Serious comment, now . . .
At 12:08 PM Tuesday 11/2/04, Dave Land wrote:
On Nov 2, 2004, at 9:22 AM, Gary Nunn wrote:
What's the big deal with a national ID card? It would prevent voting fraud. It would help transparency in many other ways - So, why not?
Here is the problem with a national ID card.....
It would not be impossible to forge a card, but it would be significantly more difficult to place an authentic cert and PIN on the server to use a forged card. It would require a major hacker or an inside person.
Let's just hope it isn't implemented by Diebold.
So do you really want to be in a position of not being allowed to buy groceries because your local Kroger store had hardware problems? Or because there was a power failure or backbone failure between you and the centralized authentication authority?
Why would this be the case? I don't have to show any ID to buy groceries now... Do you think that the mere existence of a national ID would change how how we do all business? Would I have to have my ID verified to buy a hot dog from the vendor at a ball game?
Um, what about the suggestions some have made of having your medical records stored in the National Health Care Database and every time you go to buy food, it checks and if you are overweight, have diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or anything else, you won't be allowed to buy anything that someone has decided may be bad for your condition so you will not burden the National Health Care Service* excessively?
Would I even go to a ball game?
A national ID card sounds like a good idea in theory, but the technology is nowhere near reliable enough to make this a reliable system.
By the way, despite my argument with your Kroger example (are they still in business?), I have no argument with your fundamental point, that any system that has a central authorization system therefore has a single point of failure.
I worked for Sun Microsystems 'til a couple of years ago, and they were quite hot on the idea of national ID cards at the time. Of course, that's because the cards (including your beloved CAC) use Java[tm] technology and because they figured that they'd get a big chunk of the back-end server business.
The one think they have going for them is that they are promoting a federated, rather than centralized, authority model. That way, you'd only be prevented from purchasing paw-paws at Kroger's if the store's network was down. You could always go down the street to the A&P (are they still in business?).
By the way, a while back I posted an article about Donald Rumsfeld wanting to make it MANDATORY for every computer sold in the US to require a secured card to allow use - even home computers. I can dig up that article if anyone is interested.
This from the party that promised to "get the government off the backs of the people." If I was a Republican, I'd be embarrassed. Thankfully, I'm not.
Dave
Can We See Your Papers Maru
*Whenever You See The Word "Service" In The Name Of A Government Agency, Think Animal Husbandry Maru
-- Ronn! :)
"Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever." -- Konstantin E. Tsiolkovskiy
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