant, he just has one little problem: schizophrenia.

Because of this radical change in the potential for devastation in society, I believe we have to start some new thinking – National ID cards are just a tiny piece of that. I don’t hear anyone (other than Bill Joy) really focusing on this.

If it is possible to prevent these events, how do we do so? Do we outlaw certain technology or put it under tight control? Do we watch people with certain knowledge? What about foreign countries – like Cuba with its advanced biotechnology (and no doubt bioweapons) capability, or rogue nations?

As a technologist, I like progress in technology. Yet for the first time (well, starting maybe a decade ago) I see a danger in technology that occurs at the individual or small group level instead of major nation state.

Today, a number of people are worried about nanotechnology. Chrichton even wrote a silly novel about it. But the real nanotechnology danger is biological – it will be a long time (if ever) before artificial nanotechnology will catch up to biological systems in sophistication and ultimately, danger.

I’m not a biologist, although I have a decent bakground in the subject. My daughter is a neuroscientist who has ended up working with brain viruses (some really nasty) and also genetic engineering of brain tissue. So I pick up knowledge of genetic engineering from her – and it’s pretty clear that genetic engineering is closely allied to hacking – a lot of the thinking is the same, and with the manufacturers providing lots of stuff, you don’t really have to know in depth organic chemistry to do it (although it definitely helps). In any case, my daughter learned enough as an undergraduate to be able to do this stuff, as did everyone who took a biology related major at her university.

In summary, it’s a brave new world – and a damned dangerous one – and we haven’t even come close to the level of devastation and single biological weapons strike could cause.

Jul 15, 2004 - 12:32 am 99. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Katherine

I think we are in agreement about proactivity.

I have read the Patriot Act, and the surprising thing is the level of care taken in there to protect civil liberties. Almost all of the well publicized complaints about the act were simply lies.

Somehow, a good act was drawn up. I believe one person in the Justice Department did the primary work, although the whole thing is quite long.

There might be one or two areas that need tuning up, but our national inability to debate such issues rationally meant that it was a simple up/down sort of discussion and vote.

I do wish they had come up with another name. Everybody I know who is nervous about the government (which seems to be everybody) was immediately made suspicious by the name.

Jul 15, 2004 - 12:37 am 100. Knucklehead:

This thread has probably long since run its course, but its been a very good one, IMO.

I’m trying to get a better understanding of the concerns of those who oppose a national ID system. From this thread, I believe they can be summarized as something like:

- creeping loss of civil liberties

- privacy

- security

None of these are standalone issues, they overlap a great deal.

Regarding civil liberties losses, there is always that possibility but there seem to be a whole lot of things we see as civil liberties that, it seems to me, have nothing to do with civil liberties.

Here’s an example. I have an acquaintence who is a lead foot. He drives way too fast way too often. Now, speeding isn’t, IMO, a “crime” that needs to have a national pogram instituted against it, but it is something we seem to have agreed, long ago, that we need to keep an eye on and discourage. This guy has long since lost his driver’s license in the state he resides for too many speeding violations. He is an expert on not only fighting off speeding violations but also on recovering one’s drivers license. This is REAL speeder, this guy. He is also privately employed (runs his own business that consists of him and only him, but it is a fully legal entity of whatever sort). The business has drawn him to live in other states for significant periods of time. He has “semi-legitimate” driver’s licenses from at least two other states. The reason I say “semi-legitimate” is that they are not fake, he produced whatever real documents were required to get them, but you’re not supposed to have more than one – as far as I am aware, each state that fives you a DL asks you to surrender your current DL in another state.

This is an absolutely true anecdote and I encourage people to ponder it for a while. The guy must have legitimate ID. That’s a given. But he’s an absolute scofflaw when it comes to speeding. So the state in which he lives keeps taking his DL (his quasi-national-ID) away from him AND has laws requiring mandatory auto insurance that make send his rates through the roof even when he has his DL. So the guy uses another DL from another state and his business to lease and insure automobiles.

What he is doing is using the weaknesses of the current system and achieving “authentication” (he is who his DL says he is) but is sidestepping all the access and authorization functions. He shouldn’t have access and authorization to drive in ANY state or, for that matter, to have auto insurance (probably).

A national ID that wasn’t based upon the ridiculous state DL system is nearly absurd. We don’t have any civil liberty, as far as I am aware, that says we can just drive any way we want to. But hey, we need ID and most of us need DLs. Why are these two things tied together? My “friend” has no inherent civil right to a half-false identity (he certainly doesn’t live where his other state DLs say he lives). If the guy couldn’t beat the system the way he does, he’d be forced to let the pedal off the medal and stop being a scofflaw or he’d lose his ability to make a living and function.

I’m not claiming we should build our system to stop “corner case” abuses, but it does highlight how easy the system is to abuse and, I believe, also highlights that some of what we believe are civil liberties aren’t. This guy believes that “speeding” is a civil liberty or, perhaps, that getting away with as much as possible is a civil liberty. I don’t see it that way. He’ll never get “caught” under the current system.

The next issue is privacy. Katherine, rightly, says that just because we already have no privacy in many very real ways doesn’t mean we don’t have some important shreds of privacy left and that we need to protect it. This is true. But nothing about a national ID system suggests that we cannot have a good look at what sorts of “privacies” are long since lost (where and when you travel and how much you spend and what you purchase is LONG gone if you take any advantage of modern conveniences and financial systems). I don’t believe people have generally stopped and thought about how little privacy we actually have anymore. Most everything about how we live is in a data repository somewhere and various levels of law enforcement have subpeona access to the info. We have ID on demand – you can’t fly commercially without presenting a picture ID. You can’t enter the country without your passport/green card/visa. If a cop stops you on the highway you are required to produce your DL-ID. We accept ID on demand for MANY ordinary day to day functions. The problem is that there are too many forms of ID and too many sources.

And we already have a personal number (SSN). This too is far too easy to falsify. And creeping uses has long since plagued the SSN ssytem. When it was designed it was supposed to be used ONLY for SSN purposes. Try getting a bank account without an SSN. In fact you are now REQUIRED to get one for your children who will not be paying SSN taxes for many years yet and may never see… never mind.

A national ID does not need to be a centralized individual data repository. It can be sucessfully limited to the functions of identification. We can keep an eye on it for creeping abuses (we do occassionally hammer on the IRS).

Security is something John has addressed.

Personally I relieve believe a national ID is inevitable. We just can’t keep going along with this creaky and silly system we have indefinitely. Maybe we can, but sooner or later I think we’ll just have had enough. There are just too many non-Dl functions tied to DL’s. DLs should be DL’s. Now they are DLs plus IDs plus voting document and, well, STOP IT!!

It is not some solution to terrorism. It would help with that, to some degree, within our own borders. But it would also potentially help us gain some sanity in our immigration and visa system. And it would stop some abuses of “civil liberties” (we really don’t have a right to fake or half-fake ID or to beat the system as far and long as we can get away with it).

I find the arguments against it unconvincing. I have nothing but honest and deep respect for those who have lived under tyrannical systems and have some experience with even non-tyrannical socialist systems. But the Soviet Union was never the US and neither is Sweden. Different histories, diffferent cultures, different issues surrounding IDs and national IT and benefit systems.

I’d rather we have a sensible look at designing a national ID system and do it BEFORE we are screaming for one and slap one together with spit and chewing gum and then start suffering all the failures.

Jul 15, 2004 - 6:30 am 101. Hangtown Bob:

Roger,

You say, “By publicizing such events they only fan the flames of anti-Arab feeling”. I say, “If the shoe fits, wear it”.

There is absolutely no reason to obscure the TRUTH except to satisfy some warped idea of political correctness.

In fact, at this time in our world’s life, it is correct to note that threats to the world’s security are coming predomninantly from “Arab” or “Muslim” or “Islamist” individuals or groups. It is also certainly correct that most individuals belonging to these groups are by no means a threat to world security, but it would be to their benefit if they would more often stand up as a group and condemn the many acts of atrocity commited by members of their group under their group’s banner.

Jul 15, 2004 - 7:34 am 102. PeterUK:

There will be ,eventually, a new administrative offence of not carrying an ID card.First it will be neccessary to present the card for all transactions then there will be random checks in the street.It can’t happen here,which of those who might be President in the future do you trust with this power.

Jul 15, 2004 - 11:22 am 103. Knucklehead:

PeterUK,

I believe there is an “ID on demand” case working its way up the court system out in TX or AZ. A police officer demanded ID from somebody with no possible probably cause. IIRC the guy had his pickemup pulled over to the side of some rural road and was outside the vehicle doing whatever and the cop asked for his ID. The guy refused, was arrested, now there’s a court case (or maybe the guy is suing).

I’m pretty sure we’d manage to maintain “probably cause” here. Obviously “probably cause” has a great deal of built in flexibility and is, ummm, pretty context-rich. If there is no need to show and ID and there is no good reason to demand one from you, then you don’t need to produce one just because some policemen was feeling all studly. But this has nothing to do with a national ID. If they can demand an ID they can demand ID whether its national or nothing more reliable than a state DL.

Maybe I’m just really gullible, but I just can’t imagine the police running around rousting people randomly for no good reason on any national scale (unless we let things really go to hell in a handbasket – I love that cliche even though it makes no sense whatsoever). We have way too many people and way too few cops for that and most of our cops keep live a few blocks away and have kids in the same schools and attend the same churches… In major metro areas the police are a “force”, but everywhere else their something closer to neighbors who happen to be cops.

Jul 15, 2004 - 11:56 am 104. Knucklehead:

I wonder what the maximum number of times is that I could type “probably cause” knowing full well that it is “probable cause” (I did it again that last time!)

Jul 15, 2004 - 11:58 am 105. Syl:

Man, what a great discussion on ID cards. After reading all of it my only remaining concern is how they’re going to manage to get everyone ID’d in the first place.

I’m sure there are folks out there even more lax than myself.

I lost my birth certificate many years ago. I called the hospital where I was born and got a new one.

I lost that a few years ago.

Now I don’t remember where I was born (just city/state).

I lost my SS card back in the sixties. But I knew my number. (Well, actually I didn’t. When I lost my card instead of getting a new one I asked a friend in personnel at IBM where I worked what my number was.) I never had the card replaced so I haven’t had a SS card for almost 40 years. LOL

I got my first driver’s license during a period when I actually had a copy of my birth certificate. Since then (and I’ve moved to various states) all I’ve needed was a copy of my previous state’s DL to get my new one (and take tests of course).

The only reason I bothered to get a copy of my birth certificate was to get a passport…which has now long expired and I’ve since lost that too.

I no longer have a car but do renew my DL because that’s absolutely the only identification I own.

I bet there are plenty of people out there without even that.

I love America and the whole casual nature of our culture! But times they be changing.

I’m hoping this thread has come to an end because my confession of laxity is quite embarrassing. LOL

Jul 15, 2004 - 1:19 pm 106. Knucklehead:

I can’t recall the last time I set eyes on my SS card. Birth Certificate? Paper may last that long in the Mesopotamian desert, but it doesn’t here – Gone. DD-214 – say a copy of that while back, I could probably dredge that up. DL & Passport (thanks for reminding me, Syl! I have to renew my Passport! Time flies.)

Jul 15, 2004 - 2:35 pm

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