Privacy and the Government - Ethics for the Information Age - page 298

1. A national identification card would be more reliable than existing forms of identi-
fication.
Social Security cards and driver's licenses are too easy to forge. A modern card could
incorporate a photograph as well as a thumbprint or other biometric data.
2. A national identification card could reduce illegal immigration.
Requiring employers to check a tamper-proof, forgery-proof national identification
card would prevent illegal immigrants from working in the United States. If illegal
immigrants couldn't get work, they wouldn't enter the United States in the first
place.
3. A national identification card would reduce crime.
Currently it's too easy for criminals to mask their true identity. A tamper-proof
national identification card would allow police to positively identify the people they
apprehend.
4. National identification cards do not undermine democracy.
Many democratic countries already use national ID cards, including Belgium,
France, Germany, Greece, Luxembourg, Portugal, and Spain.
Opponents of a national identification card suggest these harms may result from its
adoption:
1. A national identification card does not guarantee that the apparent identity of an
individual is that person's actual identity.
Driver's licenses and passports are supposed to be unique identifiers, but there are
many criminals who produce fake driver's licenses and passports. Even a hard-to-
forge identification card system may be compromised by insiders. For example, a
ring of motor vehicle department employees in Virginia was caught selling fake
driver's licenses [75].
2. It is impossible to create a biometric-based national identification card that is 100
percent accurate.
All known systems suffer from false positives (erroneously reporting that the person
does not match the ID) and false negatives (failing to report that the person and
ID do not match). Biometric-based systems may still be beaten by determined,
technology-savvy criminals [75].
3. There is no evidence that the institution of a national ID card would lead to a reduction
in crime.
In fact, the principal problem faced by police is not the inability to make positive
identifications of suspects but the inability to obtain evidence needed for a success-
ful prosecution.
4. A national identification card makes it simpler for government agencies to perform data
mining on the activities of its citizens.
According to Peter Neumann and Lauren Weinstein, “The opportunities for over-
zealous surveillance and serious privacy abuses are almost limitless, as are opportu-
nities for masquerading, identity theft, and draconian social engineering on a grand