Your Papers Please

From: R. J. Tavel, J.D. Sent: Sunday, October 13, 2002 12:57 PM Subject: 'Your Papers, Please': National ID, 2002

[[Note below is from R.J. Tavel rj3@comcast.net]] [NB: If anyone is interested in helping me, please write to me asap. I have voluntarily turned in my driver's license, with all i's dotted and t's crossed by their way of thinking, and have requested, and paid for, a "letter of clearance" from BMV saying that I am not licensed and that's OK. BMV refuses to issue the letter, although they cashed my check and won't refund the money, and I have filed notice of my intent to sue under the tort claims act.

If any of you have information on this subject, or wish to join me in this action so that I can allege class action status, I need to hear from all of you now. TIA, sRJ]

by Steven Yates http://www.lewrockwell.com/yates/yates64.html One of the aftereffects of 9-11 has been the return-with-a-vengeance of efforts to give every U.S. citizen a de facto national ID card. The latest effort is H.R. 4633, introduced into Congress last May by Jim Moran and Tom Davis, both of Virginia. The Moran-Davis bill, currently in committee, is euphemistically named the Driver's License Modernization Act of 2002. The fact that Moran is a Democrat while Davis is a Republican illustrates how Democrats and Republicans stage partisan squabbles before television cameras for public consumption but cooperate closely on the kinds of measures that are slowly demolishing liberty in this country.

H.R. 4633 would "amend title 23, United States Code, to establish standards for State programs for the issuance of drivers' licenses and identification cards, and for other purposes" (italics mine). The stated reason for this bill stems, of course, from the 9-11 attacks, especially the fact that at least eight of the 19 hijackers had fake state-issued drivers' licenses; this "illuminated many flaws in the Nation's domestic security, especially in its identification system." H.R. 4633 thus calls openly for the use of "new technology . that can accommodate other government and private applications [that] will provide the best return on the investment in the new cards."

This new technology includes biometric identification. According to the bill, "Not later than 5 years after the date of enactment of this section, each State shall have in effect a driver's license and identification card program under which the State meets the following requirements." This includes embedded programmable computer chips, creating what have become known as smart cards. "A State shall embed a computer chip in each new or renewed driver's license or identification card issued by the state" which shall contain "in electronic form, all text data written on the license or card; . encoded biometric data matching the holder of the license or card; . [and] encryption and security software or hardware (or both) that prevents access to data stored on the chip without the express consent of the individual to whom the data applies, other than access by a Federal, State, or local agency (including a court or law enforcement agency) in carrying out its functions, or by a private entity acting on behalf of a Federal, State, or local agency in carrying out its functions;."

Let's pause there. The first thing to note is that this bill federalizes the drivers license, which under the Tenth Amendment has been a province of states since Rhode Island passed the first drivers license law in 1908. H.R. 4633 speaks openly of biometric ID, whereas previous efforts had spoken only of "unique identifiers." It doesn't tell us what kind of biometric information will be used. Fingerprints have long been popular among bureaucrats. Retinal scans have also been suggested. The final lengthy provision above looks as if it is intended to protect the ID-card bearer's privacy. Read it closely, though. Its encryption measures protect our privacy unless someone in a "Federal, State, or local agency (including a court or law enforcement agency) in carrying out its functions" wants it. Moreover, these measures do not protect an individual from private access if the "private entity [is] acting on behalf of a Federal, State, or local agency in carrying out its functions," these again being left unspecified. In short, this bill does not protect your privacy at all. These exceptions-clauses can be fleshed out any way the bureaucrats want, and all an employer (for example) would have to do is cook up a reason why access to an employee's encoded information "carries out the functions" of a government agency. Drag your feet, and you lose your job.

The bill establishes two other requirements, that the ID card "accept data or software written to the license or card by non-governmental devices if the data transfer is authorized by the holder of the license or card; ." and - here is another real kicker - the card must "conform to any other standards issued by the Secretary." Conform to any other standards issued by the Secretary? What the dickens does that mean? Again, in practice it could mean anything a bureaucrat wants it to mean.

H.R. 4633 also mandates linking up databases, a lot of which already exist and are hooked up with law enforcement divisions so that routine traffic stops can be turned into criminal checks. "A State shall participate in a program to link State motor vehicle databases in order to provide electronic access by a State to information contained in the motor vehicle databases of all other States." The result, of course, would be a single large federal database, whether called that or not, as the most convenient way for bureaucrats based in a given state to access a person's information in any other state. H.R. 4633, it is true, repudiates the idea of a "central database." The 1964 Civil Rights Act repudiated preferential treatment of minorities. In other words, tell me another one.

H.R. 4633 authorizes $300 million in federal grant money (i.e., taxpayer dollars) to the states to enable them to implement this machinery - $100 million for the ID itself and $200 for the database technology - placing the states under the thumb of the federal government so far as issuing drivers' licenses goes. All one need to remember is that that same principle: every federal dollar comes with strings attached. Three hundred million dollars could attach a lot of strings! In cases of threatened noncompliance by states, all the feds would have to do is the same thing they did with the so-called Motor-Voter law back in the early 1990s: threaten to withhold federal highway money.

The long and the short of it is, the Driver's License Modernization Act of 2002 would bring us closer than ever before to establishing a comprehensive national ID system. The present excuse is that extreme measures are necessary to "protect us against terrorism." Yeah, right! Those whose memories go back that far know that this is not the first time someone in the federal government has tried to give us all de facto national ID cards. Such efforts existed as stealth measures - what Claire Wolfe called land-mine legislation http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/2110/E_LandMines.html - little-noticed provisions buried in large, omnibus bills like the Welfare Reform Act, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act and the Kennedy-Kassenbaum Health Care Reform Acts, all in 1996. The provisions were to go into effect in October of 2000. The feds didn't think anyone would notice until it was too late, since no one had noticed the stealth measures that gave us civil forfeiture - those nasty provisions that allow the feds to take your car without compensation if they find, say, a certain amount of marijuana or some other illegal substance in it. The feds didn't count on the Internet. When the 1996 stealth measures were revealed through email campaigns ("send this to everyone you know on the Internet"), we were fed lines about "identity theft," or about the need to catch deadbeat dads. Or the favorite, given the times: "it's for the children." In those days, national ID was fought through grass roots Internet campaigns, along with efforts to collect personal data administered through banks, e.g., the infamous Know-Your-Customer program. But measures that created huge federal databases of new employees got through, and programs akin to Know-Your-Customer are very much alive and kicking.

It is clear, too, that the Executive Branch is looking at ways to set national standards for drivers licenses; this was disclosed by Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge the day after the unveiling of H.R. 4633. Supposedly, President Bush himself opposes national ID, but is going along with the efforts to standardize drivers' licenses. The so-called Patriot Act, which Bush signed last year after 9-11, paves the way for federal, state and local databases to be linked. That bill authorized $150 million more for the "expansion of the Regional Information Sharing System" that would "facilitate federal-state-local law enforcement response related to terrorist acts."

The driver's license seems to be the favored inroad for those who want to amass personal information on law-abiding U.S. citizens. After all, it is hard for an adult to function in modern society without one. Should H.R. 4633 become law, there will be just two ways to "opt out." One is to give up your driver's license and not drive. The other is to give up your driver's license and drive illegally - with all the risks this involves. I imagine there will be people driving illegally to get around this - after all, blatant power grabs do not exactly encourage respect for the rule of law. Because not everyone does have a driver's license, the feds may eventually go beyond it and just require every citizen to carry a smart card that could function as a drivers license or not, depending on how the chip was programmed. "Show us your papers, please. No papers? You better come with us." We'd better stop thinking it can't happen here.

Finally, arrangements in which cards have been replaced by bio-implants are no longer limited to science fiction stories. A high-tech company called Applied Digital Solutions http://www.adsx.com/ already has an implantable identification chip, usable in medical emergencies or by those with serious conditions. The company's VeriChipT http://www.adsx.com/prodservpart/verichip.html consists of a small radio frequency device about the size of the point of a ballpoint pen with a unique verification number that could be implanted in a convenient place in the human body. It could be programmed to contain all the personal data any bureaucrat could want. A scanning device would activate the chip and recognize the number, enabling the person operating the scanner to retrieve the information and compare it with the information in the central database. Why an actual implant? Because smart cards can be lost, and the owner's life placed on hold for days while the card is replaced. Serious advocates of national ID have no doubt considered such eventualities; it would be naïve to think otherwise. Implants, unlike something you carry in your wallet, would become a part of you for the rest of your life. We might call it the Borging of America. An exaggeration? It should be clear that H.R. 4633, coupled with this technology, could lead to the hugest quantum leap ever in the federal government's capacity to control people. If the feds really wanted to play hardball with dissent, all they would have to do is "freeze" the dissident's assets by reprogramming the information in the database so scanners would not recognize him. The person would become officially invisible, unable to drive or work legally, have a bank account, buy anything on credit, or even see a doctor. Do we want to trust anyone with that kind of power?

It is a testimony to how much this country has changed since 9-11 that no one has visibly challenged H.R. 4633 as unconstitutional and incompatible with the principles of a free society. The 1990s gave us the obviously corrupt Clinton Regime and a significant opposition to federal power grabs. Now it's Bush the Younger, beloved of neocons who see him as one of their own and believe he can do no wrong. No serious, organized opposition now appears to exist (and I would happy as a clam to be proven wrong about that). The warmongers and their allies in the media are now happy to paint anyone critical of expansionist government as "abetting the terrorists." Such phrases are indeed following the kind of trajectory that the word racist followed http://www.lewrockwell.com/mcmaken/mcmaken68.html as verbal clubs to intimidate people into submission. Consider, too: the media coverage of 9-11 replayed the horrific events of that day over and over until the images of the planes striking the World Trade Center towers were permanently implanted into the average television watcher's brain. All of a sudden, big government was back in style. We needed it to protect us from terrorists. We were at war! Big government began issuing unspecific warnings of imminent threats of terrorist attacks that never materialized, as it expanded faster and further than under Clinton. To my knowledge, no huge al Qaeda or Iraqi-based terrorist cells have been disrupted. Moreover, Osama bin Laden has not been captured-and isn't even much talked about anymore - but Al Gore has been patted down by airport security. Repeated warnings, though, have many Americans scared of their shadows nevertheless. A frightened population is obviously easier to manipulate and control.

The real irony here is that there isn't the slightest evidence that H.R. 4633 will protect against terrorism. Given our porous borders, actual would-be terrorists would have their own networks and resources, and could get around our government's verification technologies without too much difficulty. I would suggest a number of different and more basic remedies. Such as allowing pilots to bear arms, which Bush the Younger's regime has opposed (it would make people less dependent on government). Such as changing our disastrous immigration laws and making it harder for foreigners to get into this country and stay here.

Such as recalling troops from the overseas extensions of the U.S. Empire and deploying them against our border with Mexico, if necessary, since it is well known that Arabs who might mean to harm Americans are entering the country with illegals from Mexico. Allow neocons, other globalists and cultural Marxists to scream isolationist all they want. Needless to say, Bush the Younger's regime is not pursuing anything like this, because (1) Bush is basically a globalist from a family of globalists, in an Administration chock full of globalists; and (2) this would be taking the fight against terrorism seriously without also dismantling the liberties of native-born U.S. citizens, a necessary condition for eventually ending U.S. sovereignty and subordinating this country to a global government.

Just recently I ran across this remark attributed to Sen. Gary Hart, made at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting three days after 9-11. http://thenewamerican.com/tna/2002/10-07-2002/vo18no20_action_print.htm "There is a chance for the President of the United States to use this disaster to carry out what his father - a phrase his father used I think only once, and it hasn't been used since - and that is a new world order." Clearly, the slow encirclement of law-abiding U.S. citizens with national ID technology would advance such a cause while doing little if anything to safeguard us against terrorism. Unfortunately, given the compliant mood of the country, if H.R. 4633 becomes law, when it comes time for the federalized state drivers license agencies to implement it, coercion might not be necessary. The sheeple may very will stand in line to get their biometrically-encoded national ID cards, having been persuaded that with this legislation firmly in place "we are now protected by our government from terrorists."

Steven Yates [send him mail mailto:syates2@earthlink.net ] has a PhD in philosophy and is a Margaret "Peg" Rowley Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (ICS Press, 1994), and numerous articles and reviews. At any given time he is at work on any number of articles and book projects, including a science fiction novel. Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com

Oh please...

Life is a slippery slope. Grow up.

I dont know if I support or oppose a national ID...The one thing to me that sticks out is a dilution of states identification of people. I dont know how I feel about that.

After awhile Liberals in state governments [looking for more money to spend] could say "hey lets stop making state identification...the national id is good enough. Now give me that money."

It would create another federal monstrosity of people working in whatever department was placed in charge of it.

It would however make things easier for authorities to keep up with legitimate id holders...and isolate illegitimate ones especially terrorists].

There is an upside...there is a downside.

But the slippery slope nonsense is just that.

This form of "national ID" is already in effect in all branches of the military and the majority of the federal government services. Personnel are required to have in their possession this ID to do just that, identify who they are. Is our government tracking my trips through the front gate of my base? How about everytime I buy groceries at my commissary? These cards are central in providing a service to those that rate that service. Would an employer be more likely to hire a person who can verify his address and/or citizenship/status over a person who has no identification? I think they would. Granted, illicit use and fakes will be made. That is a universal fact. But just the requirement to have an ID, whether it be national or state, is not in itself a bad idea.

What exactly is the problem with a National ID?

The biggest problem is that every identification scheme I’ve seen is incomplete and pretty easy to work around if you want to.

In California I have a driver license with picture, address, and also a thumbprint associated with it. That is great, and it would be easy to have a print-scanner at the airport or wherever that would verify that the print I just scanned there matches the one I gave when I applied for the license. But it only verifies that I go with the print and the picture and information on the license.

What it doesn’t do is check my print versus every other print to make sure that I don’t also have identification in another state (or even the same state) under another name. That gets unwieldy. That wouldn’t be a momentary process. It might literally take hours/days/weeks – though there are some things that could be done anyway. You could process all prints versus all other prints in a periodic batch-type process that would flag the prints of people that appear to have multiple ID’s, for instance.

But that would require that all states be on board, which they are not, and is one of the reasons a national system would be “easier.” It gets to be even more problematic dealing with other countries. Some of them don’t even issue birth certificates.

I also don’t think a hostile country would necessarily allow access to information that might identify someone as a threat if they didn’t want to. A state sponsored terrorist could easily have perfectly “real” state issued identification to disguise their real identity. It just gets to be a lot of effort and expense for something that can still be defeated.

But this guy is just trying to be contrary. Unless he owns no property or vehicles (in California you even have to register vehicles that are inoperable or that you do not intend to operate), has no checking or savings accounts, no credit cards, no mortgage, no insurance policy, no health coverage, or any number of other things, they can pretty much track him now if they want to. They don’t, but try telling him that.

The stated reason for this bill stems, of course, from the 9-11 attacks, especially the fact that at least eight of the 19 hijackers had fake state-issued drivers' licenses; this "illuminated many flaws in the Nation's domestic security, especially in its identification system."

It did indeed illuminate the flaws. For one the state issued them, so it's difficult to consider them fake even if gotten under false pretense. This "big-brother" argument is old and cliche and nothing more then "crying wolf." The driver's license is already a de-facto ID, except there're no federal standards for its issuance and therein is the rub because it's used for identification through out the United States.

As for biometric implants, give me a break that is such a lame scare tactic.

The person would become officially invisible, unable to drive or work legally, have a bank account, buy anything on credit, or even see a doctor. Do we want to trust anyone with that kind of power? Here's the clincher. The author accepts that an driver's license or ID is a daily requirement and argues about trusting anyone with the kind of power allowing them to withdraw it. I have news for the author the state can already do that anytime you're stopped by the police. Big brother be damned! for imigration purposes and as a means of reducing voter fraud in this country we need universal quidelines. If we had them do you think Davis would have even though of signing law allowing illegals driver licenses which showed no indication of their legal status in this country. By the way, that was the requirement in the first bill attempting to get illegal's licenses. The sponsors withdrew it instead. The one he recently considered signing was the second bill to attempt this.

By the way it's Ihre Ausweis bitte? Not Seine

You ask a question that is loaded with naivety. The question really boils down to:

Do you trust Government?

You must ask do you trust government for yourself and all your descendants?

If you say yes, then why do we have a Constitution?

If you say no, then are you anti-government and therefore a possible subversive?

Our entire system of government is predicated that We The People grant government its right to exist, not the other way around.

We The People are empowered to ask our Government for identification and not the other way around unless there is probable cause.

Our government workers must tell us they are government workers and they must have badge or identification that we may know they are part of our government workforce unless they have probable cause to do otherwise, for example an undercover sting operation must be preauthorized.

As Americans we go about our business everyday and we make the assumption that our Government is abiding by the Law.

That means our government must respond to the threat of terrorism while preserving our liberties. They must. There is no alternative.

Our highest level leaders have remarked that preserving freedom and combatting terrorism is a "tough nut to crack".

But it has always been thus. It is no different today than it was forty, fifty or more years ago.

The tendency for any government to seek to establish control leading to absolute control is as real as gravitational law. Our founders knew this.

A National ID is a critical step on the road to tyranny.

Ask any former Soviet citizen about National ID. It is a prerequisite for controlling and cataloging a population in the manner of a rancher controlling a herd of cattle.

When we are thus controlled, we lose. For then follows two classes of society, the controlled and the controllers, the Party and the masses.

We all know We The People are faced with a tough nut to crack. That is why we must attack at the root that which threatens our liberty. War with Iraq will be the first step. The next step is possibly North Korea and so on. Our sons and daughters and their children may be fighting these wars long after we are gone.

A National ID will not protect us, it will conquer us by its victory over Liberty.

We will crack this nut by fighting for Liberty.

It is either victory "over" Liberty or victory "of" Liberty.

To win we must understand this distinction.

I see it as a property rights issue. I own my likeness, my image, my DNA. Any involuntary (aka mandatory) identification is a usurpation of something I own. If I volunteer it freely, as in my ID badge at work, or a check guarantee card at a purchase, that is a simple contractual transaction.

In the case of a national ID, the ID is not the objectionable thing, but rather the compulsion to give up privacy for free travel, free exchange, etc. It's not a slippery slope at all, it is morally repulsive from the outset for a collective to place prior restraints on non-aggressive, non-criminal free, consentual behaviors. A national ID turns us into adolescents and our public servants into "hall pass" masters. Society is adolescent enough in its outlook without this abomination.

Society would be a lot safer (and more tribal) if we all lived in the open in tents. Then child molesters and thieves could be easily observed and dealt with. Most of us recognize that some level of individual autonomy and privacy is something that civilization values and actually makes possible. Don't confuse civilization with technology. Now the technology has made it cheap to return to tribal modes.

If you don't recognize barbarianism when you see it I'd say it's because we are already swimming in collectivist, dialectic pragmatism. To look only at immediate consequences of any policy is a classic failure in reasoning(see for example Bastiat's "That which is seen, and that which is not seen"). I would encourage you to try to think strategically. The policies we enact today may one day be inherited by less kind, less moral, less inhibited regimes. That's not a slippery slope, but a change of state. Seemingly trivial constraints on a complex, adaptive non-linear system (ie. a political governance, rule-based system) can have extreme consequences on some measurable objective function (for example taxation rates, industrial productivity, crime and incarceration, literacy, political participation, pick your metric of importance). If you like being treated as a robot drone in some control-loop feedback system, then by all means take another buckle off the harness on the beast of governance and see how it feels. A comfortable slave is a slave none-the-less, and a national ID is just the master's ownership papers.

Unfortunately, it takes work and mental horsepower to develop an understanding or right or wrong (grounded in basic principles) and is much easier to "just listen to the pros and cons" in an already dialectic-friendly format.

That such a scheme would necessarily present an opening for infringement on basic, God-given liberties is irrelevant to these thinkers, so long as they manage to ignore or otherwise fail to try to understand that there are unseen, unintended consequences (good reference to Bastiat, btw).

People are getting "informed" nowadays in the same way from Hannity and Colmes and Bill O'Reilly's "talking points" on Fox News Channel. The sum of "right" vs. "left" lies leads us to a truth in "the middle". If right and left can be set far away enough from truth, we're sure to never arrive at the correct answer. Why can't we just agree that Islam and Christianity are compatible since they both share good works in common, and then conclude that "God is too big to fit into one religion?"

Great post. Let's see if there's a constructive response posted to it or if it's just more of the same.

Mayhaps in YOUR version of German. I'm Pennsylvania Dutch, and while my German isn't Hochdeutsche, it's correct by the dialect I learned from my late great-grandparents, whose first language was STILL German: we spoke Pennsylvanie-Deutsche inside the family.

(Enraged Liberal-sensitivity mode: ENABLED)

And you're being culturally insensitive and imperialistic claiming you have the CORRECT version ! You hurt my self esteem !!

(Enraged Liberal-sensitivity mode: DISABLED)

(evil grin)

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.