Several post-September 11 public opinion polls have shown substantial, if declining, support for an ID system. A Pew Research Center public opinion poll taken September 13 - 17 showed 70 percent support, while a subsequent Fabrizio-McLaughlin poll showed only 51 percent support.
Larry Ellison, chairman and CEO of Oracle, recently advocated the creation of a national ID card system to improve airport security.
"We need a national ID card with our photograph and thumbprint digitized and embedded in the ID card," said Ellison, who then offered to "provide the software for this absolutely free."
The White House has said that it has no plans to support the idea of a national ID card, but House Immigration and Claims subcommittee chairman George Gekas (R-Pa.) said he wouldn't dismiss the idea out of hand. And Justice Department officials and House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) are reportedly interested in the idea.
Last week, the president and CEO of the UltraCard smart-card technology was in Washington, D.C. to talk about his product to policymakers. It's a technology that allows for large storage capacity of biometric data, such as fingerprints, voiceprints and iris scans.
But civil libertarians maintain that national ID cards, whether in the form of paper, high-tech cards or face scanning systems, should not be in widespread use by law enforcement officials because of the potential for intrusiveness, mistake, fraud and abuse.
"We have to rely upon many mechanisms to try to catch bad guys," said Adam Thierer, director of telecommunications studies at the Cato Institute.
"I think [an ID system] is a bad one, because it actually ends up burdening law abiding, average American citizens [more] than it does anybody outside this country who might pose a threat to us," said Thierer.
"I'm worried that this is going to become the equivalent of a domestic or an internal passport, which Americans are expected to carry and produce upon demand by government officials and then by a lot of other organizations" in the private sector, he said.
"From the perspective of a government official, it sounds like an appealing way to keep track of people. The problem is that it can't really keep track of everyone, and in an attempt to do so, you have to create massive databases of information that would profile Americans," said Thierer, who doubts that widespread use of such ID technology would catch more criminals or prevent more crime.
Solveig Singleton, senior policy analyst for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, also opposes a national ID system, noting that it would hardly be foolproof.
"I don't think there's any such thing as an unforgeable card," said Singleton. "And one thing you'd see pretty quickly is all of a sudden forging technology getting a lot more [sophisticated] to match the card."
Law enforcement should focus their surveillance on high-risk areas, like American borders, airports and places where chemicals or viruses are stored, she said. But more important than broad surveillance may be types of profiling, Singleton said.
"It may be that the alternative to having a surveillance net that captures everyone and really harms American culture as a whole [is] some kind of profiling," she said. "We're now being presented with some very difficult choices. It does become common sense to focus on people who are from countries where a majority or significant subset of the population is known to be hostile to the U.S.
"In the end," Singleton said, "the best way to preserve the freedom for the whole is to try to make targeting as common sense as possible. It means as soon as you discover someone is innocent, you let them go.
"I think the most important thing right now in terms of an improvement in the security is for the FBI, CIA and the folks working at borders is to dramatically increase their understanding some of the more extreme elements of Islamic culture ... so they can distinguish people from a liberal Islamic tradition," she said. That way, "they don't have to alienate those people and instead work with them."
Some longtime proponents of a national ID system, however, see the need as strong as ever.
"If you look at the book [The Limits of Privacy, which] was published in 1999, I have no reason to change a comma," said communitarian philosopher Amotai Etzioni.
In his book, Etzioni argued that a national ID would ensure that "people are secure in their identity, thereby allowing others to trust that they are who they claim to be."
"Biometric" national IDs, like the face scanning technology used at the 2001 Super Bowl, are the best way of setting up such as system, in his view.
"If you go to a Wells Fargo ATM, you don't need to bring a passport or a card or anything," said Etzioni. "You just [present] your face, the computer says hello and gives you the money."
"So the question now is not national ID cards the way we used to present that, but are you going to present your face in public or not?" he asked.
"If you go back to court case[s] and to our legal tradition, you have no expectation of privacy in a public space," Etzioni said. "It's like your license plate.
"So I'm all in favor of it, and I'm very sad that my colleagues on the libertarian side a) don't understand it and b) are opposed to it," he said. "It would do a lot of good and would do no harm." See Related Story:
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