A National I.D. Card? Yes; Run By Larry Ellison? No

[Jack Dean]

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 -----