Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Why fear a national ID card?

(Hat tip: Norm Weatherby.)

A quick run through the reasons why even the innocent might not want to surrender their privacy.

They boil down to...

...continued in full post...

Loss of control – you depend on the government's good will to access services;

Mistakes – 25% of data in databases is wrong. Want to depend on error-free data entry to access your ATM when you want to buy groceries?

Laws change. Many drugs that used to be illegal now aren't. Many kinds of gun used to be legal. Many legal guns might become illegal in the future. A future government might not use information in its database to charge you with something that was legal at the time you did it. But if the Database shows you once used a drug that's now illegal, is that probable cause?

Also, as I've mentioned elsewhere, governments like to exercise power. They like to show who's in charge, and they like to point out that It's Not You. Possession of a database linked to a national ID grants power, and power gets used.

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