ID cards+law history;
The scholarly informed citations are useful and interesting. But haven't we been put on notice that "a rebalancing" is going to occur, "it's a new world" and we will "use every measure at our disposal to combat terrorism" ?? - I fear it is naive to imagine that case law and legal precedent can combat the legislative onslaught to come.
no law enforcement interests. See, e.g., Brown v. Texas , 443 U.S. 47, 52, 99 S.Ct. 2637, 2641, 61 L.Ed.2d 357 (1979). But the balance struck by the Fourth Amendment between the public interest in effective law enforcement and the equally public interest in safeguarding individual freedom and privacy from arbitrary governmental interference forbids such expansion. See Dunaway v. New York, supra; United States v. Brignoni-Ponce , 422 U.S., at 878, 95 S.Ct., at 2578-2579. Detention beyond the limits of Terry without
The power to arrest--or otherwise to prolong a seizure until a suspect had responded to the satisfaction of the police officers--would undoubtedly elicit cooperation from a high percentage of even those very few individuals not sufficiently coerced by a show of authority, brief physicaldetention, and a frisk. We have never claimed that expansion of the power of police officers to act on reasonable suspicion alone, or even less, would further probable cause would improve the effectiveness of legitimate police investigations by only a small margin, but it would expose individual members of the public to exponential increases in both the intrusiveness of the encounter and the risk that police officers would abuse their discretion for improper ends. Furthermore, regular expansion of Terry encounters into more intrusive detentions, without a clear connection to any specific underlying crimes, is likely to exacerbate ongoing tensions, where they exist, between the police and the public. See Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders 157-168 (1968).
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I fear it is naive to imagine that case law and legal precedent can combat the legislative onslaught to come.
All bets are definitely off. IANAL, but what seems most relevant to the discussion of "national ID cards" from the earlier 1983 decision was the court's affirmation that citizens shouldn't be subject to arrest for not displaying ID to law enforcement on demand. As far as I can see, the judgement doesn't restrict whether or not a law enforcement officer can *ask* for ID, just says that a citizen shouldn't be presumed guilty of some crime for not displaying it. During los anos Clinton, there was some talk of implementing a national ID card system as part of his healthcare proposal, if memory serves -- and that idea tanked. Offhand, I'm not aware of other instances in US history when a national ID card system has been proposed + debated in the name of national security... surely this must have come up before at some point... XJ
I've written a bit about "national ID card" proposals. This link may eventually work: http://search.hotwired.com/search97/s97.vts?Action=FilterSearch&Filter=docs_filter.hts&ResultTemplate=news.hts&Collection=news&QueryMode=Internet&Query=%22national%20id%22%20mccullagh -Declan On Sun, Sep 23, 2001 at 10:08:24PM -0700, Xeni Jardin wrote:
I fear it is naive to imagine that case law and legal precedent can combat the legislative onslaught to come.
All bets are definitely off. IANAL, but what seems most relevant to the discussion of "national ID cards" from the earlier 1983 decision was the court's affirmation that citizens shouldn't be subject to arrest for not displaying ID to law enforcement on demand. As far as I can see, the judgement doesn't restrict whether or not a law enforcement officer can *ask* for ID, just says that a citizen shouldn't be presumed guilty of some crime for not displaying it.
During los anos Clinton, there was some talk of implementing a national ID card system as part of his healthcare proposal, if memory serves -- and that idea tanked. Offhand, I'm not aware of other instances in US history when a national ID card system has been proposed + debated in the name of national security... surely this must have come up before at some point...
XJ
participants (3)
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citizenQ
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Declan McCullagh
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Xeni Jardin