On Sat, Oct 06, 2001 at 12:20:07PM -0700, Carl Ellison wrote: > we already have a national ID card: a passport.
Carl, We may be speaking at cross-purposes. What I would call a national ID card is an identification device that created by the federal government that all citizens and permanent residents are issued. The U.S., of course, has no such device. Many millions of Americans have not traveled abroad and do not have passports. The privacy-anonymity threat a national ID card poses is that once you have such a card in place, a near-irresistable incentive arises for governments to make carrying them mandatory. That could mean police stopping you at any time, demanding to see your ID, and scanning it in to learn information-about-you-they-wish-to-know. Extend this prediction as appropriate to ID-card-scanners -- coupled with biometric readers and checks against databases -- at banks, airports, grocery stores, etc. -Declan --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
