Organizers of Monday's event at the National Press Club handed out these "Larry Cards," a nod to Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison's unabashed support for national ID cards.
WASHINGTON — Larry Ellison once was the richest man in the world. Now, in some quarters, he's on his way to being one of the most reviled.
The Oracle chief executive's impassioned pleas for a national ID card prompted one nonprofit group to dub him the "privacy villain of the week," and conservative and libertarian activists are outraged.
This week at the National Press Club, Ellison talked up the need for better government identification — backed by Oracle databases, of course — for everyone.
Too bad he wasn't there in person.
After Ellison ignored an invitation to a privacy confab in Washington, the event's organizers went ahead and played an audio clip of Ellison promoting national ID cards during a recent speech to employees. A photo of Ellison even graced the podium.
In his speech, Ellison said Americans have been so busy worrying about government snooping, that "we've made it impossible for the government to protect us."
An article Ellison wrote for The Wall Street Journal is more blunt: "The government could phase in digital ID cards to replace existing Social Security cards and driver's licenses. These new IDs should be based on a uniform standard such as credit card technology, which is harder to counterfeit than existing government IDs…."
Congress isn't considering any legislation in this area — at least not yet — but as the number of anthrax cases continues to climb in the nation's capital, politicians may prove to be more willing to vote for unprecedented restrictions on anonymity and Americans' rights to move about the country freely.
Ellison's trust-the-government-at-all-costs message didn't sit too well with civil libertarians, who fought against national ID cards last decade and thought they'd won this battle for good.
This week's event was an attempt to stress the technical and legal problems of new surveillance technologies — especially national ID cards and face-recognition cameras — and to portray them as types of prophylactic measures before any new laws are proposed. (As a kind of bonus, the Electronic Privacy Information Center even handed out free "LarryCards" to attendees.)
Robert Ellis Smith, publisher of Privacy Journal, warned that ID cards will suffer from a kind of inevitable mission creep. He said that police will want national ID cards that store a lot of information, such as home addresses and employer. They'll also want them tied to a central database that records whenever the ID is swiped through a reader. These cards would be issued at birth, Smith said.
"It will not be contained to the purposes for which it was created," he warned.
Whit Diffie, one of modern cryptography's founding fathers, said he foresaw a steady march of increased surveillance technology: Face recognition systems adopted by private firms, then advanced facecams that identify a person's vein patterns, then eventually DNA sniffers entering widespread use.
Diffie said "maybe this is just the scaling of society," and offered a suggestion to politicians: If national ID cards will become the norm, he said, at least offer a provision for reciprocity: Anyone who demands to see an ID card will be required to show theirs as well.
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Fair-weather friends: You wouldn't think that a libertarian columnist and the disciples of Ayn Rand are fans of big government, right?
Not so fast.
In a recent newsletter, the Rand disciples at the Objectivist Center talked up the need for more eavesdropping on Americans, and also embraced national ID cards and torture.
The war on terrorism "may involve extremely disquieting tactics: assassinations (which are already being discussed); secret trials (to prove we have the right guys without revealing to other terrorists how we know); and even torture (to avert imminent attacks, say)," says the article, written by James Robbins, a professor at the National Defense University.
James Glassman, a columnist and well-known political commentator, seems to see things the same way.
In a column this week, Glassman embraces national ID cards and similar measures. "The fact is, to live in a society as vulnerable as ours, we may have to give up something — but I disagree that what's lost is freedom. Instead, it's privacy, and maybe not even that," Glassman says.
His column, incidentally, says the lack of a national ID card makes the U.S. "almost unique." Not quite: Try Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, the Nordic countries, Mexico, among others.
ID Cards Are de Rigueur Worldwide
