Sunday, May 2, 2010

High Tech Nazi Ausweiss or Mark of the Beast? "We report, you decide."


A tip of the boonie hat to Threeper Stan for the story below. I assure you, this will be resisted even more bitterly than "Health Care."

Mike
III

Dems spark alarm with call for national ID card

By Alexander Bolton - 04/30/10 06:00 AM ET

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.

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.

The proposal is one of the biggest differences between the newest immigration reform proposal and legislation crafted by late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

The national ID program would be titled the Believe System, an acronym for Biometric Enrollment, Locally stored Information and Electronic Verification of Employment.

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.

The American Civil Liberties Union, a civil liberties defender often aligned with the Democratic Party, wasted no time in blasting the plan.

“Creating a biometric national ID will not only be astronomically expensive, it will usher government into the very center of our lives. Every worker in America will need a government permission slip in order to work. And all of this will come with a new federal bureaucracy — one that combines the worst elements of the DMV and the TSA,” said Christopher Calabrese, ACLU legislative counsel.

“America’s broken immigration system needs real, workable reform, but it cannot come at the expense of privacy and individual freedoms,” Calabrese added.

The ACLU said “if the biometric national ID card provision of the draft bill becomes law, every worker in America would have to be fingerprinted.”



A source at one pro-immigration reform group described the proposal as “Orwellian.”

But 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.

“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.

“People understand that in this vulnerable world, we have to be able to present identification,” Durbin added. “We want it to be reliable, and I think that’s going to help us in this debate on immigration.”

Implementing a nationwide identification program for every worker will be a difficult task.

The Social Security Administration has estimated that 3.6 million Americans would have to visit SSA field offices to correct mistakes in records or else risk losing their jobs.

Angela Kelley, vice president of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, said the biometric identification provision “will give some people pause.”

But she applauded Democrats for not shying away from the toughest issues in the immigration reform debate.

“What I like about the outline is that Democrats are not trying to hide the ball or soft-pedal the tough decisions,” Kelley said. “It seems a very sincere effort to get the conversation started. This is a serious effort to get Republicans to the table.”


Reform Immigration for America, a pro-immigrant group, praised Democrats for getting the discussion started but said the framework fell short.

“The proposal revealed today [Thursday] is in part the result of more than a year of bipartisan negotiations and represents a possible path forward on immigration reform,” the group said in a statement. “This framework is not there yet.”

Democrats and pro-immigration groups will now begin to put pressure on Republicans to participate in serious talks to address the issue. The bipartisan effort in the Senate suffered a serious setback when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) pulled back from talks with Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.).

“We call on Republican Senators to review this framework and sit down at the negotiating table in good faith,” Reform Immigration for America said in a statement. “This is a national problem that requires a federal solution and the input of leaders in both parties.”

Durbin said Democratic leaders are trying to recruit other Republican partners.

“We’re making a commitment to establishing a framework to work toward comprehensive immigration reform, and I think it’s a good framework and now we’re engaging our friends on the other side of the aisle to join us in this conversation,” Durbin said.


12 comments:

Unknown said...

Okay, I know I'm gonna catch a lot of crap around here for asking this, but...

What's the big deal about this?

I mean, on it's face. Forget the creepy historical connotations of a national ID for a second. What is inherently wrong about requiring citizens to actually prove they are citizens?

Not trying to stir up a shit storm, it's just an honest question. Because, to me, a national ID holding basic info like citizenship or residential status seems eminently sensible.

Crustyrusty said...

Add it to this lovely intrusion into our lives:

http://biggovernment.com/capitolconfidential/2010/04/29/bailout-bill-would-require-banks-to-track-and-report-personal-checking-accounts-to-feds/

Next thing you know there won't be any cash at all and they'll be slapping that barcode on our foreheads or right hands....

Anonymous said...

I doubt any Jews from the 1940s or those who lived behind the Iron Curtain that managed to get here are going to be thrilled at this idea...I'm know I'm not...

Anonymous said...

No Thanks,
Some tillable land, chickens, a cow or two and a well or rain collection.

This will likely push even more people back to a completely agrarian existance faster than anything I can think of.

Toastrider said...

I think the next time I hear some libtard whining about the Arizona immigration laws, I'm gonna smack them with this.

It's unnecessary, in my opinion, save as a datamining and dirty under the table registration trick. We already have state-issued IDs that work just fine, thankyew. Except, of course, when we try to use those to prevent voter fraud -- then it's screams of 'YOU HATE POOR PEOPLE' all over again.

Sedition said...

Mr. National ID, meet Mr. Microwave.

rexxhead said...

Why does everyone keep trying to solve "the immigration problem"?

What you've got is "a welfare problem".

Zero out welfare and the minimum wage laws, and you "immigration problem" will evaporate quicker than morning dew in Phoenix.

Bu if you insist on solving the wrong problem... if you insist on curing the symptom... next year you will have the same problem, the same disease, and next year it will be worse.

Anonymous said...

Gaige,
The problem is that this is a violation of the 4th Amendment; the one prohibiting illegal search.

The real problem with illegal immigration is that our border is porous. We need a secure border...we need border control; not people control. If we control the border, we don't have to violate anyone's constitutional rights....and we get rid of the 100 mile constitution free zone (in which 2/3s of Americans live).

To use an analogy....it's too late to stop the fox once he's already in the hen house. You have to stop him from getting in in the first place.

If we could control our borders, then we wouldn't need to produce papers and have biometric IDs.

No one really wants to admit that what we need is a fenced, mined, electronically monitored and physically patrolled border.

ANY id card or even an RFID chip planted under your skin can be forged....and even the most stringent border security can be breached. However, one violates privacy....the other stops illegal immigration, helps contain pandemics, and could make terrorist attack and invasion much more difficult.

Bad Cyborg said...

Gaige, there are other ways to get the job done.

I am not a millenialst of any stripe and I believe that the book of Revelation was written about things that would "shortly come to =ass" from the time it was written

BUT

That national ID card really reminds me of the passage in the Revelation that speaks of people wearing the "mark of the beast".

We don't need this. Any employer can enter a SSAN along with a name and DOB and get back a "yea" or "nay" about the person being legal to work. If the current system does not already implement it, it could easily render a "nay" if the name, DOB and SSAN do not all jibe. If you want to add in gender to eliminate given name ambiguities, that would not hurt. It also would not need to infringe on anyone's privacy. all the employer needs to get back is OK or not-OK to work and a transaction number. The facts of the transaction could be stored with just a few bytes and the transaction number could easily be accessed for purppose of verification.

We have ample processes in place to confirm whether a person may lawfully work in this country. We don't need this.

Anonymous said...

But 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.

“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.


Did no one catch that? If that kind of statement is acceptable from a "representative" of his state, we're in more trouble than even we think. Really, mull that quote over for a few minutes.

Anonymous said...

Would one still have to have the aforementioned biometric ID to be able to run for president?

Also, what happens when the system gets hacked? Or when bad data gets put in to screw over political opponents..? Or when they cross-reference it to other data that they are trying to mine and a breach of confidentiality happens? How will they check for counterfeit identity information?

Of course, the douchebags that propose this sort of thing never think through such eventualities and almost never are hurt by them...sigh

h said...

“We call on Republican Senators to review this framework and sit down at the negotiating table in good faith,”

Good faith? With Progressives? No such thing if a Marxist, Socialist, Communist, Leninist, Stalinist, Fascist, Maoist, Liberal, Communitarian, Progressive, or whatever they call themselves this week is involved bad faith is the order of the day!