TERRORISTS HAD SOCIAL SECURITY CARDS
All 19 terrorist hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks had Social Security numbers, and 13 obtained them legally, according to The Washington Post. (
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27299-2001Nov1.html )The Social Security Administration's inspector general told House members yesterday that the government needs to tighten the process it uses to issue the numbers.
"We have learned that the risks inherent in failing to adequately protect the integrity of the Social Security number may have serious consequences," said James G. Huse Jr.
The hijackers' Social Security numbers "allowed them autonomy, to operate below the radar," he told the House Ways and Means subcommittee on Social Security.
They could open bank accounts, get credit, obtain driver's licenses and apply to flight schools, he said.
The fact that the terrorists could obtain Social Security cards raises questions of how effective a proposed national ID card would be. In an article in National Review (
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-levy102401.shtml ), Senior Fellow Robert A. Levy writes that "terrorists who are capable of destroying the World Trade Center are surely capable of obtaining forged IDs (even the high-tech variety), bribing officials who issue or check the cards, creating false identities that survive scrutiny, or using persons with legitimate cards to do their dirty work.""The prospect of massive computer databases or registries, software data collection systems, digital fingerprinting, handprint scans, facial recognition technologies, voice authentication devices, electronic retinal scans, and other 'biometric' surveillance technologies have suddenly become realistic options for government identification purposes," writes Adam Thierer in "National ID Cards: New technologies, Same Bad Idea." (
http://www.cato.org/tech/tk/010928-tk.html ) "If Americans are concerned about the recent proliferation of traffic surveillance cameras on roadways and sidewalks, then they ain't seen nothin' yet."
