http://www.techcentralstation.com/NewsDesk.asp?FormMode=MainTerminalArticles&ID=95 Thursday, October 25, 2001 A National I.D. Card? Yes; Run By Larry Ellison? No By: James K. Glassman, Host, Tech Central Station Would you trust this man with a National I.D. System? When I first heard that Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle Corp., had proposed a national I.D. card to help fight terrorism, I thought it was a joke. Not the I.D. card idea. But that Ellison was proposing it. [...] Dershowitz contends that the cards might actually increase freedoms. "Four Arab-looking guys reading the Koran are much less suspicious if they have the cards and can just slash them through card readers," he said. It is the lack of an I.D. card, however, that makes the United States almost unique among nations. "You do have a right to be left alone in the most literal sense," says Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union. "If you have an I.D. card," says former Rep. Tom Campbell (R-Calif.), now a law professor at Stanford, "it is solely for the purpose of allowing the government to compel you to produce it. This would essentially give the government the power to demand that we show our papers. It is a very dangerous thing." Dangerous? Yes, there are dangers to a mandatory national I.D. card, but there may be greater dangers without one. The fact is, to live in a society as vulnerable as ours, we may have to give up something - but I disagree that what's lost is freedom. Instead, it's privacy, and maybe not even that. In an interview with SiliconValley.com, Ellison expressed this reality in his typical over-the-top fashion, showing once again why he is the wrong guy to be making the pitch. "This privacy you're concerned about is largely an illusion. All you have to give up is your illusions, not your privacy." The truth is that an I.D. card may force you to give up some of your privacy - though probably no more than driver's licenses, Social Security cards, credit cards and even electronic toll-readers like EasyPass force you to give up now. But even if privacy is lost, the question is whether such an exchange is worth the benefits? More and more, I believe that it is. ### ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- End forwarded message -----