Posted on 09/27/2001 8:49:22 PM PDT by kattracks
President Bush "is not even considering the idea" of issuing a national ID card, White House spokesman told reporters.
And lawmakers who advanced the idea are now backing away from it.
In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, House Immigration Subcommittee Chairman George Gekas, R-Pa - who favored issuing National ID cards - said there is scant interest among his congressional colleagues to hold hearings on a national ID. He added that the cards would be more subject to fraud than almost any other kind of documentation.
"The fraud elements and the terrorist activities can go beyond the ID card, and it would turn out to be completely useless," he said.
"The reality is that ID cards will do very little to stop this sort of stuff, but it will make it much easier to track everybody else for any number of purposes," Privacy International's David Banisar told Newsbytes. "In the end, this would simply give legal justification for all kinds of profiling that we've seen so many bad examples of in the past few years."
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