Change we can't believe in: Proposed national identification card must be stopped
This is a really, really, really bad idea:
(Of course, if Bush were still occupying the White House, many conservatives would be for the idea, but times have changed. Intrusive government is only okay when conservatives happen to be in charge; it's the IOKIYAR principle.)
More importantly, the creation of a mandatory ID card threatens to significantly undermine Americans' right to privacy. It's already bad enough that we live in a surveillance society where it shockingly easy for police and big corporations to track and monitor our activities, from where we go to how we spend our money.
The brilliant minds behind this national ID card proposal have even come up with their own ridiculously long and pathetic acronym:
Memo to Dick Durbin: Just because there hasn't been an uprising about airport security doesn't mean people don't hate it. Try downloading Lewis Black's albums sometime, and listen as he utterly destroys the rationale for spending gigantic sums of money so TSA screeners have the power to literally look right through us. We at NPI would much prefer to see federal funding going towards screening cargo at our ports so we know what's coming into our country in those mammoth containers. Screening cargo more thoroughly would also permit better enforcement of worker and environmental protection laws.
We reject the argument that we must sacrifice our privacy in order to achieve peace and security. We're reminded of the saying, Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety, which is commonly attributed to our founding father Benjamin Franklin (although he denied being the person who penned the phrase).
In Whose Freedom?, George Lakoff lists privacy as a very important progressive freedom. He defines it as "the freedom to a private life not only free from government interference but also where government actively protects privacy — of personal information, of communication, of personal and family medical decisions, of sex lives, of personal associations."
We like that definition. It simultaneously reminds us what we're fighting against — the kind of Big Brother regime that Orwell warned us about — and what we're fighting for: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We view a mandatory national identification card program as a threat to the ideals espoused in the Declaration of Independence, and we will work together in solidarity with other progressives to ensure that such a proposal is stopped.
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.What are Harry Reid and Dick Durbin thinking? Don't they realize that a national identification card is the perfect symbol to accompany potential right wing fearmongering about big government?
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.
(Of course, if Bush were still occupying the White House, many conservatives would be for the idea, but times have changed. Intrusive government is only okay when conservatives happen to be in charge; it's the IOKIYAR principle.)
More importantly, the creation of a mandatory ID card threatens to significantly undermine Americans' right to privacy. It's already bad enough that we live in a surveillance society where it shockingly easy for police and big corporations to track and monitor our activities, from where we go to how we spend our money.
The brilliant minds behind this national ID card proposal have even come up with their own ridiculously long and pathetic acronym:
The national ID program would be titled the Believe System, an acronym for Biometric Enrollment, Locally stored Information and Electronic Verification of Employment.If Democrats in the Senate attempt to seriously move forward with this proposal, NPI will work to defeat it. The last thing we need in the age of Google and Facebook is a the imposition of a national identification card system that ties in to a government database of unprecedented size with petabytes full of physiological details about our bodies. Such an idea is the very antithesis of progressive freedom. Whatever happened to the right to privacy?
It would require all workers across the nation to carry a card with a digital encryption key that would have to match work authorization databases.
“The cardholder’s identity will be verified by matching the biometric identifier stored within the microprocessing chip on the card to the identifier provided by the cardholder that shall be read by the scanner used by the employer,” states the Democratic legislative proposal.
Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.), who has worked on the proposal and helped unveil it at a press conference Thursday, predicted the public has become more comfortable with the idea of a national identification card.What!?
“The biometric identification card is a critical element here,” Durbin said. “For a long time it was resisted by many groups, but now we live in a world where we take off our shoes at the airport and pull out our identification."
Memo to Dick Durbin: Just because there hasn't been an uprising about airport security doesn't mean people don't hate it. Try downloading Lewis Black's albums sometime, and listen as he utterly destroys the rationale for spending gigantic sums of money so TSA screeners have the power to literally look right through us. We at NPI would much prefer to see federal funding going towards screening cargo at our ports so we know what's coming into our country in those mammoth containers. Screening cargo more thoroughly would also permit better enforcement of worker and environmental protection laws.
We reject the argument that we must sacrifice our privacy in order to achieve peace and security. We're reminded of the saying, Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety, which is commonly attributed to our founding father Benjamin Franklin (although he denied being the person who penned the phrase).
In Whose Freedom?, George Lakoff lists privacy as a very important progressive freedom. He defines it as "the freedom to a private life not only free from government interference but also where government actively protects privacy — of personal information, of communication, of personal and family medical decisions, of sex lives, of personal associations."
We like that definition. It simultaneously reminds us what we're fighting against — the kind of Big Brother regime that Orwell warned us about — and what we're fighting for: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We view a mandatory national identification card program as a threat to the ideals espoused in the Declaration of Independence, and we will work together in solidarity with other progressives to ensure that such a proposal is stopped.
# Posted by Andrew : 7:07 AM
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