Your Papers, Please: Against a national ID card.

In the present climate of concern about security, we have been hearing renewed calls for a national identity card. Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle Corp., which sells software for managing large databases, had a piece in the Wall Street Journal: "Digital IDs Can Help Prevent Terrorism." Ellison does not go into much detail about how a national ID card might actually prevent terrorism; in fact he leaves one with the impression that terrorists who were careful to keep their noses clean while in the U.S.A. would go undetected anyway.

A few days later, Alan Dershowitz, the notorious professor and lawyer, chimed in with an op-ed in the New York Times: "Why Fear National ID Cards?" Dershowitz imagines a minimal system: "The only information the card need contain is name, address, photo and [finger]print." Such a system would, he argues, actually enhance civil liberties by "reducing the need for racial and ethnic stereotyping." It is encouraging to know that the professor acknowledges such a need; though since, by the time the ID card has been requested and presented, the profiling has already occurred, it is hard to see how the card would help.

Both writers make the point that all sorts of databases already exist, full of information about our incomes, movements, and private lives. A national ID-card system would simply make more efficient and useful what already exists in a chaotic and diffuse form. Ellison: "All these separate databases make it difficult for one agency to know about and apprehend someone wanted by another agency." Dershowitz: "[The card] would reduce the likelihood that someone could, intentionally or not, get lost in the cracks of multiple bureaucracies."

Well, yes. Reading things like that, I feel that I am looking at one of those optical tricks-like the stack of cubes that seem to be ascending and lit from below, until you blink and perceive them as descending and lit from above. What Ellison and Dershowitz deplore-the possibility that an individual can lurk quietly in the interstices of our numerous national databases-seems to me a guarantor of individual liberty in the United States. It is sufficiently disturbing that the federal government can, by sorting through a pile of conflicting and unreliable data, track my movements and habits with modest accuracy. That they should be able to do this better and more efficiently is, it seems to me, a prospect to be dreaded.

There are other problems with a national ID-card database. There is the issue of data quality, for example. A study by the (libertarian) Cato Institute in 1995 showed that large databases owned by the federal government had high error rates: 5 to 20 percent for the Social Security Administration, and 10 to 20 percent for the IRS. The INS database, they found, was unreliable 28 percent of the time; people's first and last names were routinely in the wrong order, and misspellings were "rampant."

And then there is the matter of abuse. Because of the attacks on our country, we are currently in a collectivist frame of mind, with the percentage of Americans who say they trust the federal government to do the right thing "nearly always" or "most of the time" currently at 64- twice the level of a year ago. I hope and believe that the sober style of the new administration has also made some contribution to this high level of trust. We must remember, though, that a national ID database, once established, would be available to all future administrations. It is hard to imagine the Bush ...