It’s the bad idea that just won’t die.
Democrats are again proposing a national ID card. This time with “biometrics” no less.
A plan by Senate Democratic leaders to reform the nation’s immigration laws ran into strong opposition from civil liberties defenders before lawmakers even unveiled it Thursday.
Democratic leaders have proposed requiring every worker in the nation to carry a national identification card with biometric information, such as a fingerprint, within the next six years, according to a draft of the measure.
Just imagine the outrage if Republicans had proposed national ID cards… Oh wait, THEY DID!!! How’s that hope and change working out? How about that, there are authoritarian assholes in both parties.
The American Civil Liberties Union, a civil liberties defender often aligned with the Democratic Party, wasted no time in blasting the plan.
“Creating a biometric national ID will not only be astronomically expensive, it will usher government into the very center of our lives. Every worker in America will need a government permission slip in order to work. And all of this will come with a new federal bureaucracy — one that combines the worst elements of the DMV and the TSA,” said Christopher Calabrese, ACLU legislative counsel.
The ACLU is exactly right about this. A national ID card fails the Jews in the attic test.
But besides that, it’s just more security theater. There’s nothing about biometrics that makes an ID card any more secure. ANYTHING can be hacked if you have access to the physical media. ( And don’t even mention databases. Pure, 100% fail )
ID cards are a bad idea, and NATIONAL ID cards are a VERY bad idea.
I thought we already had a national ID? It’s called a passport.
Yes, because states have a hard enough time keeping up with their own internal identification systems, we should definitely generate something for the government to frak up too!
I wonder if the card will only work five days out of the week, like the USPS is about to be…