A reluctant proponent
The Washington Post carries a piece by the Republican Senator for Tennessee, Lamarr Alexander: Much as I Hate It, We Need a National ID with the interesting perspective of a conservative who is made deeply uneasy by the idea but cannot find arguments to oppose the spurious cases for “security” and “convenience”.
I have fought government ID cards as long and as hard as anyone. In 1983, when I was governor of Tennessee, our legislature voted to put photographs on driver’s licenses. Merchants and policemen wanted a state ID card to discourage check fraud and teenage drinking. I vetoed this photo driver’s license bill twice because I believed driver’s licenses should be about driving and that state ID cards infringed on civil liberties.
That same year, on a visit to the White House, when a guard asked for my photo ID, I said, “We don’t have them in Tennessee. I vetoed them.” The guard said, “You can’t get in without one.” The governor of Georgia, who had his photo ID driver’s license, vouched for me. I was admitted to the White House, the legislature at home overrode my veto and I gave up my fight against a state ID card.
For years state driver’s licenses have served as de facto national ID cards. They have been unreliable. All but one of the Sept. 11 terrorists had a valid driver’s license. Even today, when I board an airplane, security officials look at the front of my driver’s license, which expired in 2000, and rarely turn it over to verify that it has been extended until 2005.
Why does an eminent legislator not see that a unitary, centralised system will be at least as unreliable as multiple ones–though it may fail in different ways? Perhaps it is the weasel quality of the concept of “reliability”, which begs the questions who is doing the relying, and to what purpose.
