What’s wrong with a national identity card?
The true problem is not the piece of plastic itself, but the construction of a larger network of identity papers, databases, status and identity checks and access control points – in short, what has been called an “internal passport.” If the old driver’s license represented a license to drive – the government’s very specific permission to operate a vehicle on the public roadways – the fear is that the new documents will become tantamount to a license to leave your house. National IDs would violate privacy by helping to consolidate data. There is an enormous and ever-increasing amount of data being collected about Americans today. One’s grocery store, for example, might use a “loyalty card” to keep detailed records of what you buy, while Amazon keeps records of what you read, the airlines keep track of where you fly, and so on. This can be an invasion of privacy, but our privacy has actually been protected by the fact that all this information still remains scattered across many differe
