IP: Government, Big Business battling another foe -- liberty

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Government, Big Business battling another foe -- liberty
> BY DAN GILLMOR
> Mercury News Technology Columnist
Government, Big Business battling another foe -- liberty

Maybe you remember the quaint old days, early in 2001, when privacy still 
mattered.
That was before Big Business used its clout to sweep aside or neuter an 
assortment of legislative and regulatory proposals. They might have given 
you and me a modicum of control over how our most personal information 
could be traded and sold.

That was before Sept. 11, when so many Americans decided that liberty 
mattered far less than safety. Since then, Big Brother has reasserted his 
increasingly absolute right to snoop and pry and invade the deepest 
recesses of our bank accounts and private lives.

And that was before this month, when the unelected officials who run state 
motor-vehicles departments started pushing to create a national 
identification card based on driver's licenses.
These are the worst of times for your right to be left alone. Governments 
are carving away fundamental liberties, seeking to know where we go, what 
we buy and what we say. Business desperately wants the first two of those.

Both kinds of surveillance freaks want, in effect, a real-time dossier on 
every one of us. The national ID is just their ticket, or at least one of 
them. (Another can be imagined in Microsoft's wish to create a cyber 
`Passport` for all of us, a foot in the door to continuous online 
surveillance. Luckily, there's some powerful resistance building to this 
truly hideous idea.)

For a national ID to make any sense to law enforcement, it needs to be a 
smarter card than the ones we use today. It would have to include biometric 
information, such as fingerprints or a retina scan. It would store personal 
data, probably including a Social Security number, home address, phone 
number and other information. All of that data would have to be available 
quickly, captured in a scanner or other kind of card reader at a moment's 
notice and then compared against a centralized database.

Oracle's Larry Ellison made himself a contender in last fall's 
war-profiteering contest when he told the world how he'd be happy to 
provide the national ID database software for free (extra for updates and 
support). He got a respectful hearing from Congress -- including California 
Democrats such as U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, one of many purported 
liberals and moderates who treats civil liberties as a non-essential luxury.

But the flaws in the ID scheme were painfully obvious. It would do little 
to deter terrorism, at great cost to freedom. Ultimately, enough principled 
conservatives spoke out against the notion that it seemed to be a non-starter.

Some bad ideas have their own momentum. This one appealed to the American 
Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, which spotted a way to grow 
its members' bureaucracies and budgets. The association wants the taxpayers 
to fork over $100 million, no doubt a mere down payment. These 
conscientious bureaucrats are correct when they say it would be simpler to 
tweak existing driver's licenses to create a de facto national ID than to 
create one from scratch. That doesn't make the idea right.

Judging from information on its Web site (www.aamva.org), the association 
is positively thrilled by the possibilities. It would standardize the look, 
feel and technology of licenses. It would add data of various sorts, 
probably including biometric information. Crucially, it would link state 
licenses in central data banks, and then link those to other data banks; 
some are already linked, notes the Privacy Foundation 
(www.privacyfoundation.org), one of several organizations challenging the 
initiative.

The lesson of Social Security -- turning a retirement plan into a de facto 
national ID -- tells us that such an ID would be misused, because the 
incentive to turn it into something larger would be irresistible. Think of 
a national ID as your Social Security number on steroids.

Do you think government will block such misuse? Government at all levels is 
in the pocket of the industries that would profit the most. Congress and 
state legislatures, collecting millions of dollars in legal bribes (also 
known as campaign contributions) from business interests, have shot down 
practically every recent attempt to legislate even modest improvements in 
privacy -- and this in an era when protecting privacy had political support.

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